Regarding to Wong Kar-wai

This film lasted for a long time becasue most of scenes I shot with my friends in London. We did so many research to find many location and then chose some of them as candidate. There are some fantastic pics and scenes we found on Flickr and wrote down the address.

I played the heroine as well and the hero is my best friend Nic~ the whole progress was full of fun. I wrote the script as other little film we shot.

The shooting style is for regarding Wong Kar-wai who the famouse Chinese Director I love the most. the style is similar with his famous film called "2046"

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi2813526297/

The element I like the best is he like focusing on details and the plot always seems jumbled but the aftertast is unlimited.

The story of Wong Kar-wai

Born in Shanghai, he moved to Hong Kong with his parents at the age of five. Coming from the Mainland and speaking only Mandarin and Shanghainese, he had a difficult period of adjustment to Cantonese speaking Hong Kong, spending hours in movie theatres with his mother. After graduating from Hong Kong Polytechnic College in graphic design in 1980, he enrolled in the Production Training Course organized by Hong Kong Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB) and became a full-time television scriptwriter. In the mid-1980s, he became a scriptwriter/director at The Wing Scope Co. and In-gear Film Production Company, the production houses owned by renowned Hong Kong actor /movie producer Alan Tang. Wong's current nostalgic artsy style took shape during his apprenticeship with Alan Tang Kwong-Wing, who invested in the first movie Wong directed, "As Tears Go By" (1988). Wong's career took off when he directed the film "Days of Being Wild" (1990), despite losing Alan Tang millions of invested dollars. Wong subsequently graduated to feature film work. He is credited with about ten scripts between 1982 and 1987, covering an array of genres from romantic comedy to action drama, but claims to have worked to some extent or another on about fifty more without official credit. He considers Final Victory (1986), a dark comedy/crime story for director Patrick Tam, his best script.

Feature films
He made his directing debut in 1988 with As Tears Go By, also produced by Alan Tang. A crime melodrama of the kind then hugely popular, it heavily borrowed from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1974), but already displayed one of Wong's principal trademarks in its atmospheric and sometimes expressionistic color palette. It is his only box office hit to date.
His next film, Days of Being Wild (1991), produced by Alan Tang, a drama about aimless youth set in the early 1960s, established his trademark form: elliptically plotted mood pieces, with lush visuals and music, about the burden of memory on melancholy, misfit characters. Days was a box office failure but now regularly tops Hong Kong critics' polls of the best local films ever made. It has been described as a sort of Cantonese Rebel Without a Cause.
He also established his own independent production company, called Jet Tone Films Ltd. in English. His partner in the company is Jeffrey Lau, a director and producer who tends to work closer to the populist vein of mainstream Hong Kong film.
Wong went on to direct several more feature films in the 1990s produced by Jet Tone, which allowed him to work at his own pace. Among these were Chungking Express (1994), which follows the lives of two love-struck cops in Hong Kong and the mysterious women they meet and fall in love with. Originally intended to be a distraction piece for him to get his mind off of the heavily delayed Ashes of Time, it ended up being one of his most popular films, if not the most popular. Fallen Angels (1995), was originally intended to be the third act of Chungking Express, but when the tone didn't fit with the other two parts, he cut it out and made it a standalone movie instead; it is seen as a semi-sequel to Chungking Express as is a neo-noir film about on a disillusioned killer trying to overcome the affections of his partner, a strange drifter looking for her ex-boyfriend, and a mute trying to get the world's attention in his own ways, all set against a sordid and surreal urban nightscape.
Wong's fourth movie, Ashes of Time (1994), released between Chungking Express and Fallen Angels, applied his approach to a star-studded wuxia (martial arts swordplay) story; the desert shoot in Mainland China dragged on for over a year and resulted in one of contemporary Hong Kong cinema's most notorious commercial disasters.
His first major international recognition was at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival where he won the Best Director prize for Happy Together (1997). A film that "uses gorgeous, saturated images set to an eclectic soundtrack of tango by Argentinian maestro Astor Piazolla, Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso and Frank Zappa instrumentals to chronicle the stormy affair of a gay couple living as expatriates in Buenos Aires."[2] In fact, tracing back to his early career, Wong did celebrate his success without being grateful to his mentor, Alan Tang Kwong-Wing.[citation needed] Wong mentioned Tang's name in his thank you speech at the award ceremony.
Despite his background as a scriptwriter, one of Wong's trademarks as a director is that he works largely through improvisation and experimentation involving the actors and crew rather than adhering to a fixed screenplay. This has been a frequent source of trouble for his actors, his financial backers and many other people connected with his films, including sometimes himself.
The filming of In the Mood for Love (2000) had to be shifted from Beijing to Macau after the China Film Bureau demanded to see the completed script. This was all in all a minor setback in the "very complicated evolution" of the project which goes as far back as 1997. It was Wong's intention to make two films, one of which would be titled Beijing Summer, the plot unclear at the time, but eventually taking form in Macau. Here Wong planned to call it Three Stories About Food, but saw it better to settle for only one story, A Story About Food, that centers on a writer. Together with scenes shot in Bangkok and Angkor Wat, the filming took as long as 15 months. This was an especially arduous time for lead actress Maggie Cheung whose hair and makeup reportedly took a daily five hours, and who appeared in different cheongsams in each scene. She famously compared the lengthy shoot to a cold she couldn't get rid of. Working without deadlines, the film's upcoming premier at Cannes nonetheless put some pressure on Wong to finish editing. Intending to name the film Secrets he was dissuaded by Cannes, and finally named it In the Mood for Love after Bryan Ferry's cover of the song "I'm in the Mood for Love" he was listening to.[3][4]
Wong's 2046 (2004), a film about capturing lost memories, was the third chapter of a shared story that began with Days of Being Wild and continued with In the Mood for Love. Infamous for long drawn out shoots without any real regards to deadlines, a running joke amongst the crew was that he would finish in the year 2046.
In 2006, he became the first Chinese director to preside the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.
Wong Kar-wai's first full English-language film, My Blueberry Nights, opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival as one of 22 films in competition. The lead, American singer-songwriter Norah Jones, made her acting debut in the film.

The Outsider---the lighting practise

Because of the programme film is too big to upload so I could post my report first...

I couldn't using the techniques very well so I wanna practise.

Report of Lighting and Shooting

Introduction:
As the background of using a matte painting make a film with lighting techniques around it, most parts of our film has been shot in the dark for practicing the skills.
Our film has been divided into six parts and each part connected with the game: “spell wrong-he’ll swing”. And the theme of our story is around surveillance and the result will be announced at the end of the film.
We have four kinds of lighting and changed them by many ways to express our idea. And on shooting aspect, we not only used the normal pattern of shooting but also used the steady-cam to make more effect by different ways to show.
There are some classic scene from famous films as “Pulp Fiction” and “The Trueman Show”. Most of people who have watched the film like the surprise ending best.

Planning Our Work:
The project offers lighting techniques so we decided shooting at night to show our skills. We borrowed the pag-light, steady-cam and a reflecting board. We have only two weeks to finish the work so we made a tight schedule.
Firstly, choosing story was being the most important thing. I got the idea from the film “Pulp Fiction” (1994). There is a famous and deep-expressive scene of the Marsha was ripe by irrelevant man. We planed to shoot a film like it for practicing the lighting.
Secondly, after choosing the story, we began designing the structure of our work. It seems thin and weak if just telling a wired story so we try to combine it with a game and an open ending.
At last, we began to write our script and drew the sketch. Stella is good at drawing so she responsible for it. We changed it several times and then we decided to begin.
Progress of our work:

At the beginning, we found our friends who have some experience and skills on acting because there are privities between us so that we would save many time on explaining our ideas. After short explaining, we began shooting the film.
The most difficult but important scene is which the wired guy ripe the innocent man. We chose a small room and waiting the night time shooting for the best emotion and affection. All lighting set-up inhabit most space of the tiny room so I have little space to move and shoot. And because the scene offered us using the steady-cam I had to change many ways to adapt the tiny environment making better affection.
And in the same scene, because there are some lenses of making naked affection so we should make them like real. The emotion of the two actors is also important for the scene because it is wired for two men so we made wrong impression on visual for audience. And there is an important advantage that they are acquaintance and knowing each other well so the scene is not too difficult for them.
We plan shooting the easiest scene at the end but the whether was still cloudy and rainy. We waited few days but the deadline is coming so we had no choice. So we changed our idea to shooting the opening in a rainy day to make a depressed emotion.
There is problem occurred during editing that the color is different between the screen of VCR and Macbook. The tone is darker seeing on the computer screen so we had to adapt the color brighter when editing. It was a huge and long progress spending our bunch of time.

Conclusion:
Through this practice, I could control the lighting well and using most skills and theory taught in the class into practical excises. Using lighting correctly is good for expressing the theme and idea felicitously so we should practice these skills more proficiency.

About the Opening Sequence

I wanna add some details about the short opening sequence.

The actor is my friend Alec. And another friend Adam who lived in London, we were classmates in China so we always together so we have perfect privity, especially on film.

This short film shot in Liverpool Street, London, January. We have waited for almost half a month because we need a rainy day and should be on Saturday---the market of Liverpool Street.

I can't decide what name should be given for it so it is an untitle one... it's a pity...

I did the editing afterwards. There is also some problem should be solved, for example, the different effect... I have read the book: FinaCutPro 4 carefully...until now...

The audiovisual production need group work because it impossible to do all things all time, indivisually. I wrote the script, I shot the film, and also edited it. it's really tired...
plus, I have my own work of 3D...

The time managing is really really really important for doing all of these. The schedule is the most important thing!

A Opening Sequence

This is only an opening sequence of a shot film. My friends enjoyed it very well because they don't know what exactly I wanna express. They thought it could make audience thinking so much.

The film shot in London and I shot it just for fun. I always have wired and interesting ideas, maybe it because I born in September, which a month with full of idea~haha ^o^

I really wanna could choose my favourite pathway---the audiovisual production to improve my skills. I have many problems should be solved by studying more.

I have made some little film clips like this one and I would post them one by one. I wish you all could enjoy them and also give me suggestion~~~