WEDDING CRASHERS

It has been two weeks since I last saw a movie at the cinemas, two long weeks devoid of movies, leaving my soul hungry and empty. My soul craves for movies, and without movies, it withers.

Yes, I'm STILL A Filmmaker. Check out New Screenshots Of FORCED LABOUR

Yes, I'm still editing my last short film, Forced Labour, which was originally finished 3 months ago, but due to my Wong Kar Wai-ness, I totally remade the thing from scratch again while adding a new scene. I'll show two screenshots of the main characters, and er, someone bleeding.

The sort of film reviews on blogs that annoy me

Me Swifty, me watch movie and me review now.

(Insert movie poster here)

Console RPGs I Completed Throughout The Past Decade (1994-2005). (Part 3)

Now that Blogathon is over, it's time to continue this before the list that resides in my mind slowly fades away.

So yes, let's continue from the Playstation RPG I've completed, it's quite a huge list considering how many years I had it:

A COTTAGE AT THE END OF TIME (a novella written in 24 hours)

30th of June, 2012

Almost 7 years ago, my friend Yuan-Yue and I participated in Blogathon 2005. A charity event where bloggers were to post (at least) two entries every hour in a span of 24 hours. (which means that by the end of the day, 48 entries should have been posted on the blog. A significant feat during the pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter era)

Both Yuan-Yue and I turned 21 that year, we aimed to do something ambitious.

Each hour she would come up with an illustration in a blog entry and 30 minutes later, I would post an entry with writings based on her drawings.

I ended up writing a novella that had some fabulist, fantastical elements, but at its core, it was really a tale of lost love. (A theme that would characterize many of my film works in subsequent years.) I named the novella "A COTTAGE AT THE END OF TIME", a few chapters were guest-written by former guestblogger and current published author Justin Isis. This novella existed before I actually became a filmmaker.

I left all my Blogathon entries on this blog for many years, until I recently realized that all of Yuan-Yue's wondrous illustrations had disappeared with the image servers hosting her stuff.

Thankfully, I've long kept the entire novella in PDF format, so I've decided to upload the PDF here instead so that you can read the stories and view Yuan-Yue's works in a more convenient manner.

Hope you'll enjoy this.

A COTTAGE AT THE END OF TIME by Edmund Yeo with illustrations from Chin Yuan-Yue

Blogathon Is Just 10 Hours Away. (BTW: Ligers exist!)

Right. It's 11am over here at Perth (which has no time difference with Malaysia and Singapore). Blogathon is just 10 hours away from now. Beginning at 9pm, Lune will strike her first blow with an artwork, and I will counter with a piece of writing. If you want to see us pooling both of our talents to create something extraordinary, remember to come here tonight and hurl insults at us! Oh, and cheer us on as well.

I have tried getting as much rest as possible, but the usual 7-hour sleep is enough for me. Probably gonna take a nap later to conserve more energies.

I do not worry too much about my personal stamina since I HAVE endured that before whenever I was rushing through assignments. However, the internet connection on my flat MIGHT be my downfall. I am mildly worried. Hm. But there's nothing Swifty can't solve. So yeah, I think this will be the last entry I'm posting before Blogathon.

Oh, and to those who have seen the film, Napoleon Dynamite, do you know that ligers really do exist (Google it)? Of course, they are bred through human intervention, and one of them is being displayed at a zoo in South Carolina. Usually, they are bigger than either a tiger and a lion, in fact, a liger is the largest cat in the world. Ah. The joys of using Wikipedia.

A Tragic Tale Of A Guy Who Was Hospitalized After Self-Circumcision

Some people are so stupid that you'll end up feeling sorry for them, and thus giving you a sense of awkwardness when you are forced into a conversation with them. How would you deal with people like that when you know that they are infinitely dumb? Personally, I tend to ignore them, because their stupidity annoy me so greatly that I fear that by continuing my interaction with them will inflate my already massive ego even further because I get to witness a being of such stupidity, so inferior to my incredible intelligence that I feel even more awed by my personal greatness.

Book Aid International is the charity I choose for Blogathon

This is wonderful. I have received an email from Madeleine of Book Aid yesterday after telling them about our campaign. Here's her email.

Lune making her first ever guest appearance in this blog

It does make your head feel lighter to be a guest on someone else's blog. It's as if I'm one of those Backstreet men, or Tom Cruise doing a heart to heart with Oprah, with the exception of tears or monkey antics, but I wouldn't be so sure after that long 24 hours on a drawing sprint. I might even rival Tom's vulgar outburst, shed some tears of joy, trash my room. Who knows? The excitement is buzzing in blogland, and I am estatic to be part of it. It's just one of those crazy things that one has to do before turning 21 (in Eliar's case, he's already reached the big two one, so that doesn't count).

CRASH by Paul Haggis

For reasons I cannot comprehend, I have fallen in love with the feeling of wandering by myself in the city late at night, when the streets are almost empty, and all the shops are closed. In the distance, Northbridge, also the place where the tiny Chinatown is situated, comes alive with its colourful pubs and their patrons. The newsstand remain opened, but empty without customers, a place for me to buy the latest issues of Inside Film (a magazine for filmmakers), Empire (a film magazine) and Electronic Gaming Monthly (video game magazine).

The finest writers are those who read a lot

Oh well, the last movie I saw was 'Crash', I'll write a review about that soon, also, I'll attempt to continue that feature about the console RPGs I've completed thus far (which is a much arduous task than originally envisioned).

Found a partner-in-crime for Blogathon!

Yes, I have decided to participate in Blogathon as well, and I've dragged a partner to suffer through this with me. The charity organization we want to blog for will be Book Aid because both of us love reading, and we feel that more people around the world should be given the chance to read as well. According to the Blogathon website, 'Book Aid International works in partnership with organisations in developing countries to support local initiatives in literacy, education, training and publishing. We provide relevant books and information to those in greatest need–to enable people to realise their potential and contribute to the development of their communities.'

Filmmaking Dilemma, Suggestions needed

Right. This is a complicated little situation. I made a short film last semester, from February until May called 'Forced Labour' with the intention of submitting it to film festivals and the like. Now, the first version I edited during the end of April (early May) was 18 minute long, which is way TOO long for a short film with such a simple story, besides, more than half of this is dedicated to the fighting scenes, which feature characters not originally in the script.

Realizing that the fighting scenes are way too long, and take too much attention away from the main plot and the theme. I decided to re-edit the whole damned thing (I've already mentioned that few weeks ago, actually). And re-edit, or remade the film I did, snipping it down to nearly a third of its original length (ideally, this new short film will be between 5-6 minutes, I think), lots of scenes were sped up, most of the fighting scenes were removed, and the characters not originally in the script did not make it past this version either (thus any scene with them in it are gone).

The results thus far had been stellar, and it's totally something that can be sent to film festivals (if they look past the fact that I'm using a cheap-ass camera, and that the film's sooooo low budget). I've reached near the ending, all I have to do is reshoot one more scene with my main actress and things will be completely done.

Now, I feel pretty guilty that the five characters didn't make it past the final cut, and wanted to make it up to them by including them in the credits. For example, I shall do what the Farrelly brothers did with 'Me, Myself and Irene', and inform viewers that 'some characters and scenes were removed due to time constraints', and then show snippets of scenes featuring these characters and then give them credit.

Wonderful solution, right?

HOWEVER, this is best used for a jolly little comedy... what if the ending of my short film is meant to be pretty dark and angsty (bittersweet, kinda), and I try to toss that in during the credits? Wouldn't that mess things up?

So, what do you guys think? Any suggestions? It was suggested to me that I shall put them in the 'Special Thanks' section during the credits, which is something I will most likely do.

Console RPGs I Completed Throughout The Past Decade (1994-2005). (Part 2)

I was rewarded with a Sony Playstation in 1996 (I was 12 then) due my flawless results for the UPSR (a government exam you have to take in Malaysia during the end of primary/elementary school), and thus my long love affair with it began.

Console RPGs I Completed Throughout The Past Decade (1994-2005). (Part 1)

I have wanted to write this since early last year, when it was exactly a decade since I started playing console RPGs (role-playing games, to the uninitiated), but I decided to let the year went by first so that my list of completed RPGs in 2004 can be complete as well. Note that this feature is only for console RPGs, and not the PC ones (or I'll have to elaborate on the months and months I've spent on Morrowind, my god). For Part 1, I shall focus only on the 1994-1996 period, when I was only 10-12, and was just starting to play console RPGs. Young and idealistic, it was this very period where I fell in love with console RPGs.

Nora Ephron's BEWITCHED

I went off to see Bewitched last night, which was based on an old TV series of the same name.

I've never watched a single episode of the Bewitched TV series, I'm not even sure whether reruns of Bewitched were shown in Malaysia before or not. But from what I know, Bewitched is about some normal guy marrying a witch, and goofiness ensues during their married life.

SEPET by Yasmin Ahmad, an important film in the Malaysian New Wave

One of the movies I heard most of when I returned to Malaysia had, strangely, been a local film, which is something unheard of considering that at this time of the year, summer Hollywood blockbusters are the ones that rule the box-office. This local film is Yasmin Ahmad's 'Sepet' which had been making waves at some foreign film festivals, and became quite a subject of discussion among Malaysians, not just the Malays, but also many of the Chinese I know. Finally got to watch it during my flight from Malaysia to Perth.

'Sepet' depicts an interracial romance between a Chinese guy and a Malay gal. And being an interracial romance, it obviously shows the complications involved in interracial romance, like the clashing of cultures, the condemnation of narrow-minded friends, the inability of acceptance by parents. Can true love transcend all these barriers?

Michael Bay's THE ISLAND

In the not-too-distant future, the world had became so polluted that many of its surviving inhabitants have to stay in a facility monitored by kindly scientists and doctors, and all of these inhabitants with weird names, Lincoln Six-Echo(McGregor) and Jordan Two-Delta (Johansson), are waiting to go to 'The Island', said to be the only uncontaminated spot on the planet.

PREMONITION 予言 by Tsurata Norio

I haven't heard anything about this Japanese film until I went to the cineplexes today. Saw the poster when dad called and asked me to buy the tickets for tonight's show and immediately had my reservations.

"Oh god, not another Japanese horror flick." I whined, seeing the creepy pale-faced bald guy on the poster.

Of course, dad maintained that it wasn't a horror flick, thus I bought the tickets in the end.

Re-editing and revamping 'Forced Labour', figuring my next project

I've mentioned numerous times that I was going to re-edit 'Forced Labour', the short film I made earlier this year due to the fact that I wasn't entirely happy with its end result.