Update 126-01
Update 126-01
Film Shoot
21st February 2007
11:40 AMOkay okay I know I should update more considering I have some sort of viewership to cater to (I hope). My apologies. Thanks to everyone for wishing me a good CNY – Except that I don't really celebrate it. Yep, even in Singapore. I appreciate the gesture nonetheless though we always use the opportunity of an extended vacation to go into Malaysia to buy pirated stuff cuz the guards are slacker then. Hehe. Call me insensitive or ignorant if you will, but having an extremely small family that neither resides in the US nor Singapore doesn't help much. Luke calls me a 'Cultural Bastard' and I tend to agree with his label. Ah well... Guess what I was doing? Why, making a movie of course!
Coincidentally enough, there's this random and useless holiday called 'President's Day' that happens to fall on the day after CNY so I shot this film over the CNY weekend here in Amerika. I guess I was going for a more realistic, grittier, and hardcore noir-thriller film than I usually do. Well, what can I say? I don't have a SWAT team here, you know... Though I will... Eventually... Anyway, don't expect the usual BLT-guns-guts-gore extravaganza that usually characterizes my movies. Inspired by The Departed, I wanted to try something new: A more realistic, scarier, and nasty film.
Fine fine... Call it an excuse to hide my lack of a SWAT team if you will....
As per usual film shoots, the shit hit the fan as soon as we met to start. Firstly, our token minority character – An African-American gang
STA', did not show up, claiming his brother had met with a 'car accident'. I was kinda cheesed and wondered if he got into an accident stealing a car or... Nevermind. I shalln't be so racist – T'was just pissing me off. So we replaced him with another guy which probably turned out better anyway. I subsequently forced the only Asian guy on our team apart from myself to act as a doctor (The cliches!!) so he missed his Chinese New Year dinner. Wierdly enough, his name is called 'Hans' and someone broke his $200 gas-powered SIG 226 when he lent it to us for the movie. o.0
I also forced this girl to stay behind (Even though it was her birthday) to act as a random extra/blood cleaner. Muhhahaha.
Oh, and I coerced this other dude to not book in for work at Target so he could act as a thug. Looks the part, doesn't he? Hmm I hope I don't get him fired...
Then, stuff starts to go even more wrong! Before we start, we discover that our Director of Photography, this guy here, forgot to CHARGE HIS (camera) BATTERIES.
*Den Den Den*
Uh huh. That was what I wanted to do...
Yeah, I'm a rather sentimental turd – I decided to wear the same outfit I've been using ever since our very first film, Titus Andronicus. Also, note my trademark holster + utility belt (: I was acting under the assumption such voodoo would bring us better luck – Probably because we needed it.
So he ran to K-Mart to buy a
mile (Literally) of extension cables so we could use his camera powered from the wall socket. Next, our homemade 'squib' blew up on us and into this poor 'Doctor's face.
*Mutters under breath* For what it's worth, it would've been a good shot if done properly... It seems that a hallmark of all shows I do is a poor actor lying for hours in a pool of his own blood – And this film was no exception. As you can imagine per past films, it was a bitch in cleaning up the blood. Some of it even leaked through the floor and appeared dripping through the ceiling of the level beneath us (Think cliched horror movie). Damn, I pity the Chem students who have classes there this week...
2 Years doesn't really change much huh?
Next, our outside scenes were characterized by an acute shortage of light – Nothing new there though. However, one of the cars we were supposed to use didn't show up so we ended up randomly asking this guy with
a MERCEDES to star in our film along with his girlfriend (She's a photographer I invited). Phew. Lucky break there.
It's now
3 AM and the streets are deserted. We had been dutifully traveling in a 7-Car 'Convoy' so we decided to race each other along the empty streets to loud rap music and other bling-bling things that I can't quite pronounce. I think we were pretty close to losing our minds so everyone just kept driving fast (and furious -
Hur hur). Then we lost each other and wandered into some completely obscure wilderness to shoot our very last scene but got chased away by some cowboy-hat wearing, shotgun wielding, vulgarity-hurling hillbilly who must've assumed we were frat boys hazing someone. Gah. Such is life in the US of A.
All in all, I guess BLT had a fun time but it was rather scary at moments when the hillbilly was chasing us with a pack of (Metaphorical) wolves or that one cop car kept circling around our film shoot repeatedly. Speaking of which, I actually got the cops to
AUTHORIZE our guns and let us use firearms on campus publicly. Muhahahahaha.
BEAT THAT SINGAPORE!!
I'll post up more frame grabs and pictures as time goes on. Till then, have fun with Chapel bathroom forms, bi-weekly hair checks, and searing tropical weather! (:
Oh, and not to forget, IAs and essays too....
Labels: action, cameras, cny, film, la, noir, shoot, thriller, ucr, university
