May 25, 2009

Starting on our new unit today, we were grouped and working on the scripts that Ms. Wong thought would be the best to make a short film with accordance to Wong Kar Wai's style.

My group comprised of Adrian, Sarah and Xiang Yi, using Adrian's script. His script was quite simple comprising of little chronological scenes but a lot of flash backs. The story depicts a man who lost love and is in a depressed stupor. Rift with internal conflict, he sits by himself in an empty apartment pealing away the petals of a white rose, which symbolize memories that he had. The theme of the script is "memory" which is illustrated through the symbolism of the rose.

One interesting aspect of this character is that his memory is fading and he doesn't remember everything. To expresses his memory loss, Adrian has chosen to make the flashbacks different from the more conventional flashback of simply making everything black and white and reducing the shutter speed, creating a blurry picture; he has decided to utilize lighting and have the light shine on the only on the things that he remembers. In addition, the location of the shots will also change when he remembers where he was. I think is a very creative was to express memory loss and that "shows" rather than "tells" and ties in very well with the Wong Kar Wai style of film.

Examples of personal engagement was that despite his good script we did a few alterations, simply to make the story more interesting and slightly less cliche. In the script one of the characters had to smoke a cigarette, despite the fact that smoking a prominent characteristic of Wong Kar Wai films, as actors we cannot smoke. Rather than be obstructed by this impediment I suggested that we substitute it with the characters blowing bubbles. This turned out to be very effective and a was is also used by Wong Kar Wai in the film My Blueberry Nights. Bubbles also stir up the sense of the innocences and nostalgia of childhood which is effective in what we are planning to achieve.

Another modification that we made was the rose. Although this was just a suggestion we planned on changing the rose to an onion. Like a rose, the onion has layers which can be pealed away one at a time, this can also symbolize the fleeting memories however, the onion and the rose project two contrasting feels. The rose is more romantic and love related, on the other hand the onion is bitter and represents resentment. Depending on the type of feel we want to create, we are contemplating on whether to use the rose or the onion. Both work well in terms of its symbolic meaning however they portray two different types of emotions.

This was a very good introduction to our unit, I gained insight into the type of film that we will be making and understand my role as actor and lighting director. I also contributed ideas and although it wasn't my script I offered good suggestions as to how we can improve it even further. Today I exercised my ability to be "knowledge" about what I know about Wong Kar Wai and apply it to my our film, being "open minded" and "caring" toward others opinion and lastly to be "reflective" upon my work and my role in the production of this film. I personally quite like the script and believe that it will be interesting and follows Wong Kar Wai's style of film very closely.