Pitching my Hang Jebat/ Hang Tuah sci-fi film to an actress

More of my filmmaking activities will be chronicled now. Especially the making of my upcoming short film.

Bridget Jones' Diary Is Serious Literature.

Wrote this for my Popular Literature class.

Learning To Direct Actors

In order to prepare for my next short film, I've secretly sneaked into my university's Screen Production 2 Lectures to spy on the arts of filmmaking which I can steal for future endeavours. Wasn't much last week, just some stuff about the rise of Interactive Entertainment. Which is something I MIGHT play with. (creating an interactive vides for my short film?) But today's seminar was totally freaking useful beyond belief.

While making Forced Labour, I realized that my biggest flaw may have been my inability to direct dialogue, or even to direct actors properly, since I don't have formal training in directing people, and my many attempts to direct a play back then was repeatedly foiled by my high school. In fact, here's how I direct my actors in Forced Labour.

West Side Story: Homosexual Space Opera at its Finest

Some of the best speculative fiction has achieved its impact by creating a world identical to our own except for a single noticeable difference, be it absence or presence. What courses might society have taken if, for example, we could read minds? Or had lost the Second World War? Or had just recently intersected with an alien civilization?

West Side Story falls into this tradition: it posits a dystopian America in which menacing street gangs control New York, and violence (both physical and emotional) and repressed homosexual attraction are sublimated into spontaneous, flamboyant eruptions of singing and dancing.

Utada Hikaru vs Mishima Yukio: Haru No Yuki ONEGAI

So the other day I was looking for videos to download when I came upon this new Hikaru Utada single "Be My Last." Needless to say I downloaded it without thinking. Upon first playing it, well...Acoustic Utada is something I never would have expected. Putting on this single fresh from the download, I was expecting either pulsing urban dance beats or a gentle ballad tinged with Japanese percussion and spacy echoes. Instead, over a quiet guitar backdrop, Hikaru poured forth a strange, wavering ululation that eventually segued into a melancholy chorus. "Be My Last" is a strange choice for a single, not particularly catchy and somewhat downbeat - the melismatic portions are also overdone ("whooahahaaaahwhooooaahaaaaaaah" my girlfriend mimiced, not at all impressed). All in all, it seemed like one of the weaker songs she's yet done. Looking for more info, I found the following notice:

"Be My Last (Movie "Haru no Yuki" Main Theme) [CD+DVD]/ Hikaru Utada"

Wait. A fucking. Minute.

Taka: The Greatest Reviewer of All Time (J-MADNESS)

Taka is from Tokyo, Japan, and he likes to post reviews in English on Amazon.com. Utilizing his formidable command of the English language (which he modestly refers to as "poor" but which could more accurately be described as "poetic"), Taka doesn't want to just jerk-off about whatever passes through his CD player: no, he's on a motherfucking mission to expand your closed-off tastes. In that he does shit I could have done (i.e. promoting Namie Amuro and X-Japan) he's a success, but no one, myself included, possesses the kind of mastery of diction that EVERY ONE of his reviews displays. Every single item he has recommended is on my "to get" list. Without further ado, here are some choice quotes from Taka's reviews, so you can understand for yourself just why you'll never be as cool as he is. Quotes in bold indicate times when I about lost my shit.

RED EYE

Imagine being in a plane and sitting next to you is a guy who arranges high-profile assassinations, and that his latest assignment can only be completed if you agree to help him make a phone call to the hotel you work in (you're a hotel desk manager) so that you can assign his target to a room he knows. Failure to comply will immediately result in your father's death.

Therefore, you are exchanging one life for another. The life of someone you love for someone you don't really know, but are you capable of doing this? Or are you going to outthink the guy sitting next to you? If you are, how are you going to do that when he is sitting just next to you, watching you the whole time?