Ciplak: Production - Day 6

Day 6 (yesterday) lasted approximately 20 minutes. But it was 20 minutes well spent.

At 7.00pm I was sat at the steps of the HELP Institute reading my newly purchased P. Ramlee bio whilst waiting for my D.O.P., the trusty Ariff, and Mr. Wong. I had called Mr. Wong before about shooting in the HELP auditorium, which he allowed, but we only had a window of time of about 20 minutes because we were shooting just before they screened the KSFM Documentaries (which I didn't attend, unfortunately).

Now, why would we be shooting in the auditorium, you may ask? For an FX shot.

Yes, an FX shot.

You see, in the first fifteen minutes of the movie the main character (played by me) explains to the viewers about the many different qualities a pirated movie can be, and as he explains them, the movie's audio/visual quality changes to the type of copy he's talking about. I needed to turn bits of my footage into off-line edit copies (complete with running time-code), promo copies (with 'Not for sale or rental' scrolling across) and, of course, cinema copies.


The projectionist, Khairul, projected the footage I had burnt on DVD onto the screen and it was the first time I saw my footage that big, which was a strange experience. The colours all came out pretty good, as did the sound. Ariff then set up the camera in the front rom towards the side, used the strap from my bag to wrap the lens' edges to make it look like the camera's hidden in the bag, and shot the footage as it played and I walked across.

Well, I didn't really walk, I shuffled on my knees because we were in the front row, but the effect is still the same. When I watched the rushes I flipped. It really looks like some cheap-o cinema copy D5 piece of shit!

How often do you get a filmmaker happy about how shit his scene looks?

We then did the 'good cinema copy' scene where we went to the seats halfway up the auditorium, pulled out the monopod and kept it as steady as possible. For some reason everything came out green a la the Matrix, even though the image projected was fine. We tried fooling around with the white balance but we just made it worse. Ah, well, fix it in post.

I'm fixing a lot in post.

As we left, I bumped into Amir Muhammad as he was entering the building and later, in Mcdonalds together with Eddy, I met The Visitor. He'll be cameo-ing in the movie at some point, as will Eddy and loads of other guys I know. I'm packing this movie to the brim with friends.

Later that night I met up with my girlfriend and a friend of hers who looked, at the most, 25. I later found out she was 30 with 2 kids. Whatever she's using, it works.

At some point this week I'm also going to try and turn some of the other footage into 'off-line copy' quality (the copies you get which are obviously stolen from the editing suites). The plan is to (a) burn the footage as a VCD on a CD-ROM, (b) play the footage on my DVD player and record it via analogue cables onto my VCR, (c) record the VCR copy via analogue cables onto my DV camera, (d) firewire that footage into my computer. It's a lot of fuss for about 20 seconds of footage but if it works, it'll be worth it.

Then, from this Friday till Monday, it'll be a hectic 4-day shoot. Ariff will only be free on Sunday so it looks like Tony will be covering for the other days whenever he can. Friday I shoot the rest of my solo scenes and pick-ups of KL streets, Saturday I shoot my parents' scene and my Back-to-the-Future-homage action sequence, Sunday I shoot Peter Brown's scene and my beaten & bruised scenes with Nazneen and Monday I re-shoot Saiful's scene and a few pick-ups of Farah's scene that we didn't get before. After that, I need to shoot the other Farah (we have two Farah's) and voila: shoot finished. Then I just have to wait for the footage from the UK and I can finally sit down and really edit the fucker. I'm planning to get all footage done by this month, by hook or by crook.

Here comes the boom.