Start of second week
Hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend. We worked yesterday and missed all the Labor Day celebrations at home. Ain't no Labor Day in Hong Kong, that's for sure.
So
Larry Odien has joined our merry band of US refugees here in China. Larry was one of the special effects guys on ALTERED. He's a really good guy and we're lucky to get him again for this film. He was actually working on some HELL BOY 2 stuff for SPECTRAL MOTION and he was about to head out to Budapest for five months and then this job came along. He didn't much look forward to being away from his family for that long so he took this shorter gig over here. He'll only be here for 6 weeks.
Larry is supervising the make-up artists here in Hong Kong and training them on applying the Pale Figure make-up that SPECTRAL designed in LA. We met the make-up people here yesterday and they're resumes were amazing. Larry said we're in good hands so it made us feel pretty good.
Met with Lau yesterday morning and met her Gloria, who will also be working in the art department. They don't name all their positions the same in Hong Kong but Lau would be our production designer and Gloria our art director. But they call themselves art directors so I guess that's what I'll call them, too.
We went through the whole script and worked a ton of stuff out, scene by scene. The end of the film takes place in this temple that is submerged at various depths in water so that's the main thing she's trying to work out right now. That is going to be a bitch to build, but I have total confidence in Lau. She always asks the right questions and her sketches of the look of this thing have been right on so far.
Then headed to the office to meet with William, our wardrobe person. He had some photos for me to see and I cleared up a few things that he was confused with. Working on a script in your second language makes for some confusion for most of the crew. It's a problem we've been encountering from just about every position. But once I set him straight, William came up with some great solutions and he seems to know what needs to happen now. He's a good guy.
I then spent the rest of the afternoon compiling and writing all the Chinese dialogue in the script so that For can translate it into Cantonese. It took me all afternoon. I hadn't realized that there was that much Cantonese in the film. And none of it will be subtitled, since I want the audience to feel disoriented as Melissa and Yul do during the film, so we'll see how that works.
Then Larry and the make-up crew came up to test the Pale Figure contact lenses on one of our PA/actors here in the office. Took a while to get them in but they looked pretty good. They had a little color rim around the edge that has to go but they'll get us new ones tomorrow to test. These lenses are made by a local company so if they work they'll save us a ton of money. I think they'll work once they get the color right. And they aren't as uncomfortable as the ones we used on poor Walt (the actor that tested the make-up for us in LA) had to wear, so that'll help a lot once we're in production.
Overall, a great day yesterday, even if we did have to work on Labor Day.
Today was pretty smooth, too. I had a long meeting with Lam, the DP, and we worked out a bunch of my lighting concerns. He's really a talented filmmaker, not just a DP but a musician, writer and director. And a hell of a nice guy, too. He's actually lighting a commercial with Jackie Chan in Beijing in two weekends and he invited us to come check him out. We're taking a little weekend trip there with the families to visit the Great Wall and the Forbidden City so we're hoping that we can make that happen. It'd be cool to meet Jackie Chan, man.
The main emphasis of the lighting on SEVENTH MOON is realism, so we worked out a good plan for making this happen in the car and then out in the fields and woods. We planned out some camera tests that we're going to do in the next two weeks so we'll work out everything then. Should have a very clear picture of what the film is going to look like once these tests are done.
Ended today meeting with the stunt coordinator and stunt driver and then worked on putting together a CD of score music that I've been using while writing the script. I have some tracks listed in the script and Lam wanted to hear what I had in mind, so I've put together a cool temp track for pretty much the whole film. What is really cool is that most of the music is by Kent Sparling, who we've signed to score the film with Tony Cora. It's going to be fucking cool.
Anyway, Tuesday is done. Off to eat sushi with Stef and the kids and whoever else wants to join us.
Over and our from half-way around the world.
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