A short film I did with my FBC TV crew called "A Day At the Beach" won the World Television Awards 2013 Science/environment category for the Best TV Programme on “Creating Ozone Safe Generations".
Now I get to present the Film at the Asia Media Summit, which is a global gathering of broadcasters from around the world, scheduled for the the 29 May in Manado, Indonesia. That's where I get presented with my award too :)
According to the website there's going to be 500 representatives from various broadcasters at the summit so it should be very interesting.
I was so damn excited when I heard that I had won. It was 1am on a Saturday Morning and I had just finished a few hours of playing Loadout when I got the call from my Boss who had gotten an email telling him I had won. I actually just sat there kinda like "o really... awesome"
Inside though I was kinda in shock because this was my first international award, and a World TV award at that - which is pretty huge.
As far as films go I never make anything I wouldn't watch. So when I set out to make something on Ozone Depletion one idea just jumped into my head.
After hearing all this talk about stop ozone depleting substances by the year 2050 I started thinking about what kind of effect that would have on us here in Fiji. Can Fiji or the whole Pacific wait that long? What will happen before then? or after that?
Check out the "Boom Mic"
So what came out in scripting was a ravaged Fiji in the year 2063 and the rest just fell into place.
Drawing from such things as Cormac McCarthy's The Road and even a bit of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories soon the script was locked into place.
I had a great crew working with me too so after about a week of planning and a day of shooting we knew we had something awesome going. I'm lucky to always have a crew that sort of trusts me with concept and planing and especially direction.
I wanted to make the short informative, while still being accessible, so I had written a father and daughter reflecting on all the things that happened to Fiji for it to be the dry, barren place it was in the script.
We shot the project down at the Sigatoka sand dunes which gave us the perfect back drop for our story.
Before the actual day of the shoot my buddy Samu Soqoyawa and I went up to the dunes to check out the location. I shot a small video of the location on my handycam just to get a feel for the place. I then cut this into a little "mood video" that I showed the crew to give them a sense of what I was trying to capture. I also used this is a site reference when scripting.
The Day of the actual was shoot was a lot harder as the area gets a lot of rain. So it meant packing equipment up now and then, sometimes in the middle of takes, so we didn't get it wet.
What was also interesting is that I had planned to have a CGI character in the story as well. A computer that talks to the father and daughter, explaining things about the Ozone and the effects of the depletion.
The design for this A.I was pretty simple but looked great - and I owe a lot of thanks to our graphics guy and my friend David Whiteside for his designs. I'm lucky that he is a huge video game buff like me so he had a lot to draw from. In fact he designed all the graphics I animated based on a few crude sketches I had given him. though our render resources and such was pretty scarce - I thought the end product with the AI turned out great.
Lending her voice to the AI, that we named Jacki-0, was the lovely Jacqueline Speight from our very own FBC TV news desk.
The score for the short was done by our very awesome sound guy Jone Nakasamai, who actually composed the main theme a day before we submitted the film for the award.
Our two leads Peceli Rokotuivuna and Ny Vann were great sports. As we had one camera it meant we had to do a lot of multiple takes to get the different angles. Even Seremaia bui Cabecabe who was our drive for the day helped with carrying equipment up and down those mad high sand dunes.
In the end we had something we were all very proud of and to have something that is essentially a work of passion recognized with an award like this is truly amazing.
Here's the trailer for the short - which plays on FBC TV on the 15th of May at 6:30pm. I'll have a copy online soon after I get back from Indonesia.
So my friends and I did another short film this year. Costing F$150 (US$75) and shot over two nights and an afternoon, we made a little sci-fi/ horror film and called it Envy. I did a little Director journal for it that was supposed to go up on one of my friends blogs, but I thought I'd share it with you guys too.
Check out the short below and then have a read :D
Getting into the Kula films this year was an interesting experience. After our effort last year, which was met with so much positive response, as a group we knew we had to do something that would be seen as an immediate step up from Kania Na Yalo Bula.
As we were kicking around ideas for this years short, a number of things swept through my head. I knew I wanted to do something different from our last short, but exactly how different?
At one stage of the production we had actually settled on a script that was very different from what we ended up doing. It was an idea that I have had for a very long time which involved a young rugby star who gets mislead through drugs. This was interesting because even though I am open to watching any good film, such a story would not attract my immediate attention, because of this I thought it would be an interesting direction to take our short this year, it would be something that the audience would not expect after Kania.
This script went as far as gathering actors and even establishing a rough shooting date, but there was a part of me that wasn’t totally convinced by it.
At this time I was attending FNU’s Film and television course, and had learned a number of things that brought a new dimension to the way I saw my work. As artists or creative minds in any form of media, the trick is to always learn and expand on what you know, so I like to think my friends and I had come a long since making Kania, and this needed to be showcased.
It was then that the inspiration for Envy creeped it’s way into my head.
I get ideas in a number of different ways. That’s one reason I like to read a lot and watch as many movies as I can get my hands on. These things seep ideas and concepts into my work in many interesting little ways, and when I got the idea for the script that would be “Envy”, it came to me in a dream.
When I a woke from this dream, there I was at five in the morning, quickly turning on my pc to jot out what would become the first draft of Envy.
I quickly finished it and sent it off to the rest of n00b production guys who got pretty excited about it. Our producer was a bit worried about the actors we had lined up for our previous script, but I convinced him other wise :P
With Envy we had something that fell into my favorite category of Horror, and as an amateur director/ writer I really wanted to explore the genre more. I have always believed that when it comes to creating anything, you should always work around things you know, and things that keep your own personal attention.
Unlike Kania na Yalo Bula though, Envy was different in the sense that it wasn’t as straight forward . I wanted to work in a sense of suspense, and I wanted the audience to guess at what was happening and what might happen, then I tried to do my best to spin things the other way.
This years Kula entries had a run time of 10mins, as opposed to last years 5mins, so this allowed us to inject a little bit more time for the ‘set up.’ The script went through several revisions, most of it involving dialogue, but the core concept was always the same.
When it came to finding actors for the script, it was not my immediate intention to not have the same actors as last time, but because we had some new people who were interested in being part of our work, we ended up with fresh faces.
This I thought worked out very well for us.
This however brings us to one of the biggest problem I think any potential film maker would face locally, and that’s the lack of proper actors to pull from. There were a lot of comments made about the lack of acting skills the cast of Kania had, but you have to remember, these are my friends who are helping me out. They are not professional actors, and I am not even paying them. In fact, these guys actually give me money to make my films. So there’s only a certain level of believable performance I can get out of these guys, and there’s only so many times I can tell them to do a scene over and over again before I call “take.” Especially with Envy when we were working till 3am in the morning for 6 long hours with maybe one or two five minute breaks, with ‘actors’ and crew who paid their own cab fare to be at a certain location to help me out.
This however does not mean that our stars Gabriel Gravel and Michaela Asen didn’t give it their all. As in Kania, the small cast of Envy had to endure hours of fake blood, sweat and tears to get things done, and at times I considered my self very lucky to have friends that would put up with so much to bring my ideas to life.
Someone who brought a lot to Envy would have to be our last minute camera man Damien Light. We had made arrangements for a camera and a camera man, and on the actual day of shooting these plans fell through. At one point I had convinced the crew to shoot the whole thing on a handy-cam. But our Gore-effects man, Michael Jon Light, ever the skeptic, was a little apprehensive about using a handy-cam, so he spent the day hunting down his brother Damien, who only a few hours before shoot confirmed that he could help us out.
It was Damien’s keen eye for film and camera work that resulted in the visual flare of Envy. With his magic hat full of lenses and home made dolly rigs, he captured my ideas almost better than the way they looked in my head. I’m very particular about my shots, and story boarding is something I take very seriously, and working with him was one of the few times where changes were suggested that made me go “Whoa that looks awesome!”
Speaking of story boards, they were really important to Envy because even though we had them for Kania na yalo bula, we shot that pretty much in continuity. But Envy required actors to be in various stages of make up, which meant certain scenes would need to be done first so that our actors could dress up or ‘dirty up’ for other scenes. On the first day of shooting we actually shot the last bit of the short, before moving on to the other bits. Also unlike Kania that was shot in 8 hours on a Saturday, Envy was shot over two nights and a day. The lead actors and I met up during the week to go over their parts, so on the day everyone knew what to do.
We were using my buddy Michael Jon’s house; so on the nights of shooting, we had to let the family finish off with what they were doing before we invaded their home. But they were very kind and welcoming to us, even going as far as staying in the rooms or going over to the neighbors so as to give us space to work.
The second night of shooting involved the “Hatchling” in the basement, which was a lot of fun to shoot. So an afternoon was spent finding materials and dressing up what would be the creatures ‘nest’. Our Hatchling was none other than the star of Kania na yalo Bula, Danielle Whiteside, who stood patiently for about half and hour while we applied make to her. In the end it was a cold, dark and very uncomfortable role, but I think her hard work came out great.
The idea behind the Hatchling was to have something that looks human, but is clearly something else at the same time. Because of our lack of access to advance make-up and what not, we had to work this out in other ways. Eventually I had an idea of something that could be barely made out in the dark. Something slimy and slithery that blends in. For this bit I made some of the crew watch the last scene from Ridley Scott’s Alien. This one bit where the creature is blended into a space crafts wall, hidden amongst the machinery, barely visible until it moves.
In fact Alien would be a massive inspiration for me as far as Envy is concerned, aside from the obvious relation to the “Body snatcher” movies. I am a massive fan of body horror, and I like the idea of things from another world, be it biological, alien or supernatural, that come to destroy us, but they need our bodies to do their dirty work. The concept of something that looks like your best friend, or lover, but is not them is very creepy to me. Though the idea behind Envy has very little in common with Alien, that atmosphere I wanted to create, and the pacing of our short was very much inspired by it.
When it came to putting the film together after the shoot, it became very clear that we had something a lot bigger that our last project. When you sit through a raw cut of Kania, you can tell what’s going on, and you can get some sense and feel of the narrative even without the sounds and music. But watching a very rough draft of Evny, it was evident that solid visuals would not cut it. The suspense that I wanted to put across and the creepiness, relied a lot on sounds and music. Up until the Sunday before the movie was handed into the FAVC, I was still looking for sounds and music beds. Subtle sound queues and sound effects really enhanced the whole project, and once Meli Tuqota’s amazing graphics were added to the bloody mix, the whole thing came together better than I had hoped.
In the end we had something we were all proud of. Shooting out of sequence and applying ideas that involved some tricky shots, relying almost blindly on storyboards to keep things in order, and having faith in the end vision, all paid off for us.
I can only hope that the audience find our short as interesting and exciting to watch, as it was for us to make.
A quick piece I did to accompany a guest blog journal entry I did over at my buddy Wilson's Failed Paradise site. It's for our up coming short film's production diary.
So I've finished editing our up coming short zombie film, which my friends and I will be submitting to the 2010 Fiji Kula Film festival.
After a couple of days of editing, I was very pleased with the results. It's been awhile since I sat behind a video editor, but getting into editing was like riding a bike. (I used to be a video editor over at Fiji Television)
The film came together very well, aside from a few sound issues here and there which I'm trying to sort out right now. But with the small budget that we had, and considering we did everything in one day, we managed to get done everything we wanted. No shots were left out because we couldn't do it, no scenes were too hard. And our long hours of practising the fight sequences really helped.
I also just finished laying out the colour filters for it, and am loving the look of the film.
After trying a few different colour choices, I decided to go with a cool blue look to the film, it's a look that I've seen a lot of indie horror films use. Aside from making the footage look slightly creepy, it was very useful to fix shots that were too bright or too dark. Maybe that's why the look is so popular?
The pics I've put up a little stretched, but that'll be sorted in the export render, which I'm hoping to try out tomorrow.
I'll put up a small clip of the film sometime this week, followed by a trailer next week, all this is for the Facebook page that I made for the movie, because all the other cool kids are doing it.
Can't wait to see this thing on the big screen at the festival.
So yesterday we had the shoot for our up coming zombie short film: Kania Na Yalo Bula (Eat the living)
Man was it mad fun!
We got to the location at about 10 in the morning, had a run through of the shots and then got to work. With the three weeks or so of planning, everything went pretty smooth, but it still ended up being a very tiring day.
But it was the kind of tired I didn't mind at all because it was a lot of fun. My friends who took part in the film went through some serious stuff though, including my girl friend who was our leading lady.
Of all the things the guys had to out up with, I think the worst would have to have been the fake blood. It started off ok, but after filming for like almost 8 hours, that shizz got pretty sticky and very uncomfortable.
But I guess the irritation it provided helped a lot with all the screaming and running (yes running zombies) that was going on. Also because we only had one camera we had to do multiple takes to get the different angles.
At the end I realised that we had a lot of shots, which was good because they would prove very useful when editing.
While we were shooting though, it was apparent how bloody and gruesome our short film actually was, and it left us wondering if it won't too much for the film festival. I've seen some of the stuff they've accepted, which is horrendous in it's own right, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.
My buddy Wilson should have a production diary up which in turn I'll link when it's done.
For our up coming zombie film project, which we're shooting this weekend, my buddy MJ was we put in charge of the blood and gore, so here is trying out a "blood test"
So some of my friends and I drove up to the location where we'll be shooting out upcoming Zombie movie for the local Fiji Kula Film festival.
The Fiji Museum who own the place told us today that it was ok to film their free of charge, in return we give them credit for helping us out.
The place in question is called Bilo Battery and it used to serve as an artillery base during the 2nd world war. The place has long since been abandoned and there wasn't even anyone up there except this one kid who watches the gates and his two friends.
The location is absolutely perfect, and felt as though it was made to be left in ruins only so we could one day shoot our movie there.
Looking at the place I have no idea why no one has ever bothered to film a horror movie there, it is just screaming to scare you.
I spent about 20mins or so just taking pictures and going over the script for the movie in my head with the scenery I had around me. Then I decided to grab my mate's mobile phone and put together a little mock shoot, just to get the feel of the place and try out some of the angles that were coming to mind.
I put the whole thing together by simply pausing the camera on the phone and then running around to reposition for the next shot, then I added some music with a software called Video Pad that I got online for free. For the real edit I'll be using Adobe Premier though.
Check out my buddy Wilson's blog for more info on the short film.
So we have a film festival coming up, and ever since this festival has been running my friends and I have been wanting to enter.
But for various reasons we have done so.
Well this year my buddy Wilson has really been rally up the guys and pushed all the right buttons to set our film entry in motion. When he asked me what sort of movie I would like to do, my obvious answer was:
"Lets do a zombie movie bitch!"
... I didn't say bitch.
But we are doing a zombie movie! We call it Kania Na Yalo Bula which is Fijian for Eat the Living.
I'm not going to give away too much just yet, but we have done up the first draft of the script and scouted a few locations we want to use. There's this mad abandon millitary site that we want to use, and we're currently working on getting permission for that, but we have a back up plan in case that fails.
The basic premise is that a couple heads into the woods to meet up with some friends who are out on a camping trip. They discover that their friends have been messing with things they shouldn't have, and now they're on the tun from crazy flesh eating zombies.
The idea may not be the most original, but it will defiantly be a first for the Fiji Film festival, plus as an editor and camera guy, I'm looking to try out some interesting stuff with the shots.
Like I said I'll keep you guys posted on whatever's new... And I'll be looking to put the film up somewhere for you guys to see when it's done. My buddy Wilson has a write up about the project over at his site.
