The experience of making the film Blinded Love with members of Fortune Cookie and our outside actors was certainly unforgettable to me. Even though this was not my first time making a short film, I have definitely learned a lot from the experience that I was not able to experience during the production of my first short film.
My main role in the group was the director and the editor. Jin, Andrew and I all contributed to the screenplay of the production. Andrew was our camera man and he helped me directed the film as well. Vivin, Leslie and Jin were the actors of the film. I had my friend Ling Ling Long starring as my main female character and Maya Nakamoto starring as Ling Ling’s character’s girlfriend. And I also had a cameo part in it.
In the phase the pre-production of this film, Jin, Vivin, and I all came up with different ideas for the story; it was really hard for us to make the final decision of which story we were going to use. Jin came up with some pretty exciting stories that could surely go for Hollywood big budget movies, but considering that we were all amateurs, nobody was giving us any money for the production, and the time was extremely tight, I suggested the group to go with my idea. I think that my group was being pretty cooperative of that. I was really frustrated in the pre-production phase because I went back to China during the Christmas break and we did not have much time to talk enough about the story and I had to think about where and how to take the scenes because I was the most experienced in this area. Since most of us did not have free periods together, we talked about our film online. After I came up with Jin’s character Eric’s narration, Jin made it much funnier by using his sense of humor. Andrew wrote the script for the scene in the band room and helped me develop the scenarios of some other scenes.
Most of the film was shot on last Friday due to our inability to all be together for many reasons last week. And because we did not think through the part that we had MLK assembly that day, we were not able to do nearly all of our scenes in the places that we planned to. And I was devastated by that. I did not know what to do in the beginning because I was being really stubborn on staying with our original plan, and changing the places of our scenes meant that I had to abandon everything about the camera angles, positions and movements we were going to use that I have planned out for us. However, the rest of my group came up with different plans when I felt like doing nothing and I’m very glad that they did work out.
Blinded Love is about this guy Eric who is really good at schools but at the same time, is really bad at girls. He has been in love with this really gorgeous girl Leslie for years but he never has the courage to let her know or even talk to her. Eventually after he pulls himself together and goes to tell the girl how he feels about her, the girl who he has been in love with for years turns out to be a lesbian. The “lesbian” idea actually came from one of the episodes of the TV show Friends where Joey has a hard time chasing a girl and he finds out that the girl is a lesbian at the end. I found it to be something amusing and we were able to do in a 2-5 minutes film so I came up with the story. Also, we have our protagonist Eric’s voice over narration run through the movie with insert scenes in between. I think this was inspired from Mr. D’s short film.
In my mind, Jin’s character was supposed to be someone who was really shy and sincerely wanted to win his dream girl’s love. With Jin’s intentionally doing the accents in his narration and his hilarious acting went kind of digressively from my expectation. However, I think that he did a very good job in the film by developing his own acting style and the film did turn out to be good and funny. I think that the film is pretty successful considering that we improvised most of our scenes in less than 3 hours because of that MLK assembly.
I had an extremely hard time editing the film because I forgot to let my actors know that they needed to keep going on with the scenes after they were actually done or the shots would be too short to cut. Another thing was that my actors did not get use to the idea that each shot needs to be taken at least more than 5 times to be perfect, and I was not strong enough to make them do more takes. The most challenging part to me was to put Eric’s narration and the moving images together. And I was so afraid that we needed to reshoot some of the scenes because there were no enough images to go simultaneously with the narration. However, I tried my best to fix the problems by using my limited editing skill. Also, it is not obvious that the character Leslie is a lesbian at the end of the film which is very critical to the movie. If I were given the chance to do the last scene again, I would definitely insist on making my actresses kiss or do something else to emphasis it.
In our film, we used voice over narration throughout the movie; voice over narration is a way of telling the story by having the character’s narration in the back go with the moving image. The contents of the narration and the image should be closely corresponded to each other. We also used close ups for the film to emphasize our characters’ expression. When Eric’s friend tells him that there’s another guy in his way of getting Leslie, we used close up to show Eric’s confusion and anger. Another cinematic technique that we used was the tracking shot of our femme fatale Leslie’s first appearance in the movie. Technically it was not a tracking shot because we did not actually have a wheeled cart like the professions do. But I tried to make it seem like a tracking shot to show Leslie’s beauty. I can’t quite articulate why I thought it would give the effect that I wanted; it was just something in head that seemed to work. The fourth technique that we used was flashback. Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in the character’s memories. Each scene besides the last one in this movie is actually a flashback. The last cinematic technique is long shot. A long shot is to show the entire human figure or object. I used long shot for the scene in which Eric gives Mr. D the weird answer in class.
After I was done with this short film, I truly and thoroughly experienced again what I concluded from my last film that making a movie is absolutely something a hundred times more complicated and exhausting that it seems to be. But it was really fun working with my group members. I’m very proud of each of us. And as the only girl in my group, I’ve learned that next time I will have to be strong and insist on doing what I want for the movie. Additionally, next I will certainly plan out everything and take each possibility into consideration to avoid letting things like MLK assembly stop me from doing what I want. Last but not least, I will never let myself or my group members procrastinate during the production phase because we may always want to leave the time for reshooting the scenes and fixing the problems that we may have neglected before we edit it.
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