At long last we met up with Chris Yi in Los Angeles, a city that inspires both awe and disdain in both the natives and the tourists. I grinned in relief when Sean and I were told to meet at Mossimo’s Mudspot, a modest hole-in-the-wall of cracked stucco and peeled paint. Parts of LA, like the southern parts of Orange County, are ballrooms of Victorian formality, where strangers dance with other strangers in a secret but acknowledged ritual of unspoken attraction.

“It’s the same with any city. If you go to Hollywood you’ll get a lot of stuck-up people who wanna be actors, so I just stay out of those places,” Chris explained. This guy is talkative, easy-going and interesting. I meant what I wrote in this Tweet—just give him five years, tops. If I was the sort of ‘azn’ who doted on my heritage, I’d be AZN PRYDE all over this guy, who as a fellow Asian-American has directed some cool material. But the fact stands that I don’t give a damn about my roots, not in that way, and even in that light his work is still mighty impressive. He’s twenty-three.

Our meet went aiight. Some awkward silence here and there; or maybe that was because we took simultaneous sips from our drinks. One thing is for sure: Back to the Future is a powerful force to be reckoned with. I was giddy with enthusiasm when Chris said it was his motivation to become a filmmaker. Me too! And when Sean brought up Rory’s First Kiss, his webseries in the making, Chris plunged into even deeper depths of insight: the best stories are first and foremost entertaining. Let me say that I am a believer in Roger Ebert, who wrote A film must be entertaining before it can be art. Damn true, that.

What spurred us to meet was our one mutual fixation: short films. Chris told us his sad, sad story: a student at UCLA, he fell out of love for cinema because his filmmaking peers were so damn snotty and selective. He shot Korean Days of Our Lives (which is so awesome) and then decided that advertising was less artsy-fartsy than cinema. It was only recently that he started up his Netflix account and realized how much he missed the movies and, I suppose, the potential to make his own.

You all know Sean’s story—that guy is busy with Rory’s First Kiss, which can be said to be a series of short films. Me? I’m furiously plotting a twenty-plus page romantic drama. It’s the ending that eludes me: should it end happily, or should someone, like, get shot or something?

An hour later, when Chris glanced at his iPhone and said “Alright guys, I gotta split,” we shook hands and parted ways. Sean and I zipped over to Samy’s, a superstore that sells everything on the planet you could ever want (as long as you’re a filmmaker). I lingered in front of the Steadicam display, fondling the buckles and pneumatic arms as if it were a girlfriend, until Sean whispered in my ear that it probably costs twenty-thousand dollars. We sauntered upstairs (the store is three levels high) to admire the lighting equipment, to which I noticed these really cool babies. Yes, they are also battery powered and dimmable! But alas, the bigger units run up to around two-thousand bucks.

I desire this Litepanel so bad that it violates the Seven Deadly Sins. A powerful, portable floodlight, without the need for AC or a huge-ass generator, is a total revelation.

So Sean has been meaning to show me his outline of Rory’s First Kiss, his very own webseries in the making. What little he has revealed makes me think of The Guild crossed with Quarterlife. The Guild is cool, but I pledge no allegiance to it, just a fleeting Hey that was kinda funny. As for Quarterlife, well, the show is a watered down WB soap, clinging to cliches and borrowed structure as if they were hand-me-downs from Kevin Williamson.

Sean dotes on Rory’s First Kiss the way a pregnant mother dotes on her unborn child: it doesn’t matter that his water hasn’t broken yet, he’ll still spend hours trying to decide on the wallpaper. At this early stage the plot is all that matters. Still, I’m confident he can bang out a pilot that’s a notch above the production values of The Guild and a notch above the conventions of Quarterlife.

Oh and I am, by the way, eating Taco Nachos, a new $1.99 item from Jack-In-the-Box. That’s my keyboard right above it. See what I just did? I interrupted the flow of the topic and substituted it for an image of cheesy-gross nachos. This is called a Chapter Break. You all may visit the restrooms and make a choice at the vending machines.

Sean said that he has trouble reading my long-ass posts, and so it pains me to say that I shall have to relinquish my rambling insight and give in to this ill-educated, homogenized mass of soul-crushing public opinion. After skimming through successful blogs, I see that the only folks who are allowed long-ass posts are either experts and their “industry tips,” or generally attractive girls who Jack Kerouac the crap out of their sentences and are popular; because men on the internet understand that an attractive girl’s blog is the next best thing to sniffing her hair, and so they linger, a misdirected shot at romance.

Oh yeah! My short film.

After brooding all last night till four o’clock in the morning, I formed a solid idea of the first half. As already mentioned, this will be a romance. It’ll be different from Rory’s First Kiss; so different that it’ll be like the North and South Poles–you can’t get any further apart on Earth than that (right?). Sean told me his influences, which are Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” and, though he didn’t mention it, “Garden State,” because I know it happens to be his number one movie…and is such an inspiration to him that I suspect it even plays a role in the moral choices he makes in life. (“Garden State” is an insidious puppeteer to trend-conscious youngsters that tells them that if they do not meet a girl like Natalie Portman then their life is broken and needs to be fixed by behaving more like Zach Braff)

Pleasant movie, though. I saw it. Twice.

My influences are of the snottier sort, the kind your single aunt or professors are aware of because of course they are wiser and more mature than you and don’t you dare question that: Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Trois couleurs: Rouge”. Yeah, that’s like trying to measure up to God; but as a failsafe I’ll say that my third influence is Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs”. Because if I don’t like the way my short turns out then I can just end it on a shootout or a rotting, decapitated head…and it will still be an awesome stroke of brilliance.

Wish us luck! And the Taco Nachos are good but now my heart feels slower.

So here it is, a shot from the ending location of my short film in the making. Out of the hours I spent scouting locations, this is the one I spent the most time framing. No surprise that this is the shot where someone saw me through their window and reported me. I know because I got a glance of them peeking from behind their curtain. A few minutes later a black-and-white cruiser pulled up to the curb, its spotlight on me as if this were a prison break.

I think it was worth giving up my discretion, don’t you? Try to imagine an actor standing or sitting somewhere in the frame. I would’ve posed myself, but I didn’t want to leave the camera.

Yes, several elements of this shot are post-processed; the same as what I did to The Thing at the End of the Hall, only less so. I recall the reaction of my cousin’s girlfriend when she saw the pictures of my trip to France. How did you get them to look so good? she asked. I tried to explain composition, exposure, the leading of the eyes, the staging of the subject and in general the rule of thirds, but when I topped it off with Photoshop she went Ohhhh Photoshop! as if that explained everything and nothing else was relevant.

By now it has become second nature of me to expose shots explicitly to raise the black levels, and I am getting better at estimating what the shadows will look like. I adore high contrast; it adds to the sensation of depth. You see, I don’t expose shots by adding lights. I expose them by adding shadows. I just think they’re more interesting and, for an amateur like me, much easier to control. Of course in a location like this I must deal with what I am dealt, and in this case, after rejecting three other locations, I finally found a parking lot with the right kind of lights: florescent, balls of florescent as opposed to tubes. They cast a diffused glow that, depending on the white balance, will give off a sickly green hue, which is what I did in an earlier short; but in one setup I had a warm lamp on the subject’s face, so their skin was preserved a fleshy pink.

Time to shop for a portable warm-toned light. In a close-up or a medium I can throw the warm tones on their face while the rest of the shot remains green. Solid separation without mutating the actor’s face into a Ninja Turtle.

I shouldn’t concentrate too hard on how it will look because that is a separate and altogether difficult process on its own (though it hasn’t stopped me from terrorizing suburban cities with a PMW-EX1). I do by the way have more of a lead on my story, and because I have included a shot of what is likely the ending location then clearly I have come a long way. The tone of the short is laid out, as is the subject matter. It will be a romance of some sort; though it will be more truthful to say that this is drama laced with romantic elements. Hmmm. I feel iffy about the word drama, possibly because it comes off as too highbrow for my abilities.

I read this Edith Wharton short story called “The Letters.” I won’t bore you with the details (even though Edith Wharton is not boring), but I admired the plotting. Everything is peachy and right as rain until the final few pages, where the protagonist’s life is suddenly flipped upside-down and everything dear to her is revealed to be a sham. The neatness of this revelation and the surprise that it delivers is a pleasure to experience, not due to the singular twist in and of itself, but due to how Wharton orchestrates the con: it is clean and bloodless, like yanking off a tablecloth with such swiftness so as to not spill the drinks.

Chaos is drama, and don’t assume that it is all bad, like negative energy, or, to use the layman’s word of choice, depressing. There is this essay by Philip K. Dick, written just before his death (and before Ridley Scott screened a workprint of “Blade Runner” for him) called, “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” This is what the man had to say:

I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life.

So there you have it. Everything falls apart in this story. Because I want it to. Because I want my characters to mean something. Because I dislike happy stories that begin happy, plow through a second act of more happy, and then end happy. Perhaps it is because they are afraid of what lurks out there in the banality of real, authentic life. Perhaps it is because they are the filmic equivalent of a stoner, so high on its own agenda that it numbs itself to pain. Or perhaps it is because they just don’t try very hard at being human. I am reminded of the wisdom behind Harris K. Telemacher, who said, “Let us just say I was deeply unhappy, but I didn’t know it because I was so happy all the time.”

And here is where I leave you with what I think will be the end music.

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I think I’ve got it! My idea! My story idea! But I’ll just dish out a tiny morsel because I hate ideas that are incomplete. I don’t even know if I like it. I’d feel like the boy who cried wolf. Hell, I already feel ashamed for using exclamation points.

Story goes like this: two friends, one night, a bit of backstory and bickering, some broken romance, and a lone plot device to trigger all the anomalies required in a narrative. “Anomalies” are what I now like to call the-things-that-happen-in-a-story. I guess you can stick to calling them Plot Points, but anomaly has a certain ring to it; a word you’d toss around in a room full of nodding scientists, stroking their chins in applied wisdom.

Here’s a shot, captured from when I was loitering the city for locations that I suspected would look interesting. Not all of them were. But this shot had an emo vibe going for it. Combine this with the song I plan to use in the skit and POW! instant combo; like peanut butter and bananas. It’s a mood setter.

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Exterior locations are a go-go. They’re so liberating compared to interiors. The only problem is the general public: residents, pedestrians, traffic, and oh yeah cops. I was interrupted last night, scouting locations. Somebody must’ve spotted me through their window. Yeesh. Not a big problem; the cop pulled up to me when I strolled across an intersection. He had those fierce, dagger eyes of a dangerous jock. I wished he wore sunglasses, the way most cops do so you can’t really know what they’re thinking when they pull you over for a ticket, if they’re bored or enjoying it, or if they think you’re smokin’ hot jailbait. You just can’t know.

When he confirmed that I was a film student at the nearby CSU Fullerton, he asked what my short film was. I didn’t know what that meant and if he was just killing time, so I told him it was a skit. A what? he asked. A skit, I repeated, and for some reason he said “Thank you” and I said “You’re welcome,” and he spun off with his buddy riding shotgun, who at this time of night, midnight, donned a patch of black sunglasses.

Truth is that I have been bored since Sean and I went on hiatus with Take Zer0; which forced me, coerced me, blackmailed me to be creative week after week, shooting and editing and writing long-ass posts. To anyone who knows what Take Zer0 is and miraculously also happens to read this blog, yes, Take Zer0 is on break. A very tentative break. Our website kind of broke (Sean dropped it, don’t look at me) and that roused us out of a filmmaking trance that forced us to ask an uncomfortably adult question: what are we going to do with our lives? And so, as a creative diversion from our money-making schemes that could inspire an episode of The Honeymooners, I present to you this potential short film, which isn’t even written yet and yes I do feel guilty like the boy who cried wolf for writing this post.

Even the premature thought of a short film inspires me. I meant precisely what I wrote in this Tweet, which is kind of disturbing as I read it (haha). Apparently I have Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that’s not all bad, but it does make me think of asparagus. If a thief had stolen all my stories and my ability to relate stories, then I would surly be without hope and become a sociopath. Or a journalist. Because without the ability to tell stories–even the crappiest of crappy ones, in a manner as well as I could tell them–it would be as if I were stricken with Scarlett fever all those years ago as an infant, deaf and blind and forever feeling with the fingers for a way to understand the world.

I may as well post this. It’s an end segment for a never completed episode of Take Zer0. Shot in a little over twenty minutes, the gimmick is that Sean uses DeShaker (a stabilization plug-in) to stabilize his handheld shots; except in this video, the joke is that DeShaker comes in pill form. As an aspiring steadi-cam operator, Sean ends up becoming dependent on the drugs. Clearly this is a play on athletes and steroids.

I think both Sean and Drew deliver pretty solid performances (as in not terrible), especially when you consider that I dumped the script on them only a half-hour before. Not bad, not bad at all.

The pacing is a bit slow, even for only a minute long; but it was to be used as an epilogue, after all (i.e. the denouement). I’m pretty satisfied with the reflector and how it lit up Sean. As for the strobing of the light, the location was chosen because of it; though I’ll admit that it gets a bit pervasive in the first shot of Drew. All in all, the entire video could use more sound mixing—ambient effects here and there—but heck, it’s good enough for being a video that was never used.