One of the high points of the movie, at least in the script, has always been the big sword fight towards the end. As we have always tended to leave the toughest scenes for last, this was one of the last things to shoot.

In a way it was a relief after the week before, in that we didn’t have to deal with so many people, and the people who were there were all good friends and dedicated to the task of filmmaking, so that we didn’t have to worry (too much) about desertions.

Though it didn’t involve too many people, it did involve a fancy, involved, and hopefully exciting sword fight. Originally we were going to have Shirzi choreograph it, but Shirzi seems to have disappeared. So it was fortunate when we found out that April’s stunt double, Eddie Tsai, was also into swordplay and was willing to choreograph the fight for us.

Eddie, some of his fighting partners and someone’s girlfriend came over to Dean’s a couple of nights during the week before the shoot, to work out the layout and give Rowan and Dean some things to work on. Dean had bought four or five practice swords in case of breakage. I was more worried about sword shard-related injuries. I also wished we had more time to practice, but time was short as Dean’s departure date loomed.

Early Saturday Dean and I showed up at the university conference room and started setting things up. The others showed up later, and we got just about all of the non-fight shots done with April, Sarah, Rowan, Dean and Bill. Eddie, who was leading a team in a martial arts competition both days of the shoot, showed up at about 6 or 7pm. He and his teammate dressed in Rowan’s and Dean’s costumes and went through the fight for us and the camera a few times. They were very good, going after each other so fiercely that they even broke one of the swords, and I began to wonder how we could get Rowan to look that good. Dean’s character is supposed to be clumsy at swordplay, but Rowan’s character is supposed to actually be somewhat good. That night I shaved my head and face so that I could fill in for Rowan the next day.

Saturday had been a long day, but Sunday was even longer. I managed to subsist on Mr. Brown coffees in between McDonald’s hamburgers and salads. April came back and finished her crawling shots, and Dean got his makeup on. Who knows what the people in the hall thought we were doing in there, between the noise, shouting and the clanging of swords and Dean’s bloody appearance whenever he left the room. One shot required a blood spurt, and as a result fake blood got all over a couple of walls and wouldn’t come off. It looked good, but Dean wanted his room deposit back, so we had to do something about it. We called Paul and asked him to stop by B&Q on the way over to pick up some paint.

Although his shots looked great, Rowan had just caught a cold and was losing steam fast by nightfall. We got everything of Rowan which required his face, fighting against Eddie, and let him go. Then we got everything with Dean fighting against Eddie, and then, in order to get wide shots of Dean fighting, I put on Rowan’s costume and fought Dean while Darrell operated the camera. Throughout this entire dramatic fight, Paul was adding layer after layer of paint over the bloody wall.

We slogged at it until 11 or 12, packed up and went home. It was good to get the sword fight over with after waiting for so long, between all of the different ways we filmed it, it should look fantastic.

Documenting

Prince Roy was meeting some friends for dinner on Monday, so I decided to skip badminton. The pug-nosed women could wait.

I got off work a little early, so I walked halfway to the teahouse where we were meeting before finally catching a cab. Prince Roy, Spicygirl, Dan and Eric were already there. Dan and Eric are both into martial arts, so a lot of the conversation revolved around that. I might have come off a bit badly by expressing my opinion that Tai-chi and competitions are a weird mix at best.

Our thirst for tea quenched, we took another taxi over to the Tonghua Night Market, which PR and SG visit weekly. I’ve always felt the Tonghua market a bit watered down as compared to other night markets, but maybe it’s just that that part of town gives it a different vibe. I don’t actually get over there that much in any case.

We found the restaurant PR and SG always go to, but their favorite chef wasn’t at the table. If you can imagine. PR promptly informed the management of this grievous error, and the skinny kid was dispatched to the kitchen and replaced by an older fellow with a yellow handkerchief around his neck. Our group responded with everyone taking out their cameras to document the event as he dumped our food on the grill and moved it around in an expert fashion.

My beef dish was good, and the other dishes looked good, though, so the guy obviously knew what he was doing. Eric and I didn’t have the spicy stuff, while the non-Taiwanese at the table all got super spicy dishes.

It was drizzling again as we exited the restaurant afterwards. We walked to An-he Road and went our separate ways. I set off to the nearest MRT station, taking pictures as I went because it’s been too long since I’d done that kind of thing. The nearest station was Da-an, where I used to live when I was at the horrible old Chungking Mansions Taipei. It was a great area, and still is; the mansions themselves were, and still are, a mess.

When I got to the Da-an Station, however, I didn’t feel like getting on just yet, so I continued walking up Fuxing South Road, taking more pictures, until I reached Zhongxiao East Road, where I finally got on the train home.

Scene 3 is probably the most complicated shoot in the movie. The reason for this lies mainly in the fact that it has more people and more speaking roles in it at one time than any other scene in this already-complicated script. I knew that expectations were building as we near the end of principal photography, yet we could only budget one afternoon for it due to scheduling concerns.

Dean wrangled a university meeting room for the location. We’d been hoping to find a better location but it never happened. I guess zeppelins are harder to come by than they used to be.

We arrived at about 11am to set up, and other cast and crew started trickling in at about 1pm. Rowan and Alex, the main players, arrived last, and we began filming with me walking backwards on top of the table, dragging the camera on a dolly as I went.

Along with Alex, Jane, Bill, Rowan, Norm and Sarah, we had quite a few new faces just for this scene. Dean had photoshopped pictures of Rowan wearing various costumes into so-called portraits of his character’s ancestors to ordain the walls. They looked pretty amazing.

I was shooting according to the storyboards, but it soon became apparent that unless we cut out part of the scene we wouldn’t get it done without at least one mutiny, as most of our volunteers had simply come out for some laughs and a little light filming. Unfortunately, this meant we had to ax a nice little fight scene we’d all been looking forward to since the inception of this story. It also threw me completely off track as far as the storyboards went, and spent the rest of the time going by pure guesswork.

It’s not the first time this has happened, but it was worse this time because we can usually browbeat our good friends into staying long enough to get all the shots we want. This time, however, the cast outnumbered us and could have taken us in a fight, so that was that. We did what we could and wrapped up around 6 or 7pm. I was disappointed in myself for not foreseeing that it would go down like that, but as I said, expectations were high. They’ll be even higher next week when we have an even bigger scene to film, albeit with fewer people to deal with. We’re getting together with our swordmaster Eddie for some sword practice on Wednesday.

On Saturday we filmed some stuff up in the hills near my place. We found an old temple (I think it was a temple; I’m not sure) for some dream-sequence shots and a nearby patch of jungle for a flashback. Yes, we have dream sequences and flashbacks, two real no-noes according to script readers. Then again, our script is never going to go through that process, so screw it.