natkhat

Thanks to the Bayou City Inspirational Film Festival, Released is now listed on B-Side.  So if you’ve seen the film, please help out and throw in a review or ranking!

The Bayou City Inspirational Film Festival will be screening the film in Houston on Friday, August 8th, at 3pm at the Sheraton North.  So if you haven’t seen it, here’s yet another chance in Houston.

One of the things that’s been keeping me busy over the past few months is that I’m producing and assistant directing a thesis film for a student a few years ahead of me.  The film, one of the most ambitious short film’s I’ve ever seen, is a space film that is being shot on 35mm.  We’re  (by we I mean the art department) actually building the interior of a spaceship at the UT studios.

The shoot is divided into several parts to give us time to build the various locations.  We just wrapped the first phase this past Monday.  We’ll shoot phase two at the end of July.  Then there’s some location work for the end of summer / early fall.

Here are pictures that various people took:

Patrick’s Pics from the first three days of shooting.

Design Pics

Early Building

As the AD, my job is mainly to stand around and look mad.  So I don’t get photographed very often.

But here’s one of me talking to the DP:

And here’s one of me doing what I do the most — talking to the director that we’re behind schedule and need to figure out a way to cut a shot:

I guess I failed Christine’s challenge.  Actually, I’ve been feeling like stopping to update the blog for quite some time now.  I find that when I don’t write anything for long spurts, I get hungry to write, and that motivates me to sit down and write a script.  With the blog, there’s this steady pressure-release, and that’s bad.  Because it takes that sudden urge to do anything as crazy as actually try to write a film.

I’m not saying that I’m quiting entirely.  We’ll see.  But I think that I will probably try to make my posts shorter updates than long rambles.  That’s probably better for everyone involved.

Released will screen at the Slant Film Festival at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston this Friday.  Come check it out and celebrate the Houston premiere with me!

We just completed shooting pickups for my film this past weekend.

Pickups/reshoots are a pretty common practice.  You basically shoot your film, cut it together, and then go back and shoot anything that’s missing or that didn’t quite work out the first time.  The trouble is, reshoots can be difficult and expensive.  You have to get everyone back together again.  You have to dress locations again.  Your actors may not be available, or may have died their hair, or gone through puberty, or who knows what else.  Plus, production is already a stressful and expensive venture.  It’s extremely difficult to get the motivation back up again to do reshoots.  The whole time I was planning them, I kept kicking myself for needing them in the first place.

When I originally planned production for the film, I divided the shoot into two parts.  I scheduled all of the stuff involving principal locations and actors for a six day shoot in December.  Everything else, I put off for pickups.  Although it was difficult to get motivated, in the end, it worked out great.  Most of the pickup stuff consisted of zombie action.  And as it turned out, the stuff we actually needed was nothing like the stuff we initially wrote into the script.  So if I had shot all of that zombie action stuff in the original 6 days, I would have killed the schedule getting a bunch of stuff that we didn’t actually need.  By putting it off for the reshoots, we were able to edit the main drama of the film, look at it, and only go back and shoot the minimal zombie stuff that we actually need to make the film work.

If possible, I think I will always plan my shoots like this moving forward.  If a script ever calls for action or 2nd unit stuff that doesn’t require the principal actors or locations, I’ll just put it off for pickups.  That way I only have to shoot what I’ll actually use in the cut.  There’s no point in shooting a bunch of expensive, effects-heavy action and having it end up in the trash.

I don’t watch TV. I mean that literally, not figuratively. I don’t even have a cable connected to my TV. I only watch DVDs and will every once in a while catch Daily Show videos online. But if I did watch TV, this site might be cool: Hulu. Apparently, they have all of this free TV online and it’s legal!

I spent a little time browsing their catalogue — In Living Color, the office, Arrested Development, Miami Vice…

This could be a bad discovery.

Finally, ad-supported bike sharing (a program already in play in Paris) makes its way to the US. Check out the NYT article.

Bathroom Stall poll in the UT Communications building Men’s restroom (CMA 3rd floor).

The New York Times previewed Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha today.  Glass is famous for his haunting, repetitive music that has already been used to score numerous films.  According to the article, his opera takes a meditative look at the birth of Gandhi’s resistance in South Africa with special emphasis on how the Gita inspired him.

Someone in New York, please check this out and tell me how it is!

I think when dealing with current political issues, art often works best when utilizing a little indirection.  Arthur Miller responded to McCarthy in the 1950s with The Crucible, his play about the Salem witch trials.  Performances of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata always increase during times of war.  The play depicts how a group of women withhold sex from their husbands to bring an end to the Pelopennesian War.  At Shunya, we responded to the rise of hate crimes against South Asians post-9/11 by staging The indian Wants the Bronx, a play about a couple of thugs that harrass an Indian in New York written way back in 1968

Recently, films about the Iraq war have done very poorly at the box office.  Perhaps, they’ve just been too direct.  Who wants to go see a film about Iraq when that’s all we see on the news?  When we go to the movies, we want to escape, we want to be entertained.  When the entertainment can fulfill our desire to escape while still commenting on our present condition, I think that’s when our entertainment starts to transcend and become art.

Perhaps a revival of Gandhi’s message of non-violence is the perfect level of indirection to comment on our current condition.

Green Homes Designs is housing design company specializing in earth-friendly housing in Houston.  The company is run by two of my friends.  They recently completed their first two homes and were covered by the Houston Examiner.