Poagao in China on Youtube

In order to make our story a little less macguffinolicious, Dean and I came up with a new version of the film’s ending that makes use of a kind of dream world. Of course, the first place one thinks of when one is considering surreal surroundings in Taiwan is the old abandoned spaceship village up on the north coast. It must have seemed a neat idea to the Jetsons afficionado who came up with the idea, but land disputes did the place in, not to mention the idea of fiberglass houses alternately baking under the Taiwanese sun and being blown around by typhoons.

In order to carry out the sequence, we needed to find someone to play Dean’s character’s wife, and he found Heidi, who is a little young for the part but looks good. I hauled myself up early Saturday morning and took the train all the way to Danshui, where I met Dean, and we took a cab out to the site. William and Heidi were walking their dogs along the beach on the other side, and we met up in the middle. I filmed a wide shot while Dean and Heidi went over their lines and blocking, while William tried to keep the dogs from running into the shot. He was mostly successful in this.

Heidi and William had to split early, leaving Dean and I to get his half of the conversation, so I read Heidi’s lines while operating the camera.

Here I’d like to interrupt the regularly scheduled blogging for a minor rant: You know those long dramatic shots of characters, where you’re looking at them standing there, feeling the emotion of the scene and listening to the grand swell of the music? You like those, right? But on the set, there is no grand music and people are walking around and talking and wondering when lunch is, and here’s the director with his little camera just sitting there filming and distinctly not saying “cut” or “ok” or “that was good” or “well, I guess that will do” but instead just staring into the viewfinder. I can understand that it’s quite annoying and mystifying, but chances are there’s something really interesting going on, something that will not only make it into the movie but could possibly even raise it to another level and make the audience go “oh!” or “damn!” and send a tingling down their spines.

A lot of what attracts us to a movie lies in the pacing. It’s a lot like music that way. I like to have as much latitude as I can reasonably get when I’m playing with the pacing of a scene. I aspire to cutting down on the talking heads and getting the point across with visual cues.

Ok, that’s enough ranting for now. I’m not so much complaining as explaining why I tend to let the scene play itself out.

As we left the spaceship community and were waiting on the side of the highway for a cab to pass by, we spotted an enclosure with a sign saying “Beware! Electrified!” Inside the fence was an ostrich and several chickens.

We caught a cab back to Danshui and went to the foreigners’ graveyard at Athelia University to do more dream stuff. I climbed a tree and balanced on a limb while filming Dean walking around the various graves.

We had an appointment for more filming in the city later, so we caught the train back to Dean’s house and then headed out to the Outback restaurant at the corner of Dunhua and Nanjing Roads. Dean had talked the people there into letting us use one of their rooms to be part of our museum sequence. April and Mark showed up, as well as Eddie, an acrobat who would be standing in for April in the heist sequence. I set up the camera and let Eddie do his thing while the others munched on fried onion that the restaurant graciously provided.

Eddie was pretty good, I have to say. He jumped and flipped and rolled all over the place. He even brought a sword, you know, just in case. I’m hoping he can help us out with our sword fight later. He seemed surprised that his part was over so soon, but we had more to do in that location. We filmed Mark’s scenes using my monkey statue and then April’s stuff before calling it a day and winding down over a nice meal.

Dean has to be back in Canada by Christmas. Our goal is to get main photography done by then, so I can have a rough cut ready for ADR soon after that, so the schedule’s pretty packed this month. We really only have one major scene to go, plus a few pickups here and there. It’s been a long race, but this is the last stretch.

When I was in China last month, I would occasionally use my little Canon Digital IXUS 40‘s video function to take clips here and there. Over the course of 11 days I accumulated about half an hour of video. Upon my return, I dumped it all into a Premiere Pro timeline, parred it down to about 15 minutes and overlaid some of the music by the Chinese band Brendan turned me on to called Second-hand Rose. Somehow it seems to match my mood at various points of the trip pretty well.

I posted a low-res version on Google video and one on Youtube. The original video is 640 by 480, but the WMP encoder on Premiere seems stuck at half that resolution, so it’s best viewed at less than full-screen size; I’ll see if I can put up a higher-resolution version when I have time. Keep in mind that this is no more than an extended vidlet with music made with a point-and-shoot camera. To tell the truth I forgot about the video part for most of my time in Shanghai (and also I didn’t feel like whipping out and talking to my camera in the company of Lennet or my other gracious hosts in that fair city), so unfortunately there’s no footage of me wading through the touts along the Bund. Ah, maybe next time.

After many months of looking for a good torture room location, we ended up about 50 yards from my front door down in Bitan, at the ruins of the old police station that was abandoned when the amusement park up on the hill closed down decades ago. I’d never gone inside before, but it was suitable, full of abandoned desks and chairs, old photo albums and cassette tapes and shelves full of mildewing park brochures. It would do fine if we could somehow get access to electricity inside. I stopped in at the dumpling store across the way and arranged to borrow their electricity in exchange for promises that the cast and crew would eat there.

On the day, however, it turned out that, due to some miscommunication, we didn’t have an extension cord long enough to reach the restaurant. Dean and I knocked on the door of the adjoining apartment next door and talked with a young woman, who gave us permission to run a line out a police station window onto their balcony. It didn’t look as if we could spend time waiting for dumplings anyway.

The room we were originally planning to use was too bright, even with the window coverings Dean had brought, so we used another, smaller room instead. In the end it didn’t matter too much as we spent the entire afternoon arranging things and setting up equipment; we had to remove a mattress and furniture, clean up the more unsightly parts of the garbage strewn across the floor, move a rather recalcitrant desk, and set up a single light above the “torture chair” Dean would be sitting in. As a result, the sun was setting as we got our first shots of the day.

In addition to Dean, Rowan, Sarah and our tortionnaire, Jaques Van Wersch, our guard de jour was Juan, who had agreed to help us out by donning the old red and maroon garb and taking his station next to the door. The dust was horrific, but thankfully Taiwanese never put much stock in insulation, so at least we were pretty sure it was asbestos-free dust.

I started off with wide master shots, as usual. I do this to get coverage, and let the actors get used to the scene being filmed without the pressure of a close-up. Rowan, who was distracted by all the fascinating instruments on display, was having some trouble with his lines so he took a break to memorize them better while I filmed Juan’s reaction shots as he had to leave.

When we got back to the main action, things went quite smoothly. The actual shooting was a challenge as actors moving into and out of the circle of light went from underexposed to overexposed and back very quickly. I tried to keep up by adjusting the shutter as well as the focus, but it was very tricky. Digital video in this format is very restrictive in this regard.

Still, the lighting, when I could keep up with it, was very nice. It will be a challenge to avoid exposure mistakes in the editing, but it should be a pretty good-looking, rather gruesome scene.

Eventually Paul and Darrell had to leave, but Dolly showed up, accompanied as always by Maurice. She was there to don the Lady X hat and glasses for the last time, a true historic moment. She looked great walking in and out of the light, smoking and teasing Dean.

We finished at about 11pm and began the long process of striking the little camp we’d made in the ruins. People left, we returned the lights to Paul, woke up the lady next door to get our cord back, and left the place for the ghosts once again.

潑猴的介紹

這是公視拍的電視介紹.

Meet Poagao

A while back PTS did a little video spot on me. Here it is. Apologies for the mumbly Chinese; I was a bit nervous, being on the wrong side of the camera and all.

The lovely 17″ Samsung 171T monitor, whose crisp and colorful 1280:1024 image I’ve been enjoying since 2002 after my last 19″ CRT monster died, refused to turn on the other day. I couldn’t even get the menu or the “no signal” to come up. There were no warning signs of its impending demise, other than the fact that LCD monitors don’t generally last longer than three or four years.

So I had to get a new monitor. I went down to Ba-de Road and found a gargantuan 22″ Viewsonic VX2235 LCD to replace the fallen Samsung. At half the price of the 171T, it was relatively cheap and looked good at the store.

When I got it home, however, I found that with the increased real estate came some other viewing issues, such as some areas being darker than others. A smudge-like area graced the left side. When light levels at the top were ok, the bottom was too light, and when the bottom was just right, the top was too dark. Also, it just felt unnaturally large. It barely fit under my computer shelf desk.

The size I could get used to, but the other issues were unforgivable. I took it back and decided to go back to Samsung with the cheaper 20″ 205BW model, which has the same resolution, 1680 by 1050, as the Viewsonic. The brightness seems more even, the color better, and though the top/bottom differences are still there, they don’t bother me as much. There’s some light bleed at the top that is only visible when watching 16:9 movies with solid black bars on the top and bottom. I have to admit I’m a little concerned about that.

The new Sammy’s not huge. In fact it’s the same height as my old Samsung; it’s just wider by half. And, not insignificantly, a couple thousand NT$ cheaper than the Viewsonic, which is good because I also had to get a new ATi Radeon graphics card that could deal with the higher resolution after my nVidia 5700 literally wet itself at the prospect of displaying so many pixels at one time.

I’m tired of hauling monitors back and forth from Ba-de Road to Xindian in any case. Hopefully this one will do just fine.

Hi blog readers. Me here. Darrell. “Mr. B Camera.” As regular readers of Poagao’s many blogs, you all know that he was pretty much tied up all last weekend gigging with his jug band, the Muddy Basin Ramblers. So, with the deadline for principle photography just around the corner, I was asked to step in and take the reigns and shoot a quick scene and a couple of inserts for scenes already completed. The negotiations went something like this.

今早收到一封有趣的信:

“

I had to work overtime on Wednesday, so I was late for practice. The class seems to be running later and later in any case. I remember when we started at 8 and went until 10. These days it’s more like 9 to 11, meaning I get home around midnight.

Some of the newer students were there, and I practiced with them for a while. One guy, who I always think of as being from Hong Kong for some reason, has a really aggressive approach to tuishou, using all of his force. “Ah ha! I know your weakness!” he told me.

“I have plenty,” I said. “Which one did you discover?”

“If I told you, you’d be on your guard and I wouldn’t win!”

Sigh. “Look, how can we learn anything with an attitude like that?” I asked him. “We’re here to learn from each other. You want to focus on winning each and every time, go to a tournament.”

It turned out he was talking about my poor resistance to modulating the up/down direction of his pushing. Fair enough. He did adopt a softer approach after that, but I’ve still got bruises on both arms to show from it.

I noticed Yang Qing-feng doing tuishou with an older guy in a white jacket who had been hanging around watching us earlier. He’d been asking questions, and it turned out he was from a judo background. Occasionally we get guys like him who want to show off their mad grappling skillz, but in my experience they always end up being pWND by Teacher Xu. This was no exception. The guy seemed friendly and took it very well, though. He might even end up as a student, who knows.

Teacher Xu’s instructions this time included not restricting your balance to your heels; you can move the focus of your stance even further back if you know what you’re doing (and with some practice). Also, engage your power in stages, e.g. upper body, handing off to feet, then handing off to lower body. All of your power should come from the same point; it’s just a matter of how and where you expend it.

All of these lessons are too much to keep in mind, of course. The idea is to make them an automatic part of your tuishou resume, as it were. I still have a long way to go.