Teaser Up!

"Passages" - Rough Teaser. from herrith sebon on Vimeo.

A teaser for what we shot in Taiwan this past summer.

CAST:
Zhi: William Chen
Yong: A-Jay Lin

CREW:
Directed/Written By: Norbert Shieh
Produced By: Jacqueline Liu, Lin Qiu, Norbert Shieh
Associate Producer: Chingya Wang
Cinematography: Sean Marc Lee
Production Coordinator: William Chen
Assistant Director: Lin Qiu
Art Director: ChingWen Hsu (Carina)
Casting Director/Assistant Camerar: ShunWen Yu (Vivian)
Sound Recordist: Jake Mumm

TECH DETAILS:
Shot with a Canon 5d Mark II with a combination of Nikon Lenses (28mm f/2, 35mm f/2, 75mm-150mm f/3.5), a Canon 50mm f/1.4, a Mamiya 80mm f/1.9 and a few more that I can't remember.

Some rough color correction was done in FCP, but otherwise sound & image have not been mixed or graded.

production cast and crew.

Yes, we are wrapped and I'm now back in the States. Sorry for the lack of updates during the shoot, will post more soon... but first cast and crew photos.

CAST
Chen Wei-Yuan as "A-ZHI"

林世杰 aka "JAY" as "A-YONG"

CREW


Vivian Yu as CASTING / 2nd A.C. / BEST P.A. EVER!

Carina Hsu as ART / PRODUCTION DESIGN

Jake Mumm as SOUND RECORDIST

Sean Marc Lee as CINEMATOGRAPHER

Lin Qiu as ASSISTANT DIRECTOR / PRODUCER

Jacqueline Liu as PRODUCER

Norbert "Lobo" Shieh as DIRECTOR

week 6: into the void.

Back from location scouting. Some pics are attached above. Flights for Sean and Lin are happening tomorrow. We pick them up and then head towards location Friday... Shooting in less than a week!

week 5: a little over one week to go.

(until we start shooting).

Four days of auditions done... onwards to callbacks and location scout 2.0 this weekend.

I'm hoping most of the places made it through ok. This picture was taken right after Morakot. The typhoon left the home opposite of the location with the roof caved in.

week 4: the tipping point.

Sorry for the lack of updates. Been busy with script revisions and casting. Auditions this weekend.

At this rate, I should be heading back to the States in about a month and that scares me!

Found this bit from an interview between Gus Van Sant and Kelly Reichardt.

KR: ...I’ve become completely sold on the art of acting over the years. It’s great to be able to do nuanced things with an actor like Michelle who is really a master of her craft.I always thought it would be easier shooting with non-actors. If you love what they’re doing when they’re doing it, then it’s the greatest, but if you want to change anything—

GVS: —There’s no control.

KR: In your films, you get people at an age before they necessarily come to the idea that they want to act, and you get something special out of that.

GVS: You mean like with John Robinson in Elephant?

KR: And Gabe Nevins from Paranoid Park.

GVS: That’s just casting. I think you can do it when they’re under 20. Not when they’re 30. I was under the impression doing Elephant that you should cast the real people in the roles. So if you’re casting a plumber, you should cast a real plumber. If you’re casting a racecar driver, it should be a real racecar driver. It was a theory. I tried to do it on Last Days with rock and rollers. It was just way, way different for me. There’s something about being under a certain age, like 20; they have a lot of free time. They aren’t citizens yet... What I needed for Last Days was the 25-to-30 year-old rocker, a real rocker. Which certainly exists, but you find a real person and they’re just not interested in doing a movie at all. We tended to use our friends because they were like the characters in the story.

KR: It’s kind of impossible to have a blanket theory about casting...

BOMB Magazine Interview.

week 3: the clouds above opened up and let it out.

Some images that my Dad took of Syuejia (the city down south where we're shooting), a day after Morakot left the vicinity. Not bad compared to other places in Tainan. There was some minor damage to the locations, I'll upload a few pictures later.

week 3: after some rain... was some more rain.

week 3: onto new horrizons.

Status updates from the front lines.

1. Deeply entrenched in the casting war.
2. The move to new living quarters in Gongguan was a success.
3. Found free WiFi at Norwegian Wood (named after the Murakami book & the Beatles song), and thus no longer a slave to WiFly.
4. Primary locations in Southern Taiwan were safe from typhoon damage.
5. Onto version 2.2 of the script.

week 2: there's a lot to be done while your head is still young.

So the typhoon came and went without much notice (at least up near Taipei where I was). Needless to say, I was incredibly let down by my first typhoon experience. This was then followed up with bad news about one of the locations.

The long short of it was, we weren't able to shoot inside. The main draws to the place was being able to walk inside it... so I decided against shooting there. Not worth the trouble involved to get the permission and only get exteriors.

Thinking back on it, I wasn't planning on using the location too much because I knew we had limited access to the place. Speaking of which, I got bad vibes from the house during the scout when the phone started ringing in there for no reason... and its been abandoned for several years!

Update: Morakot devastates southern regions.
Up to 2500mm (8 feet) of rain!

week 2: a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

So if you ever wanted to catch a glimpse of apocalypse, goto a supermarket right before a typhoon hits. All vegetables are sold out, people are frantically running around to grab last minute food items, and the place has a frantic energy. Looks like I'm going to be staying inside for the next two days.

and it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard,
and it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

week 2: boy, you gotta carry that weight.

Just got back into Taipei, after a location scout near Syuejia and brief diversion to Taichung to visit family. There's talk of a typhoon coming in this weekend (yay for tropical rain!). The weather's been up in the air (one minute it's cloudy/foggy with lighting strikes and another it's sunny). This would be the first typhoon of the season if it hits.

Watched Empire of Silver, for my birthday yesterday with my uncle. A strange concoction of a film; hemorrhaging story lines, bad CG (the wolves!) and melodrama... what was even stranger was seeing Jennifer Tilly in there.

Starting to interview some people to help out as crew. No#1 priority is to work on casting as quickly as possible. In another month I'm slated to be shooting.

Here's to hoping it all works out.

day 7: falling off the radar.

Going to be down near Syuejia for the next few days, will just leave this here...

day 6: The song and dance...

Working on script revisions (and will be for the next few weeks). Began on writing this character breakdown for casting. If you're in Taiwan and interested in auditioning, please get in touch.

PASSAGES (2009)
follows two brothers as they exchange paths in southern Taiwan and struggle with their inheritance from the recent passing of their mother.

Character Breakdowns
YONG (Age Range: early 20s) - Younger Brother. Took care of the family while Zhi was away. Feels almost too comfortable where he is in the world. Must be able to speak Taiwanese and Mandarin fluently.

ZHI (Age Range: mid 30s) - Older Brother. A career driven Architect. Left early from home and never looked back. Must be able to speak Taiwanese & Mandarin fluently as well as some English and Japanese.

Minor Roles
AUNT (Age Range: mid 50s/60s) - Brother's Aunt. From the City. The Executor of the mother's will.
MARY (Age Range: early to mid 20s) - Former classmate of Yong. Now works at the brother's hometown as a street vendor.
LAWYER (Age Range: 30s-40s) - Deals with the brother's will.

day 5: everything in moderation.

Slogans from Alexander Mackendrick.

Movies SHOW
...and then TELL!
A true movie is likely to be 60% to 80% comprehensible if the dialogue is in a foreign language.

~

PASSIVITY is a capital crime in drama.

~

Student films come in three sizes:
-TOO LONG
-MUCH TOO LONG
-VERY MUCH TOO LONG
(and in videotape it's worse)

Doh! I think I've broken all three.

day 4: what's on the list?

Brought some books for reading. These ones are mainly for inspiration.

"Notes on the Cinematographer" - Robert Bresson
"Sculpting in Time" - Andrei Tarkovsky
"On Filmmaking" - Alexander Mackendrick

These are for research and general referencing.

"Chinese Characters: A Genealogy and Dictionary."
"Lonely Planet: Taiwan."
"Orphan of Asia" - Zhuoliu Wu
"Becoming 'Japanese'" - Leo T. S. Ching
"Forbidden Nation" - Jonathan Manthorpe
"Chinese in a Flash"

day 3: looking back.

Monument from herrith sebon on Vimeo.

I realized I don't have much of my own work online (which I argue is always a good thing). However, I'm starting to look for actors/crew members here in Taiwan who have no idea what I've done. So I've uploaded an online version of "Monument," for them and your viewing pleasure. It's horribly compressed and isn't in pretty HD, but will suffice for now.

You can find the old production blog for the film here.

day 2: i turn my camera on.

found this on a t-shirt around the shilin night market.

the cinema is a very truthful medium
in the dust of the deed of time
where we sat to watch the stars"

true dat.

day 1: packing for a plane.

1PM PST:
Spent most of the wee hours of the morning playing tetris with my clothes and equipment to fit them into three pieces of luggage. Now for the award of a 14 hour plane ride...

4PM PST:
Had to check in the pelican case with my camera gear (7kg's max weight for carryons)!! Did a last minute scramble to throw everything valuable into my backpack and ziptied the case.

FLIGHT:
Tried to do some reading, wasn't really up to it. Ended up watching two films L-O-V-E and Taken, during the flight.

LOVE was an omnibus in the vain of "Paris, je t'aime" or "Tokyo," but this time in Taiwan. Featuring an orgy of teen idols doing teen idol things; looking cute, being cute, and saying really cute things about "love."

TAKEN was a surprise, think "The Searchers" meets "Borne Identity." Was like candy. Something about having a film with "professionals" (script co-written by Luc Bresson), doing what they do best never gets old.

POST-FLIGHT:
Everything (gear & luggage) made it alright. OMG... it's hot here!