The Moment

A beautifully captured film of that electric moment.

Tres bien, no?

Baya Rejang Day 9 (more or less)

I'm typing this the night before I post it - I only have 20 minutes of Internet time every day, in the morning just after breakfast. So I prepare my outgoing mails and blog post the night before for quick work once I get connected. And tonight I'm too tired to think, so I'll just post some pictures.Giant tampon on a stick.Yes, another phallic symbol. No, it's not crooked - I think it's my camera angle.Setting up a "river" scene (it's a lake).A Bidayuh bridge (they love bamboo).

Now, when we first arrived here at Permai Rainforest Resort, I went crazy after dumping our bags. Had to explore this fantastic place. I mean, where can you get a resort in a domesticated rainforest right between dense rainforest and a beautiful beach?The first beach, which is shared with Damai Puri Resort. There's another beach at the other end of Permai Rainforest Resort, but I didn't get any good shots of it.The view of the resort (kinda) from the beach. The green hut on the left is the Rainforest Cafe, the only eatery in the resort. The rest of the accommodation's off to the left.A straight-up view from the Rainforest Cafe.

As part of my going crazy, I scrambled over all the rocks to get from the second beach to the first and tried to get sunset shots. It was pretty cloudy, but that made for some really beautiful stuff. Enjoy.

More Sarawak Cultural Village

Our second and last day at Sarawak Cultural Village. When I heard that we weren't coming back again the next day (as originally scheduled), I quickly decided to take a quick tour, but found out that most things were already shut (and it was only 5pm). I also just discovered that the Rainforest Music Festival is held there, and so many people stay at "Home-stays" in the longhouses themselves.Part of the show involves an Iban wedding celebration, which is really a lot of dancing.The "ulu" part of the name actually means "hulu", which means one end of a river (I think it's the upriver end).This longhouse really looks like a fort. It's stood quite high up on stilts.Speaks for itself. In case you don't get that they're Muslim, note the Jawi.These guys are crazy about bamboo.You can just about see it past the trees, and that's where we did most of our shots.
These guys are the nomads of the forest here, apparently, and are the best blowpipe makers.And in case it's not obvious enough, note the red bunting around the door and the Chinese characters.My piddly little phone's camera isn't so bad after all, eh? I'm quite impressed and quite happy.

Onto Sarawak Cultural Village

When I first saw the sign to the place, it was Kampung Budaya Sarawak, which sounded funny to me. Cultural Kampung? Village of Culture? Anyway it's a lovely place, with the whole area dedication to the beautiful conglomeration of tribes and races that is Sarawak - Bidayuh, Iban, a bunch I don't remember right now, Malay and Chinese. Yes, as Raja Petra mentioned on his Malaysia Today blog (I think it was there), Malay is just a "tribe" among the many that populated this area. Well, I think "mini-nation" is more accurate - I think the comparison is very similar to that of Ancient Greece, with their city-states like Athens, Sparta and Troy as well as their island-nations like Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete. Compares well to Malacca, Jawa and Bali, doesn't it?

I'll talk more about it when I've done more research - I know too little about the history of this region (partly because there hasn't been enough written on it) and I'll need to do greater research on those Ancient Greek times. But that thought was inspired by a wonderful book I just read by David Gemmell - Lord of the Silver Bow, the first book of his Troy trilogy. Which bloody rocks, and I'll discuss more at a later time. Let's just say that I didn't expect to enjoy it this much, and ended up finishing it in about 4 days. Really wishing I brought the 2nd book with me now, but nevermind - I'll devour it when I get back.So, onto more teaser pics. Firstly, many apologies to Hani if you ever read this: you really should've dropped everything and come. But then we'll see how it all turns out, yeah? We did several scenes around and in an Iban longhouse today, in the Sarawak Cultural Village.(No that's not the Iban longhouse in the background.) It was bright and probably the hottest day in our time here thus far.Yes, it's long. It's the same length again behind the shot. That's our Director and DoP there discussing the shots.That's our rest area for shots outside the longhouse, by the lake we used as our "river".This was one of our location shoots before the Village ones. It's actually situated in our Resort.
This was another.Together with this.


And guess what closed our day on Saturday?

This.

The shoot from heaven

As mentioned in a previous blog post, film always scared me. I've still much yet to learn about working with the camera, and I took on Baya Rejang with quite some hesitation. At the end of the day, it would be great experience - but it could be at the end of a very very long day. Thankfully, everything wonderful that could happen did happen.I got to visit Sarawak for the first time. Kuching's lovely, I have to come back again and chill.We got to shoot with Gunung Santubong. We got to shoot on Sungai Santubong and Sungai Rejang. In a little sampan, in a little passenger boat, in a police boat.One of our locations was by the Sarawak Boat Club, which served as our rest place in between shots.When we moved on to our next accommodation, I found out that it was the Permai Rainforest Resort. The moon came out to greet us, too.This is our cabin in the resort, which houses 6 but I'm sharing with only my fellow actor, the DoP and the Director.


And we've just about started. More shots to follow, and man, I am having a blast. We've shooting at Sarawak Cultural Village next!

Sarawak so far

Quick update: it's our 4th day here and we're checking out of Harbour View Hotel in Kuching. It's been a blast so far; today we're going on to stay at Damai (the housekeeping here clarified that it's Damai Putra or something like that, which is different to Pantai Damai) which is near the Sarawak Cultural Village. But before we travel there, we're going into the jungle to do shoot the several scenes we have there.

We spent the whole of yesterday at a friend of the production's house, which is at Matang. From the outside it looks like any other wooden house on stilts in the jungle, but inside it is well-kept and very very English. It's quite charming, really - and we had a great time there. Tiring but great. For his "front garden" he has a farm, guarded by a Rottweiler - for his "back garden" he has a river running through it and 2 small lakes. Wonderful. There was a narrow wooden pier that jutted to the middle of the lake (I did say small) and it was a surreal experience walking up to the end. Had a nice meditation session though.

We have some real characters on board and many of them know what they're doing, which is the best part. Seeing the technical team in action is inspiring, and some of the cast are awesome. A good budget's so useful. This is, by far, my best film / TV experience. Thank you, Rob.

What's the key to working with film?

As an extension of the CLEO bachelor thing (and Kenny Sia's take on it), I was asked to be part of Deal Or No Deal. As a model. Yes, holding one of those briefcases. No, not in a dress.Contrary to popular opinion, it is not as easy as it looks. It was a rather painful experience as we had to stand there, look good and smile for hours. What looks good on TV isn't necessarily comfortable, so we had a rather awkward standing pose that was neither here nor there for me, and a horrendously wrist-breaking position to hold the briefcases while we stood and waited.

(click the image to try out the game at your own leisure)

Over the course of those hours, I had numerous people mention - oh you must be used to this, you must work with TV lots - and I had to reply numerous times that I wasn't, in fact, and this is one of the harder things about TV that I'm still learning to cope with. Basically, it's the annoying chunks of time between shooting that you hang around and wait for. Especially annoying because you don't know if it'll be 5 minutes or 50 minutes. Or 5 hours, if shit hits the fan.

With a different character to play, it's worse - what do you do, stay in character and try not to piss everyone around you off? Get out and rest, and resummon the energy and character when the time comes? Work harder and build on the character?

The problem is that of balancing character and energy. For a particular scene, your character is this way - and for the overall show, your character is this way (a superset of the scene, ie not radically different to that of the scene). Yet, a scene can be shot multiple times and in multiple times of the day - so you have to remember what your character was like at that time. Then comes in the energy part: your energy will fluctuate over the day, yet it has to be consistent throughout a particular scene and of course congruent over the whole show. And for an intense bugger like me, I burn up tons of energy every segment of "action" and "cut".

So my dilemma is this - what is the key to acting with film? How does one effectively manage the triangular scale of time, character and energy?

Playing puppets on Jinggo & Friends

Some past few days, and some other days before that, had been spent with most interesting company - the big-brotherly Jinggo, the extroverted Didi, the blur Baba, the sweet Lolo and the cheeky Tamtam. As you may have gathered from the title, they're the names of the puppets on the show I've been working on.
About

Jinggo & Friends is a children's show in English that will run on RTM sometime. It's got good stuff- spiffed up nursery rhymes (the tunes are still running in our heads), positive words of the day and stories told with kids interacting. Produced by Penumbra Productions, with the puppets' voices provided by Yusmal Ghazali, Nina Sharil and yours truly.

Children

We spent 3 days working with children averaging 8 years of age. The segment is only 2.5mins long, and it's just storytelling with audience (the kids) participation at the end. It was absolute torture.

6 kids - 3 boys, 3 girls. Frankly, the boys were the ones who drove me raving bonkers. Whether it was because they were boys and that's just their nature, or because of how they got involved with the show (decided by their parents who are somehow related to the production) I'm not sure. What I do know was that they didn't want to be there but yet they wanted to be given the spotlight, or the best seat, or whatever.

I had never so felt like smacking anyone before, but there were moments when I was ready to tell them off and slap them silly. Especially on Sunday, when the air conditioning wasn't working - no joke man. Thankfully it was only the 3 days out of 6 or 7.

Cast & Crew

The fellow puppeteers were wonderful to work with though. And the crew - the director and her team are fantastic. I'd happily work with all of them again.

I discovered that I can't work too long with promoter characters. All that scattered energy and self-centered focus just annoys after a while.

Singing songs without the pressure of excellent on-stage one-off performance is good, too. Makes a nice change, though I did have to cringe and let go when songs didn't work too well. The legacy of Mervin Peters, I guess.

Learning Malay

I'm glad to have basic Malay - this production gave me a great opportunity to improve it. I learned that I need to let go of my high standards of language, otherwise I'd never let myself be understood.

Puppetry in Malaysia

Working with puppets has been fascinating. We so don't have a puppet culture here, that technically we can get away with anything. We bashed arounds lots of ideas of the kinds of shows we could do with puppets. An adult puppet show could be hilarious and amazingly good.

We used hollowed-out dolls for some of the puppets, which made for cute characters but very sore forearms. That could be something to develop if more people get interested in using puppets to tell stories or make pointed messages.

Toys in Malaysia

Which segues into another subject that came to mind - the lack of a toy culture in Malaysia. Or a toy industry, to be exact. Kids spend so much money on toys, games, cards and whatnot - why don't we do stuff like that in Malaysia?

Boardgames. Collectible card games. Puppets. Puzzle toys. So many things - anyone interested in taking it up, give me a yell. Lots of ideas to share.


Thank you, guys from Jinggo & Friends. Thank you, guys from Penumbra. It's been a real pleasure and a great honour.

MalaysianTalents.com launches on Gua.com.my!

The first episode launched on Tuesday 15th Jan 2008, go check it out on www.gua.com.my!

It basically opens the series by setting up who Douglas' character is, and has Elaine Daly coming in to see him. If you're too lazy to click 2 links, here's the direct one to Episode 1 of MalaysianTalents.com. Sheesh.

Seeing as I'm posting this on Thursday 17th Jan 2008, Episode 2 should be up later today. Yup, twice weekly. Nice.

Shooting for MalaysianTalents.com

Code-named MTDC, by Popiah Pictures; idea by Douglas Lim, modelled on The Office and Extras; launching on gua.com.my on the 15th of January 2008 (information correct as of today).

The first full week of 2008 and I'm kept occupied with the shooting of this 20-episode series of under-5-minute shows introducing Douglas' website that he put up about 2 years ago and hadn't had time to further develop until now. Of course, this way of introducing it is typically his - he plays a pompous know-it-all who gets celebrity actors to come in to register for his site and teaches them the finer points of acting. He also takes in some students (this is where I come in) to 'make into stars'. It's dry, it's hilarious and it doesn't take itself too seriously. Great stuff.

There's also a Facebook group up, check it out here.

Some teaser pics from the set:

Eager students in Douglas' class

One of the characters I play

A shot of one of our favouritest scenes

Davina doing her thang

Douglas doing his thang

I will, of course, post the moment it goes live.

Auditions, Auditioning and Audition (the book)

I've had my first dose of being on the other side of the audition table for the first time recently, as the HR dude for The Oral Stage. They were casting for their upcoming 2 productions, Orkishly called Quikworks and Biggworks (the Biggworks play's called The Illusion, by Pierre Corneille but the adapted English version by Tony Kushner). Interestingly, not long before that I bought quite a treasure called Audition by Michael Shurtleff, quite cheap at Kinokuniya (sorry I think I bought the last copy there). And of course, not long before that I had a successful audition for Rose Rose I Love You, which I'd like to reflect on with all I've learned since.

Auditions
I'd previously heard of some producers' dislike for posting auditions on kakiseni.com . Also, I'd heard of their dislike for open auditions at all. I never quite understood why until I did myself - not so much the latter but the former. I did get a considerable amount of response from the posting - I was quite surprised how quickly some came in. For the first set of auditions, the number of people who followed-up with properly booked auditions was about 2/3rds of the number of people who made contact. And the number of people who actually showed up was about 2/3rds of that. The result at the end of the day was that about 2/3rds of those who came in were suitable for casting (note that this production was looking to take in newbies). 2/3rds of 2/3rds of 2/3rds is 29.630%, or under 30%. Having 15 decent candidates at the end of 2 days (about 8-10 hours in total) isn't the best of results. And some of the nonsense people you have to go through for these results.

Oops. I just realised that I've mentioned some of this before.

The 2nd set of auditions proved better in terms of quality. Of course, the people who came were more experienced (with an exception or two). But more of the candidates who came were through word of mouth, many of whom I've worked with before. So - people through word of mouth tend to be more eligible than through mass calling.

Interestingly, and perhaps shockingly, of all the people who got rejected only ONE asked for feedback on how to be better. Here's my response in user-friendly format:

• Keep going for auditions – the practice is good.
• Keep trying your best – casting is very subjective and sometimes it may not be a matter of ability.
• Watch plays – they provide great sources of inspiration and learning (sometimes it’s what to do, sometimes it’s what NOT to do).
• For monologues – have a couple prepared, and get them from established plays (unless you’re an amazing writer). Make them interesting, they don’t have to follow the piece that you got them from but that could serve as a guideline. Practice it, you’ve all the time in the world to prepare a monologue. By “interesting” I mean dramatically interesting – you must be heavily emotionally involved. Something must vary over the duration – your emotion could change, your tone must change, your feel, your thoughts. Your physicality may or may not vary, depending on your piece.
• For readings – much like the above, without the preparation time. You don’t have the context the piece is from, so you can do ANYTHING you want to with it. Make it interesting. Make it ridiculous. It’s all up to you, just make sure it shows what you’re capable of. For example, you could take a piece and go “1st half I’m angry with you, 2nd half I’m madly in love with you”. A useful guideline is to 1) think of all the possible ways of reading that piece, 2) choose the one that’s slightly unusual that you think you could pull off and 3) do it.
• For improvs – watch Whose Line Is It Anyway on TV and Actorlympics on stage. They’re great inspiration. Basically, you can do ANYTHING with what you’re given – a useful guide is to take the most unlikely thing (if you prefer funny) or the worst thing (if you prefer drama) and make it happen, then react to it. The key is to keep introducing events to a scene so it flows and things keep happening so you got things to react to. For example (going with the funny), the scene is “you’re about to have sex with your boyfriend and something happens”. So you ask if he has a condom, he goes “yes” and pulls out some chewing gum. You react, you start arguing. Your Dad walks in (new event). You react, now you start defending yourself. Your boyfriend reveals that your Dad is his uncle (new event). You react, shock and horror. Your Mum walks in (new event). Of course, you could choose to end it with that, depending on how long you’ve been going on. You get the idea?
  

Some lessons I've learned about how I've posted auditions on kakiseni.com:

• Make it very clear that you need to book your audition time (maybe don't even put a time there to force them to make contact)
• Minimum 20 minute slots are better - maybe 30mins is ideal (allows for breaks)
• State consequences of tardiness (if any)
• Make it clear that it's theatre

On a final note on these auditions, I think the director's choice of cast is most interesting. Not necessarily in a good way.

Audition
Picked up this book on a whim when at Kinokuniya (love the place, they need another one in a more friendly location) and thought I'd need to audition seriously well over the next few months to make sure I'm constantly performing. Even though it's old (printed in the late 70s), it kicks ass. Damned useful reference for that 30mins (or thereabouts) where you have to give it your all for that job.

It's main crux is the 12 guideposts he recommends people to follow in bringing a reading to life - Relationship, "What Are You Fighting For?" Conflict, The Moment Before, Humour, Opposites, Discoveries, Communication and Competition, Important, Find the Events, Place, "Game Playing and Role Playing" and "Mystery and Secret". Some notes on what I liked and learned:

• Ask "Where is the love?" in every scene and always find one (or a distinct lack of one). Find it in your scene-partner (or blame him/her for the lack of it) and fight for it. Love is a powerful creator of emotional commitment.
• Make things IMPORTANT. The character talks about something or is in a scene because s/he finds it important. It may be inane to you, but regardless it's life or death for your him/her.
• The desire to change someone else is very powerful and always leads to conflict between people. Use it.
• Revenge is another very very powerful emotion.
• "Ignore so-and-so" does NOT mean shutting him/her out. It an intentional means of communicating silently to get what you want.
• Limiting yourself may be the most dangerous thing to do. Always find a way to have your character do it. ie don't say "But s/he wouldn't do that!"

Aside from that, there are a great many notes and pointers about 'the little things' that make all the difference. The book's scattered with little anecdotes and examples from the writer's experiences, and it's always nice to hear of how now-greats such as Dustin Hoffman and Robert de Niro had such humble beginnings. Highly recommended.

Auditioning
My Rose Rose I Love You audition turned out quite nicely in that I almost didn't go, thinking it'd be too soon after Tunku. Very happy I went, as I landed a supporting lead role with my name on the postcard (and in the papers - NST's Streets p8 20th Oct)! Wahey and happiness!!! I had a great audition, though I'm not quite sure what cinched it for me. Definitely it's an overall thing - a decent amount of skill and talent and a healthy dose of confidence and self-worth. Let's see if I can compile a list of what worked:

• Not getting intimidated by a room full of Girl Power
• Not caring that I wasn't listened to after a minute of "Tell us about yourself" (I didn't ramble on, just waited as they were obviously deciding on something)
• Going in wanting to give them my shining best
• Singing like I just didn't care

What didn't work:

• Not being daring enough with my reading (I read for a lead role but didn't take enough time or create enough physicality where relevant)
• Not sufficiently different between my 1st and 2nd reading

I think I should have asked for a minute or two to just skim through the script to get a better idea of the scene. Perhaps even asked the context. In the end, absolutely no regrets. I got far more than I expected to, and am working with such a different group that the experience alone is invaluable.

Thanks, guys.

Transformers the movie

With Michael Bay, I always know to "Hope for the best, but expect the worst." The absolute worst. Disappointingly, I was not disappointed. Apologies in advance, this is a rant. You might find it entertaining.

1 hour US propaganda, 1 hour love story, 30 mins Transformers. Of course, the 30 mins were the bomb. Yes, sounds like Pearl Harbour doesn't it? Wished his bloodline was bombed out by the Japanese 60 years ago - it'd save us from ALL THE FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!

It breaks my heart, it does. There are moments in the movie that absolutely rocks (yes all in those 30 mins). The intro to the transformers is waaaay cool, the fact that they took so damn long (in a bad, cheong hei way) to set it up made it all the more satisfying to see the US base get fucked over. The intro to Bumblebee kinda sucked, though the intro to his other incarnation's cool. The intro to the Autobots is very cool, and really made me feel all kiddy again. Note: the INITIAL intro was cool - the unnecessarily-dragged out intro sucked. The Decepticons' intro sucked because it was so damn brief.

Fight scenes rock, though the over-elaborateness of the robots made faster scenes confusing. Aaaaand that's pretty much all that's good about the movie. The damn robots, which was about 20% of the damn movie. I would NOT watch it again, I cannot go through so much cheese and crap to enjoy that wonderful 20%. A quick description of shitty 80%:

Love scene. Ugh. What the fuck is that all about. Sure, the girl is hot, that's the only thing that makes it palatable. The unrealistic scale is tipped over again by the fact that there seems to be little real chemistry - I didn't get it that he wants to fuck her brains out. Hello, she's hot, she obviously likes you, you've been in multiple death-defying situations; all you wanna do it touch fucking fingers?!?!? Fucking loser. Yes, I really hate unnecessary love scenes that contribute NOTHING to a movie except build further on a false belief that you can be a complete and utter loser and still get a hot girl.

Note that there IS another hot girl - an Australian blonde hottie working for the NSA, no less. She represents the best team of signal decrypters that the United States of America has. Note that she's just more-or-less graduated from college, and has a good friend who is a fat black man and is the best hacker she knows. Suspension of disbelief, OVERDRIVE ON.

US patriotism. Look Americans, the rest of the world (that's 95% of the population of the world) get it that you love your country and you think you rock your socks. We think that's quaint and sometimes cute, though we're quite sorry you have such low self-esteem. Multiple zoom-ins to "US AIR FORCE" on a plane (Nooooo really? Not TENTERA UDARA DIRAJA MALAYSIA??), slow-motion exits of US soldiers from various vehicles, a few scenes of US soldiers enjoying life and the company their multiracial compatriots, clichéd shots of US aircraft banking in perfect harmony, the good ol' helicopter rising in silhouette with a sunrise/sunset background. Christ Almighty, what a painful exercise in autofellatio.

Humour. For some reason, Mr Bay wanted to make this film funny. Everyone tried too hard, and that just makes it all fall very flat. Combined with the long drawn-out-ness of some scenes, I got restless and am not surprised that some people felt like sleeping.

So, question time (possible spoilers here if you're worried, the whole movie's a spoiler to me):
- if you were the member of an Arabic tribe near Qatar, what would you do if you saw a bunch of US soldiers running towards you? Yes, I would fucking gun them down too, and THEN worry about that big scorpion transformer behind them.
- if the US army could land missiles and massed gunfire on a target with such pinpoint accuracy that soldiers 25m away from the target did not even suffer a scratch, why do they keep blowing up their allies in wars?
- why IS there a scorpion transformer anyway, aside from being a convenient plot device?
- if US soldiers can last so damn many hours / days / whatever convenient timelength in the desert with absolutely no supplies and in full complete uniform, why send so much supplies to Iraq?
- where are the other Decepticons when one of them is getting gang-banged? What are they doing most of the movie anyway?
- what happened to all the extra robots created accidentally near the end of the movie?
- if the helicopter Decepticon has such kickass weaponry, why can't he just blow the fuck out of the boy anytime during the final fight?
- why did the boy run all that distance when he had the Autobots guarding him most of the way (1. "eh fucker, transform and lemme jump in!" 2. "eh fucker, pick me up, you run faster than me!" 3. "eh fucker, take this object that everyone wants and jump to the top of the building I'm running to!")?
- why did hot chick take Bumblebee for a nice drive around the block in the middle of a firefight?
- where were the US tanks that come out for every other movie?
- how come they didn't send Bruce Willis to nuke those fucking asteroids coming to Earth?

Gimme my 2 hours back.