an ex guber: July 2007

So yeah, another one of my episodes will be popping up next week (I think, still trying to get confirmation). After the mind-fuckery that was my last episode, this one's a bit more straight forward, although still not that linear.

Interesting note: The other day the editor at Niche, James, commented on how every single one of my episodes starts at the end. I never realized this until he pointed it out, but it's true. And if I don't start at the end, I'll start at the beginning, then go to the end, then go to the middle, then the beginning, then the end again (blame Tarantino).

I think the main reason I do this is because of the format and the knowledge of how fickle people watching TV can be. If I start with some kind of weird fucked up shit for five minutes, with no explanation, then go straight to what happened before in order to make the audience watch the whole show. I don't know if it works, but fingers crossed, eh?

So yeah. 'Eye See Eye Believe' (or, as it's called in Malaysia, 'Mata Nampak Mata Percaya'). A straight up pontianak story (that's a Malaysian vampire for you Westerners), with a twist. The script was pretty tight and simple. A bit too simple, actually. For the first time I wrote too little, and had to shoot an extra scene after I edited it to fit the run-time (my original cut was 13 minutes long). This was also the first production where I got to use a bunch of really cool rigs for attaching cameras to cars...

The cool thing about these rigs is that you can just keep driving and shooting and the shots you get look so much more high-budgeted than it actually is.

Unfortunately, the bad thing about the set up is that the cameras are rather obstructive. We had one camera at the front with a piece of card above it to stop any glare which already made it difficult for the actor to drive, then another on the left hand side which made it worse because if you drove too close to anything on the left you run the risk of destroying the camera.

The ladder was actually used to do the spook floating scene. I needed a close up of the pontianak's feet rising and originally we thought we could just lift the actress up. No go. In the end, she sat down on the ladder and the two guys on either side lifted the ladder up and moved it forward, making it seem like she's floating. Nifty, eh?