Ninja vs Penguin

Penguin January 4th, 2008

Love Angle is finally finished!

It was a tremendous experience. I know it’s not the best work out there. Nor is it the best that’s in me. But considering the goals of the project, I think I succeeded.

Coming into this, I knew nothing about video editing, camera work, production, storyboards, or anything else. But now I feel equipped for my next project.

Many thanks to the great cast and crew that I had. Without them, this wouldn’t be possible. This isn’t a film by me. This is a film by the whole team.

Credits:

Written & directed by: Wey Wang
Produced by: Wey Wang
Director of Photography: Andrew Chen
Edited by: Wey Wang

Lana: Jeannie Huang
Jay: Dan Lin
Danny: Mike Tang
Ken: Andrew Chen
Kira: Charissa Shen
Amanda: Amanda Shen
Dave: Bo Wang

Additional Camera Work: Wey Wang, Bo Wang
Production Assistants: Jack Chiang, Mark Chung, Wendy Chang, Kathy Chang, Mike Tang, Amanda Shen, Melody Chen

Special thanks to Mr. & Mrs. Shen and Katrina Chang Liu
Very special thanks to Nancy Chan
Most thanks to God

Shot on a Canon GL2
Edited on Adobe Premiere CS3

-Penguin

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Penguin December 29th, 2007

The other day, I held a private screening of Love Angle for my principle actors. They mainly wanted to see how bad they were, understandable considering they’re amateur actors. I think the best compliment was when they said it wasn’t as bad as they thought it would be. Considering that most people cringe when they see themselves, I consider that fair praise.

Based on some of the feedback and just watching it again, I made a few more changes. Another 9 hours later (6.5 to render, 2.5 to burn) I’ll have the DVD.

The whole thing should be up on YouTube in a few weeks.

-Penguin

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Penguin December 21st, 2007

I finished my first work print for Love Angle yesterday. For the most part, it works. There’s still a few things I need to change in the third act. But I’m fairly happy with the way the story flows and the relationship is built.

The next step is to edit the audio for pops and up the gain for a few scenes. Then do some color correcting. I can’t wait for you guys to see it!

-Penguin

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Penguin October 19th, 2007

I’m back working on Love Angle again. It’s been awhile, but I’ve been loving it. Last night I finished editing this one scene.

I remember when we first shot it, we were all cracking up from the first take. Dan and Bo kept improving the bit and it kept getting better and better. Sometimes, I think about the scene and just start laughing.

Enough of my blabbering, here’s the clip. The typeface at the end is Gotham, by the way.

-Penguin

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Penguin July 17th, 2007

As we get deep into shooting this movie, I’ve found that the toughest thing is getting the requisite actors together. One day they’ll be okay for a shoot, the next, they have something pressing to do and we lose a day.

One of my actors dropped a bomb this past Friday. She wouldn’t be around for 3 weekends. Considering we only had about 5 weekends, one we lost already, it would be almost impossible to schedule her parts in for just one weekend.

As much as it pained me, I had to let her go and find a replacement.

With all my scripts, I tend to write for the actor. Over the years, I’ve come to know their voice and their mannerisms, so I can tailor the dialogue and emotion of the scene for them. I can visualize how they will play out the scene and interact with the other actors.

But, I have to do what’s best for the movie. If that means finding another actor, that’s what has to happen.

We also started shooting during the week and it’s incredibly difficult to shoot more than one scene a night.

At least it’s slowly coming together.

-Penguin

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Penguin July 15th, 2007

I hope you’ve all been enjoying my little adventure on making Love Angle. We’ve had our ups and downs, and the script has been in a state of flux. But the script has come a long way.

Attached, you can find the current shooting script that we will be using from this point on. You’ll see that there are some pages with letters in the page number. That means that there were changes made and they moved beyond the page they were on. In order to keep the other page numbers accurate, they had to be locked. To differentiate, letters were added.

Additionally, you’ll see that some scenes were omitted. Instead of just deleting the scene heading, it was modified to, again, preserve the scene numbering.

All this stuff is a bit tedious, but it makes sense. It’s just hard to keep track of all this and make all the changes manually.

Here’s the script:

love-angle-_s4_.pdf

Thanks for your comments!

It’s 4:39 a.m. Time for bed.

-Penguin

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Penguin July 1st, 2007

We started our first shooting day today and oh my goodness, there is nothing else like shooting video. The only thing better would probably be film. But until I can get a budget of a million dollars, it’ll remain a pipe dream.

I had borrowed Nancinator’s camera for the shoot. I didn’t have a chance to pick up any miniDV tapes, so I used on of her’s. When we got back to edit the video, we saw that we had taped over part of a wedding. Luckily, the wedding was about a year old and all the footage had been captured.
We spent about a little more than an hour shooting two scenes, when edited, resulted in in about maybe a minute and a half worth of footage. Not bad.

Some of the lessons we learned.

• Shotgun mics are awesome, but not when the actor is right next to the mic.
• Be careful which XLR to 1/8″ adapter you buy, the one I picked up is mono, which sucks
• When your actors are giving lines, make sure they give a little space between each other’s lines. It makes for editing in cover a lot easier.

I have about two weeks to continue working on the script. Hopefully, I can make some dialogue that’s more interesting.

-Penguin

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Penguin June 25th, 2007

In my last post, Love Angle: The Script, I let the world see one of my drafts for the movie. I took a lot of Zach’s advice and started trimming the fat from the script. I managed to cut about two pages. But there was still something about it that just wasn’t working.

Talking to Ninja last night, I realized that there were three fundamental flaws with the screenplay.

The external conflict is too weak. It’s not so much that the possiblility of failing physics sucks, rather, it’s the result of failing physics. Okay, she’ll have to go to summer school, big deal. This may just be my “grown-upness” speaking, but summer school just isn’t that bad. I remember we used to sneak INTO summer school because everyone was there.

You don’t know the characters until the end. This is probably the biggest of the problems. Romantic comedies hinge on the audience identifying with the main character. If this connection doesn’t happen, then they won’t care what happens to them. Thus, they won’t care what happens in the rest of the movie and will have turned off.

I feel like the characters are pretty strong at the end. The go through this arc and this change, but it’s a change from the boring. There’s nothing about them that’s endearing or engaging.

My dialogue sucks. There’s not much I can do about this one. My skills as a writer can only go so far. But I do see deficiencies that I can try and fix. One of the biggest problems with the dialogue right now is the use of “yeah”s and “what”s. Yes, this is the way people speak. But this isn’t what people want to hear. It may seem natural, but it ends up being boring and uninspired.

I remember watching a documentary with Kevin Smith. One of the audience members asked him how he wrote such good dialogue. His response was if he wrote the way people spoke, it would be boring and wouldn’t go anywhere. Instead, he wrote what he wanted his characters to say, what he wanted to hear from his characters.

It’s taken me four weeks to see how bad the screenplay is. As much as I want to start shooting, I can’t see how I can with the current state of the screenplay. I was all set to start shooting. I had created a shotlist that, but if I’m going to fix the script, I’m going to have to throw out a good portion of the shotlist.

Lessons learned.

-Penguin

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Penguin June 22nd, 2007

Here is the second installment into the forray of film. You can start at the beginning with Love Angle: My First� Movie.

I just about wrapped up the script. The first revision was a disaster. I had the unfortune to sit next to Ninja as she read and made faces at the script.

After the table read, both the cast and I felt that there were a lot of deficiencies in the script. Some of my actors weren’t happy with the direction I took their character. We spent a lot of time brainstorming and thinking of solutions to some of these.

During the week, I felt that the way we lead up to the ending was just such a huge contrivance. So, I ended up rewriting a good part of the script.

As we approach our shooting schedule, I’ve come to a point where I’m okay with the script. It could probably use the addition of one or two more scenes, but for the most part, the structure works.

I’m going to try something, and post the current draft. If it works, take a gander and post in the comments. Otherwise, stay tuned for more updates.

love-angle-beta-6.pdf

-Penguin

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Penguin June 16th, 2007

I’m the Drama Director at my church. This summer, we’ll be embarking on our first short film. So I decided it would be a good opportunity to share about the whole movie making process, from start to finish.
We looked at our budget and decided that the easiest thing for us to do, was a romantic comedy. I never really liked romantic comedies, or chick flicks; they tend to be formulaic and uninspired. This is not to say that we’re going to produce groundbreaking cinema, but it’ll give us an opportunity to go at it from a different angle.

Two Sundays ago, we came up with the general plot outline:

girl stood up at prom…causes intimacy issues

girl meets boy
boy is girl’s tutor
boy doesn’t know
girl goes to great lengths to get boy
flirts with other people
work at the same place
talk/is herself/common interest
boy notices girl
girl loses boy
girl has intimacy issues –> runs away from boy
“I never really liked you. You were just a rebound”
boy pursues girl
boy makes his own prom just for the two of them
takes her old dress

One of the hurdles we have, since my cast are generally between the ages of 15-20, is chemistry. I’ve produced two previous works, where the lack of chemistry just made the entire thing disastrous. In an effort to resolve this, we did some screen tests. I also talked to my actors about who they were comfortable interacting with. Although, I didn’t get my ideal cast, I think the casting is still good.

Not only am I the casting director, the director, I’m also the screenplay writer. I’ve been working on the script for the past three weeks. It’s getting there, but I’m afraid it won’t be ready for our first table read tomorrow.

During the screen test, I had them read a small part that I wrote, and the dialogue was just horrendous. I was so embarrassed. Hopefully, this round will be better.

So, what’s next? I need to location scout, convert my script to a shooting script, write up a shot list, and write up a shooting schedule. Lot’s to do.

If you’re interested in film, stay tuned!

-Penguin

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