Saturday, December 22, 2007

leica response

hi all, hope u guys r having a great holiday season thus far.
in response to the leica, i liked most of it, but some of it could still be cut, a lot of it actually.
but the new stuff thats happening in the jump made me laugh. i guess its suppose to be cheesy rite?! and the end is a bit more together than before so thats good as well.

as for the new version or not....it doesn't matter as long as what the group decides, maybe we can vote on this blog? but we should stick to it and resolve the problem we face and not jump on a new idea everytime we get stuck. that being said, im not saying which idea is better or not, its just b/c we gotta finish this sometime b4 semester 2 ends and so theres not a whole lot of time to jump around. ideally we would all like to explore every possible story ideas that we have, but right now we just can't afford it.

for the new script, id suggest that ppl who wants to take part could get together and work on it and post the scripts on the blog for rest of the group to comment. ideally if we get through few revisions of the script during this holiday, we probably be in good shape when we come back. if the scripts tight and clear then boarding stage wouldn't be that big of a problem.
this is my experience from the summer having worked on a short film w/ fellow 3rd yr students. we got a lot done during summer with about 6 members. (in the production stage when school started ) for those who wants to see what our beat script, here it is CLICK ME!
this is the final version and we've gone through about 5+ revisions.
we basically boarded from the script and changes were made based on the critiques of the leica.
anyways, let me know what the rest thinks, my vote is for the old idea. :P

5 comments:

Rory said...

First of all, I don't think we are jumping to a new idea to avoid a problem, I think the new idea is simply a solution to said problem. The new version is different, but it evolved from the old version and leaves much of the basic plot in place. Avoiding the problem would be cutting out death altogether, or replacing him with a talking rabbit or something. (I am being a tad tongue in cheek here, but you get my drift...)

As well, I disagree with the thought that doing the new idea will take any more time than making the current idea good. And going with the second idea will help us get this finished because it will allow us to make it a 3 minute film instead of a 4:30 film. It is true that we could save a lot of short term work and allow ourselves to move straight into production if we simply went with what we have in the leica and tightened up the editing (I agree it could still be cut down considerably), but then we'd be polishing a piece of crap for the rest of the year. Let's be honest with ourselves here: there are moments in the current version that are very good (individual lines, gestures, gags etc.) but as a whole it just isn't very well crafted. So no matter what we do, I'd say we need a serious overhaul. Whether we try new death or stick with old death should be a story choice not a logistical choice, because we will have to rework the story either way. As well, we shouldn't forget that any time we cut out now is work saved later on, and that a good film is a lot easier to get pumped up to work on for a whole term than a mediocre film.

Jack Yu said...

u misread me. my intent was not to use our current lecia and go on into production and make a piece of crap. my intention was to point out even if something was wrong with the 1st idea, should we look at ways of retelling the story and other possible ways of fixing it? if you get my drift, what im saying is to not abandon an idea so fast and so soon w/o even giving it couple more quality tries.
changing death's role entirely is considered a new idea, but putting a rabbit to replace death, would be considered...well, just funny to be honest.

can you be sure that the we won't face any problems in the 2nd idea and the 2nd idea will take less time or same amount of time as fixing the 1st idea? and certainly there's the possibility that the 2nd idea's leica will be just as long as the 1st idea. which again leads back to my original intention of this post, fix and resolve, and not abandon something fixable. if after a few 'good' attempts of fixing the story, then we will know whether or not we should continue further.

i personally like the idea of death being a friendly companion to ES, but if that has to be dropped in order to make this work, why not?!..its very personal how we each feel about this film but whatever the group decides to do, im 100% behind it.
i do hope everyone understands that im not here to argue which idea is better, but to suggest that we should fix it rather than adding a new idea in. we could argue and play with words on whether changing the role of death is a solution to our existing problem or are we just avoiding our problem and jumping to a new idea. obviously, im not here to argue on that, but you should of already gotten my drift..;)

Rory said...

Well, I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on this one then, because changing death is a potential solution to the “death problem” not a blatant attempt to avoid it. I think you misunderstood me on that point: if we really wanted to just avoid this problem we could, as I said, just get rid of death altogether (he wasn't in the original idea after all). And herein lies the thing we agree on: both ideas are going to take some serious working out. Because as a potential solution I am not saying that the new idea will just magically come together and be perfect, it will take just as much time and effort as making the old idea work, so it all comes down to which of the two we as individuals feel will fit our story best, and will result in the better 3 minute film. That is what I meant by it being a story decision and not a logistics decision, because both of the options will take a considerable amount of time and there is no point in trying to predict which will take longer. What I am saying is: make the decision for story reasons – which death seems to fit with the kind of story we want to tell and which death will give us the best chance of making the film not only shorter, but better and shorter. If your opinion is that old death is better in terms of story I completely respect that, but I don't want this to become an argument about logistics and initially that seemed to be what you didn't like about the new idea. I hope that I have made my point a little clearer this time, because apparently I did a bad job of explaining it in my previous comment.

Jack Yu said...

changing death's character will change the story, as this makes 2 entirely different stories.the death problem as i see it is:
1) if we just want to tell a story about ES doing his final jump with death and other external aspects as obstacles, then the idea of death being the typical death (wanting to kill ES) will certainly fit in well. in this idea, death could and/or could not be part of it -> that was the original concept.

2) if we want to tell a story about death and ES relationship and how they both overcome obstacles, then that is exactly what we have been doing.

but both 1) and 2) are very different story.as which one we choose, will ultimately define ourselves and our film. if we know which one is our direction, then certainly we will have simpler grasp of story telling and much more clear focus to make this a short and tight film. this is the story decision that we must make.

Rory said...

Well, as I said, we'll have to agree to disagree because that is not how I see it.