A Farewell Song screenings (UK)

Some of you may remember that our feature documentary "A Farewell Song" played at the Side Cinema in Newcastle at the end of February. Though we couldn't make it, the organisers have told us that everyone who saw it loved it. Well, our Tyneside adventures are set to continue. Afterwards we were contacted by the programming director of The Sage Gateshead who saw the film and thought it might work well at their upcoming Chinese musical event, the East'08 Festival. The screening is set for the afternoon of April 6 (a Sunday, I believe) at some time around 2pm. I'll post more details once I have them. I think it is a free screening, so do go along if you are in the neighbourhood.

For anyone interested in knowing more about "A Farewell Song", we have a page here on our website. There is a link on the page to the trailer too.

For info on The Sage Gateshead, click here. Follow the links to the Chinese festival.

Photos from the shoot prep

These are from a few days ago, mostly taken so we could work out angles on shots. More photos from the shoot itself will be uploaded in the next day or so.

The big lane shoot

Shooting on the athletics ad went really well on March 24/25. Our 100 extras did a great job of looking like 200 extras. And our main actors/athletes were Trojans, running up and down the lane all day for us. The weather held for both days too, which is remarkable and rather wonderful for this time of year, when drizzle is quite common. We had, in fact, consulted a fortune teller on the best day to film - and, would you believe it, we moved production back a couple of days to please the gods. If the blue sky was anything to go by, they were quite pleased. The only sign of damp came when we wetted the lane down to stop it looking too overexposed and contrasty in the bright sunlight.

We raced through the shooting script at a rate of knots and - credit to Luo Tong, producer, and Lu Yuqing, cinematographer, who worked out the timings - completely everything to schedule. There's a first for everything. If anything, shooting on 16mm speeded us up. On video formats, the temptation is to do endless retakes. But the cost of buying, developing and telecining film is a great incentive to get things right first time.

Next stop... telecine.

The big line decision

Thought I'd let you in on the exciting decision-making processes we use. Watch and be amazed as our team tests out the various techniques for creating a white line on a road.

The poster

The poster we had made for the athletics advert. Notice how it follows the contours of the bricks - we wanted it to look like a genuine pasted poster. It is in fact made of plastic.

One week to go...

Apologies for the radio silence over the last few days. We've been busy scrabbling together the final bits and pieces for our ad shoot, which is now set for next Monday/Tuesday (March 24, 25). If the gods are on our side, the weather will be marvellous, the extras compliant and the leads Marlon Brando to a man. We can only hope. We spent Monday and Tuesday this week finalising shots on the storyboards. Our cinematographer LYQ saw our shot lists last week and came back to us over the weekend with some more suggestions. We added several of these yesterday before going back to the lane with our Artistic Director to map out props and set.

The main issue in the lane is hiding the ugly aircon units that bespoil most of the beautiful brick walls. Since we can't really box them up without making them look even worse, we are going to have to cover them with carefully-placed clothes lines.

We are back to the lane on Thursday to finalise the look. Apart from the aircon units, the other two things we'll also be checking are the posters we are having made and the running track lines. The big question for the next day or so is whether we are going with chalk lines or white masking tape. My, what important decisions we have to make.

Stereotypes

Yesterday afternoon we had another casting session for the upcoming TV ad. We have now chosen the old man, fat man, thin man, teenage girl, 6-year-old boy, dwarf race starter, and the boy's father (a Tony Leung lookalike). We are still looking for a mother. The trick is finding cast who look enough like the obvious stereotypes but add a twist. Chinese is full of actors who play to type extremely well. Turn on the TV and you see them everywhere, in TV series, commercials, on chat shows. The twist is the tricky bit. And I've found that you can only follow your gut on this.

Update: we lost our fat man, but almost immediately found another one... a 350 pound professional shot-putter. This provides the ultimate twist. Our proverbial man mountain will probably be the fittest athlete in the race we are staging, in which he is meant to lose. For his "audition", he got him to sprint 100 metres in the garden below our office. He was very fast. Not quite up to my sub-14 second standard, but good nonetheless.

LostPensivos on YouTube

Just a quick note to say that most of our trailers and short videos are now up on YouTube as well as our website. This may be the solution for anyone who can't view videos on our site. You can see our YouTube profile and all the videos by going to www.LPfilms.net and clicking on the YouTube link on the homepage. You can also go directly to www.youtube.com/lostpensivosfilms.

I thank you.

Shanghai lanes

We've been trawling Shanghai lanes for the past week or so, looking for the perfect spot to shoot the upcoming TV commercial. It's been fascinating. "Longtang", as they are called in Chinese, are as distinctive a symbol of Shanghai as the hutong communities are of Beijing. And they are beautiful: criss-crossed labyrinths of brick terraces packed with detail in every nook and cranny. Sadly, they did not have a good time of the latter part of the twentieth century and they have become overcrowded and badly maintained.

We have looked at dozens over the past few days and some are in terrible disrepair. The exteriors are bad enough: potholed roads, leaky drains, peeling paint-work and so on. But, once you get inside, you see the true damage of decades of poverty and overcrowding. Crumbling walls, rotting door frames, mouldy wallpaper, corridors jam-packed with dusty ramshackle furniture.

Beneath all that though you can still see the potential of these long-suffering buildings. With an injection of cash, most of these places would not just be livable, but highly desirable residences. They remind me of mews houses in parts of London. If you ask them, many of the people who live in the lanes love their houses, even if they are frustrated about the cramped conditions and air of decay around them. There ought to be government grants available to help people do them up. In twenty years time, it will be the longtangs that people will visit Shanghai for as much as the high-rises.

But the sad fact is that the lanes are disappearing fast. Dozens have gone already, replaced with ugly office blocks. In one area we were walking round last week, half the houses were in huge rubble piles. We asked a friendly-looking man in a wheelchair what was happening to the remaining houses, many of which had strong art deco features, thinking that they might be spruced up and sold on to rich Chinese and foreigners as has happened to a few of the old longtang communities (I'd rather see them preserved for the original residents, but at least some of them are saved this way). But no, he said, they were all due for demolition. What will be built here, we asked. An office block, he said with a grim smile.

For a city obsessed with money, knocking these places down makes little sense, even financially, except in the shortest of short-terms. Over the next few decades, if these places are restored and well-maintained, they will become some of the most sought-after properties in Asia. Think about it: little bachelor pads in the heart of the fastest-growing economy in the world. Inside, some of them are big enough for families too, with their wandering corridors and little backyards. But knock them down and they are gone forever and all you have left is shiny office blocks, many of them  struggling for tenants. 

I'm not suggesting we keep them all - a change, after all, is as good as a wash. But, for goodness sake, let's not rush to get rid of them all.

We've chosen our lane for the TV ad, by the way. See if you can guess which one it is. Amazingly, we found a room in one of the houses for an interior scene we need to shoot too. That was unexpected. We all thought we would have to film the scene in a studio and patch it into the story. But, no, we found a large dining room on the ground floor of the second house we looked at. To one end of the room, big French windows lead out onto a messy old patio and then out into the lane through the big double "shikumen" doors. We told the owner we particularly liked the walls, which seemed to feature original old wallpaper, faded but still visible - making it a better fit for us than the rooms upstairs where all the old features had been replaced. Yes, he said, it does look old. The last film crew in here had it repapered and then aged.

On the way out, I half-joked with our production assistant that if any of the flats were free, I'd love to live here. You can't, she said. There is a demolition order on the whole area. It'll all be gone with the next five years.

The Score

More on Shanghai lanes later. For the moment, had to share this with you. We are trying to secure rights to a piece of music - a version of the jazz classic "Fly Me To The Moon" - for the sports ad we are working on. One of the big record companies owns the rights (publishing and recording) and has got back to us with a price of US$30,000 (£15,000) for one year of TV play. That puts it out of our range - so we'll have to negotiate. The irony is that, apart from the big ad companies who do everything by the book here, China is rampant with advertising music that hasn't been cleared. Very few royalty payments are ever made and even major bands have their music ripped off and played on prime time TV ad slots without ever making a penny from it. This is a road we've been down before. We've even had sound studios here try to sell us music licenses that don't belong to them. So... actually contacting the record companies and trying to pay your bit puts you at a distinct disadvantage. But that's what you have to do. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but also because intellectual property is starting to become an issue that the government takes seriously here and I wouldn't want us being scapegoats. Now, that would be ironic, given that we are doing a lot more than most here to pay for what we use.

Cast and crew

This afternoon has been all about crewing up for our latest shoot - a TV commercial we'll be filming in mid-March. So far, we have cameras and camera-men semi covered. We still need an art director, grips, sound and a proper casting director. This is one of those times when we can't skimp on casting expenses - we are planning around 120 extras. And all this for a 30 second tv spot.

Next up... locations. We are scavenging around for a great lane in the middle of Shanghai. More anon...

Mystery solved?

Of course, having put all our eggs in the MP4 basket for the new video setup on our website, www.LPfilms.net, we're now discovering that 90% of the world's population are having problems seeing them. The eggs. Er, videos. Anyway, if you can't see the eggs (or should that be basket?), we think we have found the solution.

It's like this. Macs ship with Quicktime, which reads MP4s. PCs don't, so can't. 

Answer: install Quicktime on your PC. It's easy. Go to www.apple.com/quicktime. Follow the links. It takes about 5 minutes.

Alternatively, buy a Mac. You know it's worth it.