the pains of being pure at heart - november 4, 2010

(photographed for discorder)

BETWEEN STARS & THE VANCOUVER FILM RACE

August was productive. Here's two reasons why:

BETWEEN STARS

Between Stars, starring Kate Crutchlow and Edison Skinner, is done production! There's many updates on the production front - many stories, many photos. Expect to see much more both here and on the tumblr in the upcoming weeks and months.

XOXO

This year, I participated in The 24 Hour Vancouver Film Race. Together with my team Station7 - Lynn Wee, Jerry Tai, Karlo Melgarejo, and Bernie Yao - we conceived, shot, and edited a short film in 24 hours, from 10pm on Friday August 27th to 10pm on Saturday August 28th. We wrapped production at 5 in the morning and hurled ourselves through editing. It was epic.

The result? A short film called XOXO - starring Bernie Yao and Edison Skinner. It will be screening together with the other film race participants at The Ridge Theatre on September 1st at 9:15pm. Check out the Film Racing site for more screening details.

joseph keiley - lenore (1907)

published in camera work no 17, 1907

follow the turtle

(c-prints - 2009)

NEON RUSH: the opening credits for gaspar noé's enter the void

For a change from the stream of softer images and sequences I've been focusing on - this is TRIPPY, PULPY, and IMPACTING. It's also one of the best text-based title sequences I've seen in ages. See it full screen and experience the full neon rush.

website redesign! and a new project!

In celebration of my graduation from Emily Carr University, the new version of my website is up!

Also new: the pre-production blog for my upcoming short film, Between Stars. This film is currently in the early stages of pre-production, and I'm aiming for a July shoot date and a November completion date. Between Stars will be my first short film outside of studenthood. I'm excited about it. The blog will follow its ongoing development and realization.

MAKE ME STRONGER: archives

I'm remodeling my website and getting rid of the blog on the main page. So, in the interest of capturing the process of my grad film, what follows are the posts related to the film from the old blog. (oh the memories!)

October 30, 2009

I took this in 2006 on a trail about five minutes out of Prince Rupert.

My grad film at Emily Carr is inspired heavily by this environment - the sense of entering into the uncanny that permeates rural BC. The film, a retelling of a girl’s repressed memories of a traumatic event, takes place in a rural BC forest similar to this one - a beautiful yet dangerous environment.

While finding locations in Vancouver that capture this feeling has proven to be difficult, I’ve found my forest, and I’m now prepping for the shoot next weekend. This means: rehearsals! Shot lists! Etcetera! Tomorrow, I’m off to the location with my super 8 camera to run some tests and plan some shots.

December 12, 2009

I’m out of production and into editing of my grad film, Make Me Stronger. The first cut is nearly finished - and this means the first batch of stills from are on flickr. More to come in the upcoming days and weeks. The semester is almost over, but there’s still much to be done before the completion date in April.

(Also see the black and white stills taken by my friend Jerry Tai.)

MAKE ME STRONGER: the poster

After eight months of long work, my grad film is finally done.

MAKE ME STRONGER will be screening at Emily Carr University's grad show from May 2 to 16.

great moments in the backs of human heads.

standing in line at the olympics.

half an hour later, everyone gave up on the queue and rushed the stage.

make me stronger - the trailer

Now online: the trailer for my grad film.

The completed film will be screening in May here in Vancouver as part of Emily Carr's upcoming grad exhibition. (There's still much to be done in the upcoming weeks.) But until then, see the trailer!

printing the titles

letterpressing film titles

Titles are among my favorite parts of the filmmaking process. I have a huge fetish for them, be they Woody Allen's elegant white Windsor on black or the opulent animated sequences featured on Forget the Film, Watch the Titles. The choice of typeface and the construction of the sequence can stamp the film and subtly affect the experience of the entire work.

But beyond that, type is fun.

Because type is fun, this semester, I'm taking a letterpress class. This means I have access to a printing press and wood type. Naturally I had to take advantage of this and handprint the titles for Make Me Stronger.

Each of these letters were handset, and all the indentations and scratches exist in the original letters - markers of decades of use. Not that long ago wood type was the standard media for fast-printed posters and other such ephemera. I enjoy how making the titles for my film - what ultimately will be an ephemeral thing - results in ink-stained hands and tired muscles.

(Side note: printing used to be such a violent laborious act. Metal lead type, for instance, was created by shooting hot molten lead into molds. Letterpress is hardcore!)

I will not be printing all the titles like this. (Maybe in an alternate reality where I have a week to set aside to handset all the letters. Letterpress unfortunately takes time, especially when learning. The slow, meditative process is part of its charm. But one can dream.) However, I will be letterpressing the poster - and there may possibly be other secret items.

More information in the future.

owen pallett - on naming his band final fantasy

"I feel sometimes when I walk on stage in front of a thousand people with just a violin and a loop pedal and I’m supposed to entertain them for twenty minutes, it’s preposterous, in the same way that fighting a one-armed, one-winged angel-giant named Sephiroth in the clouds on another planet is."

(via popmatters)

deny your discontent

a letterpressed anti-olympic poster.

(best viewed large.)

(on documenting.

be it writing or photography.)

fever dream rainforest

last week i was in hawaii. while there, i went to the iao valley.

hawaii is a good place to have random conversations with eager tourists and pretend you are the only person in the entire planet. both of these things can be accomplished in the iao valley!

the mountains look like distorted fever dream representation of mountains, with craggy edges and spindles.

they are just jagged enough to maybe make it into the grad film.

a couple of weeks ago, i went back out into the forest to shoot insert shots for my grad film at emily carr university, make me stronger - a short film about a young woman uncovering a traumatic childhood memory. (i'll be making regular trips there from now until the end of post-production.) the forest in question - pacific spirit - is located close to the thick of vancouver, but go just a few minutes out into the forest and you could be days and weeks and months away from the city.

except for the soundscape:

traffic. airplanes. dogs. bikes.

all the aural borders are defined by city. you can't forget where your place is - that just outside the forest is vancouver.

the challenge now is to make this noise of the world feel outside human control.

this is a start.