When I started this project, my main goal was to achieve multiple storytelling in multiple timelines through the manipulation of time and space. The end results makes for a nonlinear form of storytelling. Being able to understand this technique meant I could alter time and space while at the same time keep my audience captivated. Besides that, being able to understand this technique gave me a better understanding of planning and teamwork.

What I have managed to achieve from this research is a better appreciation for film productions. Having to take up most of the roles to shoot my experimental film, I understood the importance of a strict timeline and how essential it is to have prepared everything before the actual shoot date. A lot of planning had to be done prior to the shooting day.

To make this blog easier, I will break it down to a few points and elaborate on those.

Pre-Production:

By far this was the toughest step among them all. A clear understanding on what story I want to tell and how I wanted to tell it was crucial before shooting. I had to plan three stories in order to achieve this effect. The first story, which is the main story had to be properly written before I was able to write the other two. This is important because I had the built the other 2 stories based on the first storyline in order to get the story to relate.

Besides that, deciding the types of cuts for the transition was very important as well. I didn’t want to go with the very cliche “dip to white” kind of shots because I felt it was overused was a lazy form of storytelling as well. So I decide to go for two kinds of cuts, a match cut and a quick jump cuts. The match cut was mainly inspired by Edgar Wright’s film because I thought it was a pretty interesting film technique to be done. Not only was it useful in comedy, but I wanted to see if it could work on the emotions of intimacy as well.

The quick cut on was meant to be a quick way of narrating both the main stories and the fight to show the intensity of the fight. The quick cut allows the audience to register what they think is going on, at the same time give them room to interpret why the main character was depressed. This form of cutting shows how we as an audience can quickly understand and register both stories, while giving room for interpretations as well. This also shows that we are visually stimulated as a whole.

Production:

Since I’ve spent quite some time on planning, shooting was a breeze. I communicated well with my crew and understood that most of them had to leave by the afternoon.This gave us a gauge on the limited amount of time.

Understanding the lack of time we had, I scheduled the shoot to be done early in the morning where the sun was our main source of lighting. Having the sun as the main source of lighting really saved our time because the overall lighting for the set remained consistent, and not much lighting changes need to be done. Besides that, the lighting also set a very nice mundane look on the actor and actresses face, helping to set the tone of the film.

On the set day itself, I had help from a guy who’s name is Bryan as well. With Bryan’s help, we manage to shoot coverage of the scene in a very short time. Having to work with Bryan on previous shoots, we understood how we wanted to cover the scene, this helped us a lot in saving our time and he as well understood my vision for my film. Communications among the crew is very important in a shoot like this, especially since we don’t have the luxury of time.

Being creative on set remains to be one of the most important aspect of shooting. There were a few minor hiccups on the day of the shoot, for example the actress not being able to cry. Our solution to that was we chopped up some onions and put the bowl next to her, making it easier for her to shed tears while we shoot. Another problem was getting the hot water to fog up the room, so what we did was turning on the hot water from the shower and let it fog up the room. Small things like these helped us figure a way to complete shooting the film and I was satisfied with the final results.

Post-Production:

In post-production, I bumped in to multiple problems as well. Even Though I had the continuity sheet to help me out with the editing, there were a few minor details that bugged me. Since I decided to go for a quick phase cutting style, many of those little details either remained unoticable or too slow for the audiences to catch it.

Besides that, on my first draft of the export there were a few narrative problems which could leaves the audiences confused. I had to rearrange the scene, which in the final product allowed the story to be narrated more clearly. These minor tweaks and attention to detail of the film plays an important role to the overall narrative to the film. One small mislead in details can leave the audiences confused and astrayed from the real meaning of the film.

Conclusion:

Overall, I learnt a lot from this little experiment. Not having to worry too much on the technical point of the film really made me understand narrative in the film clearly. Attention to detail remains to be very important in a film as it can really mislead audience’s interpretation of the film.

Although jumping between space and time is an interesting and powerful technique for storytelling, it remains to be pretty complex and very time consuming to pull off. The planning really took up a lot of time, but overall I was very pleased with the final result of the film.

This post will focus on the arrangement of the film and how I cut my sequences in order to achieve its final look.

For the narrative, I jumped back and forth between the 2 shots constantly in order to give a more poetic look for the film. Silence played a big role in this short experiment. The absence of sound give it more of a dramatic visual effect, intensifying the fight. We don’t know what they’re arguing about, and is it really important that we know?

After reviewing my final export and bringing it to the class lecturer for feedback, I realized that the narrative of the story could be better structured and produce a clearer meaning to the film. Cutting on “sorry” when my actress was writing on the mirror made it seem like she was sorry for being the victim when my intentions were for her to say sorry for what she was about to do. This simple mistake in the narrative could mislead audiences who are watching the film, making it seem like she was the one at fault. This in results doesn’t make the character sympathetic, but instead cause confusion to the audiences.

My intentions for the film was to give audience’s their own interpretation of the film, questioning if she was going through with the suicide or not, while at the same time show her motives on why she would carry out such a thing.

Cut on action- this were the guidelines that I used for every cut I made in this editing. For every action that was happening in the fight, I cut another scene in order to show a clearer difference between both timelines. This in result create a quick form storytelling between both present and past.

All these concepts combined in to one experimental film resulted in to a film that I was surprised by.

Please take note of the time this blog is being posted, yes because this is exactly what time I’m awake and still doing my editing. Piece of advice for anyone who wants to do what I’m doing, drink more water, it helps reduce the hallucination.

The joy of every editor….Arranging sequences.

Jokes aside, let’s get to the serious topic. Continuing from what I did in production, I was pretty clear on what I wanted to achieve in post-production. Thanks to the planning in earlier stages, and the notes I took down in during production, I edited most of my footages with ease. I didn’t encounter much problems with editing as editing has always been a strong point in my filmmaking skills. The real struggle I had was deciding on the style that I wanted to go with. Yes I did decided to go on a more “whiplash” look in the earlier stages, but due to certain obstacles I faced, I had to tone down the look and create another different look. It is some what similar, but different at the same time.

To add on with the point I had in my earlier blog post, this picture serves as evidence for the limitations of using a DSLR for filming. It didn’t make the editing easier either due to the compressed video, I didn’t have much flexibility controlling my highlights and shadows, this in result caused limited the amount of grading I could do in my film. In the attached image above, the highlight is clearly blown out, probably 3 stops overexposed and I could really do much to save it. Luckily that frame only last a few seconds and is hardly noticeable. You really start to see the flaws in using a DSLR once you have experience editing, luckily for me I’ve took in to account most of these errors and worked my way around it. Part 2 will discuss more on how to color grade, and how I achieved my look.

This is a continuation from my previous blog.

The camera:

The camera is the probably one of the bigger reason why the images didn’t come out as the way they are in the movies. Since this is a large topic to cover, I’ll break it down to a few parts so it would be quicker to understand.

• Codec: The maximum format that the DSLR could run is 1080p All-I file, which is something similar to motion jpeg. It is very compressed and often doesn’t offer much flexibility in post production.
• Fps: The maximum frame rate that the camera could run is 25 fps in 1080p, which is pretty standard, but often time limits what the director wants to achieve. Not having the ability to shoot in slow motion forces me to rethink what could be replaced in order to seem like the picture is moving slow.
• Rolling shutter, moire and aliasing: This is probably the most frustrating part about using a DSLR as the main camera. Because the sensor was not built for full video compability, images often look disgusting in camera. The rolling shutter became an issue while filming the fight sequence as I couldn’t move my camera to aggressively or it will results in some really ugly images. Moire and aliasing meant that certain clothes could not be worn that day such as stripes or fun. If she had done so, the video would have looked very distracting and muddy.

The shoot:

The shoot overall went pretty smoothly, mainly because it was at a location that i was familiar with and because the weather was pretty good that day. I had the help of another camera operator because I knew in order to get the filming quick, it had to be shot on 2 separate cameras. It became clear that it was a good idea when I was filming the fighting scene. Being bale to worry about a single angle made it easier to operate.

On the next few blog posts I will be focusing on the production day, the problems we encountered and how we resolved it.

Since this was an experimental film and lighting wasn’t really the focus of the shoot, I didn’t have to worry too much about having the correct lighting and just to make sure that my subject and background were properly exposed. The real challenge that I face during the shooting day was time. Most of my crew members had to leave before 2 and that gave me about 4 hours of planning and shooting.

Timing:

Thankfully, thanks to my planning in pre-production, I was able to shoot scene after scene with ease. Although, with so much planning done, there would still be more unforeseen that would appear. One of it being that my actress could cry during the shoot, and that held the shoot back by a few minutes. We had to be creative and resolve this problem, so we looked to what I could find in  the kitchen. Lucky for us, I still had some leftover onions and I told my actress to chop it, which resulted in her tearing up. This simple method saved us a lot of time, and I should have been more prepared and bought eye droplets, but the turned out to be a decent enough solution.

Lens Choice:

Since we shot the film in the morning, the sunlight remained consistent throughout the shoot so exposure wasn’t too big of a concern. What I felt really did challenge me though was making my idea in to a reality. The images I had in mind were no where near what I achieve during the shoot, and after further research I realized it was my choice of lenses that led to this issue. Many of my sample images that were taken from movie were shot with anamorphic lenses, which was something I didn’t have because of its price. To make the best with what I could do, I shot most of my scenes with prime lenses (Sigma 35mm Art lens) to achieve the sharpest image possible.

For this blog post, I will focus on the structure and how I organized my film set.

Since I’ve already finished talking about my inspirations on the film in Part 1, I thought it would be great to look through my thinking process in this blog post.

Based on the image belows, you can clearly identify that I’ve arranged my shooting and story sequences in numbers. The whole reason behind this is because it allows me to easily change the shooting sequence as easily as I want to. I also find this method very flexible as when I decided to do a certain correction, I can just cross out the numbers, and write another story on another page replacing that number.

Besides easing me with the narrative, it also helps during the shoot, giving me the convenience to know which scene should be shot first and which scene I could save for later. The benefit with having this kind of flexibility enables me to save time and coordinate better with my crew.

For the next few blog posts, I’m going to break down my thought process when planning, shooting and editing this film.

In part 2 I will break down how I arranged and format my shoot, but for this blog I would like to explain my idea of the film and how I came to my final look.

To start us off, pre-production was probably the most annoying part for me because I’ve never really thought of myself to be a good writer and have always prefered to be behind the camera. The reason for this is because I don’t think that my ideas were good and often times I would be too ashamed to see the results of my own films. But for the purpose of this experiment, I decided to step out of my comfort zone and conquer my fears.

what I found challenging as a director is the idea I want my film to take on. My experimental idea was largely influenced by films such as “Memento” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, therefore my story line were going to be based on that as well. Figuring out the appropriate type of cuts to bring my subject back in to the past was the key in to this whole experiment. I always found match cuts and transition through sound very interesting, but I also had to work with the limited gears I had. Since I didn’t have a proper audio recorder, I decided to go simple and just tell the story visually.

Besides telling the story, I also was trying to figure out the color tone of my film, how I wanted it to look and what would be the best way to show the character’s motive. So I looked to “Whiplash” as a source of inspiration for my color tone. I love the warm tones of the films and how it brought a very reflective contrast on the character. It not only feels intense, but a little bit uncomfortable to look at, which was the look I was going for.

This is a quick look of my inspiration for the films, more will be explained in Pt.2.

I have to admit, I was an hour late for class and totally missed out on the lessons about white balancing, so I did my own research and discovered how to do proper color correction in post production.

Jarle Leirpoll’s video was the first I looked to for post production editing. Having to edit the lastest movie “Deadpool”, I was blown away by how beautifully graded the film was. He divided color correction in to a few stages, which I did not know about until I saw his videos.

The first stage was to adjust the color balance of the film by identifying the whites and grey that could be spotted in the sequence. After identifying the neutral colors, he used the curves (which could be found in Premiere) to adjust the color in order to get the proper balance of the film. He then added an “S-curve” to increase the contrast and adding more details to the film.

Moving to the second stage, he then fixed the skin tone of the actor/actress in his films. Using the scope built in premiere pro, it acts as a guideline on getting the proper settings of the skin tone. After getting the skin tone corrected, he then proceeds to controlling his exposure and again guided by the reference monitor in premiere. If the object is moving, he using a track matte and mask in order to properly expose his subject.

All these steps are essential in getting the film look corrected. A lot of beginners filmmakers mistaken color correction for color grading and totally skip this step. I found a new importance in getting the color of the film right before grading it because it can ultimately affect the final product of the film.

I’m usually very uncomfortable being in front of the camera, you can say I really hate the camera looking the camera in the eye, ironic isn’t it?

Today in class we were told to act a scene that was given to us, only this time we were emphasizing on actors and how excellent actors almost go unappreciated for their hard work. Today, I took a step in to their shoes, and realize how truly hard it is to face the cameras with a director that was constantly in argument with her director of photography.

The fact that the director didn’t know what she was directing made it even more difficult for both me and the actress to perform what was being told to us because we didn’t understand what we were supposed to do. Instead of acting, I ended up setting the shots up for them when I wasn’t in frame, which made things a little bit more easier, but still very confusing.

What I can take from this assignment is that we really have to understand what we want to achieve before having to shoot with the actors as it can really effect the confidence of actors towards the director’s vision. Not to be insulting but throughout the shoot, the thought “when can we start rolling” constantly rang in my head as they kept wanting me to be in place, but didn’t have a clue on how to shoot the scene. This not only made me angry, but unwilling to act for them again.

I now appreciate actors a whole lot more knowing the difficulty of having to be patient while providing a professional standard of acting. Being tolerant is key to acting as some directors would want multiple takes of the same scene which can be really draggy for a whole day’s shoot.

For this research, I wanted to focus my attention on a local filmmaker that made a path for Malaysian filmmaking, the one and only P.Ramlee. On this research I wanted to focus on the filmmaker rather than his films because of what he brought to the table for Malaysian filmmaking.

Raised and born in Penang (Malaysia), P Ramlee represents one of Asia’s biggest influence in the golden age of Malaysia. To date, P. Ramlee has known to be the most successful director, actor, songwriter and singer in Malaysian history. And this in itself is very interesting because it’s very rare to come across a director with so many different talents. Over his career, he starred in 63 films, directed more than 30 films and written well over 200 songs.

Most of P.Ramlee films consist of song and dance, and since all of this were filmed in the around the 1950s to the 1960s, the Golden Age of Malaysian Cinema, were all black and white. Due to the very limited opportunities film studios in Malaysia had that time, P.Ramlee had to work his way from the bottom, being a coffee guy for many sets just so he can learn how to make films. Often times, P.Ramlee would perform and direct his own films, sometimes even taking control of the camera works for his films.

Song and dance were largely popular in Malaysian film, reason being of the influence from directors from India who were brought in to do filming. P.Ramlee largely received his influence from Indian, Japanese and Hollywood cinema. In his films, he likes to shoot in kampong, a place where villagers used to stay. One of his better known films is called “Bujang Lapok”, and in this film he compares the more stylized kampong in contrast to the city. His vision for films were to show what it was to be Malays, Muslim and Bumiputera, also known as a native.

Kampongs are commonly found in the rural areas of Malaysia

P.Ramlee wanted to make his film real, sand Bujang Lapok is a great example of his work. In the film Bujong Lapok, the actors that were involved in the film used their real names in the film blurring reality and film. Besides that, the film was meant to target the issue that was present in Malaysia in the 60’s.  This film reflects the change in lifestyle in Malaysia from both the Japanese invasion and the British colonization. Besides that, the dialogue presented by the actors were spoken in both English and Bahasa, evidence of cultural influence from the British.

In my opinion, featuring in your own film although give you total control over what you have vision in mind, it sometimes gives very little creative space for other cinematographer, and actors to bring in ideas.  As prove, P.Ramlee often fought with other directors but he always had the upper hand because the studio had his back. What is present in his film though truly shows the culture and issues that were faced by the locals at that point in time.

Overall, watching his films really do reflect his love for Malaysian cinema. Although P.Ramlee ended his career in a very harsh way, watching his films today really do give us a sense of enjoyment and laughter. Just like most directors today, many of their film styles and technique are based on how they were influenced growing up, it was just unfortunate that P.Ramlee was way ahead of his time.