Shanghai Golden Grand Prix TVC launched

LT, Luther, Aaron and I headed down to the JW Marriott Hotel near People's Square yesterday for the launch of the Shanghai Golden Grand Prix ad. You can see the ad here. We'll be uploading it to YouTube too soon.

The vice-mayor, sports' bureau head, reps from the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) and from the Golden Grand Prix itself were there as were about 200 journalists from the print and broadcast media. We were invited up on stage to explain the concept behind the ad. You can see one of the articles that appeared today in the local press here.

Three years on... Question Time

Was checking out the newly unblocked news.bbc.co.uk the other day and came across the Question Time Shanghai Edition page.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/4338447.stm

It's hard to believe that the show was three years ago. It still seems very fresh. We were shooting a promo piece for the Howard Johnson hotel at the time when had a call from David Wivell, now a good friend, who wondered if we would be interested in helping coordinate the programme.

We met the BBC's rep on the programme (which is actually made by a company called Mentorn, based in Oxford) in Shanghai a few days later and a month or so after that we went behind the scenes for a live Question Time from Cambridge.

David Dimbleby was an gentleman, as kindly and wise backstage as he is stern and fair on air. And the rest of the QT team turned out to be very warm and welcoming. One of the highlights was the after show dinner at the Riverside Restaurant in Cambridge. LT and I sat next to David Coleman, the director, and had an absolute riot. The guests from the show (Armando Ianucci, John Redwood, Caroline Lucas, Lord Falconer and Anne Leslie) joined us and David D was a wonderful host, making the rounds with the wine to keep us all topped up.

But for all the good will and experience, it was hard to believe then that we would manage to bring a live political debate show to China. And even if we managed it, many people believed that we would be tied down with restrictions on what could be debated, and lumbered with a government-picked audience.

Months of negotiations and hard work followed on the China end (especially from David W), and eventually paid off. To the amazement of much of the Western press, we were promised a unrestricted show. There were no limits on the topics that could be discussed and the audience was to be hand picked by the QT team based on their usual requirement for balance of views and demographics (the only restriction on members being that they all had to speak English).

The process was not without its hiccups. Visas for the UK team were very slow to come through and it wasn't clear they would make it until about a week before the show. And then they did come through, so it was all fine.

The last blip was the issue of the audience. We (LT and I were listed as producers by this point) had invited applications from as many organizations as we had contacts with, as well as the general public. We received about 400 or so and called most of them to check their English and to see what sort of issues they wanted to talk about. And then, a couple of weeks before the show, we were contacted by the Shanghai foreign affairs office to see if we needed any help finding audience. We mentioned that we were weak on academics - people who might have knowledge about and informed opinions on social issues. They sent us a list of about 5o or so scholars and we vetted them the same way we had for the rest of the list, checking their English and making sure that there was a good spread of opinions.

A day or two before filming, the English press got wind of the story and started reporting that we had been forced to include government stooges in the audience. It blew over very quickly but it was a lesson in sensationalism. Out of a total audience of around 150, we had in fact taken something like 25 from the FOA list. It was a small number, and they had all been through the same process as the rest of the audience. The QT team was amused more than anything. In fact, they told us, it was quite common for them to get lists of potential audience members from local government offices in the UK.

The show on March 10 went well. Panelists included Chris Patten, David Tang, Isabel Hilton, government spokesman Liu Jianchao and WTO negotiator Long Yongtu. Questions were picked from suggestions made by the audience in the hour before the show (as they always are) and not checked by anyone outside the show production team. Topics included Taiwan, human rights, and democracy in Hong Kong. The panelists' debate was lively.  The audience proved to be subtle and open to debate too. Opinions differed wildly.

After they show, the production team and most of the panelists headed off for the ritual buffet dinner and drinks. There was a buzz in the air and everyone felt they had taken part in a remarkable event. It was the first of its kind in China and proved to us that despite the obvious restrictions a lot can be achieved here.

The web page I found today took me right back to March, 2005. If you have a moment, please read down the comments at the bottom of the page - reactions to the show. They are telling.

Jobsworth

We've been watching the hit counter on our website (www.LPfilms.net) shoot up over the last couple of weeks. The reason: we've been posting on several of China's most popular recruitment websites, looking for a couple of new staff.

The production assistant post is currently filled marvellously well by Yunnir. She has done a great job of translating our whole site into Chinese - we're hoping that will be online in the next week or so. But Yunnir was only ever temporary help. She is heading off to a job at a top consulting firm in May. And our assistant editor, Hui Hui, is also heading off this month.

Hui Hui has been an absolute stalwart. We took her on during the Special Olympics project, essentially to help us log and capture the 150 hours or so of footage we shot. She was quiet and reserved and we were so busy shooting we didn't have much chance to get to know her until we joined the editing process in October, once filming was over.

By that time, Hui Hui had become the master of our edit suite and the complicated filing system we had adopted for the footage. Without her, we would have been lost. She guided us through hours of tape and was often the only one who knew where to source a vaguely remembered clip of a child laughing or a crucial shot of stacks of bottled water (the latter we discovered was not, in fact, video footage, but a photograph).

So, over the months, Hui Hui has kept us at least partly sane, and helped on every section of the Special Olympics project (which entailed not only the feature documentary, but several short trailers for the event and stacks of video extras on the DVD), as well as the post production job on last year's Golden Grand Prix wrap-up video and the new "Lane Heroes" ad we will be launching at the end of the month. If there was a prize for the editor who has done most work in the field of sports videos over the last year, she ought to be a nominee. And now she is leaving to pursue her dream of becoming...

... a policewoman. Did I mention that she is not like most people?

So, we are spending today interviewing potential editors at Shanghai's newish Film Academy. We've interviewed a dozen or so of the almost 100 people who applied online for the production assistant job, the main qualifications for which are excellent language skills and an open flexible approach. But if you want to find an editor, the best way is to head somewhere where they actually make them. We'll be looking for someone with good technical skills and the ability to tell a story in pictures and sound.

And here's my plan B. If we don't find the right person at the Film Academy, we are going to head to the Police Academy. I am thinking we might just find a trainee copper who is thinking of making the switch to filmmaking.

"Lane Hero" post-production

Brace yourselves for industry-speak.

Post-production on the advertisement now known as "Lane Hero" has gone pretty well. The new edit station (Dual Quad Power Mac, Decklink card) is holding up, which is a bless'ed thing indeed. After telecining the original 16mm footage to HD at the Shanghai TV Tower, we imported it all full 10-bit into our system. There were some glitches. Over the first three days, the computer began to grumble until it effectively ground to a halt. We called the technicians in and realized that the mistake was our own. We'd been saving render files onto the raid (where they should be) AND the computer's own hard-drive. With around 180 megabites a second running through the system, we were forcing the poor little thing to effectively keep up two conversations at the same time and it was struggling to keep up. Anyway, we re-placed the render files, chucked Mac under the chin and he was rearing to go.

The rest of the process has been marvellously smooth. TVCs tend to edit themselves, at least in comparison to the slog of cutting a documentary. Our last project - the Special Olympics "making of" film - involved paring 150 hours of original footage down to a 48-minute TV show. With a TV ad, most of the shots match the storyboards exactly and it's mainly just a case of putting the best take down on the timeline and fine-tuning. That is, of course, an exaggeration. With only 30 seconds of screen time to play with, every frame becomes vitally important and the tweaking and teaseling of shots, transitions, music, live sound, and so on, become month-long obsessions.

We are almost done with the edit now. DVDs went off today for approval and we should be able to output the final digibetas within a couple of days. Once we have a final cut, we'll post it here and on our website. Do drop back in soon.

Gateshead screening photos

Some of the photos that Steve and Judith Jones took at the screening of "A Farewell Song" in The Sage Gateshead, last week. The film apparently went down well and we had a packed audience of, er, a handful. A hand full of two fingers. Erm, people. Two people, that is. Or at least that was roughly how many went to the screening at 2pm. There was another screening at 3.30pm, or so we hear. I am assuming everyone was saving themselves for the later showing. Please let me know if you were there.

Gateshead AFS screening confirmed

Just to follow on from the last posting... "A Farewell Song" is now confirmed as screening this Sunday (April 6th) at 2pm at The Sage Gateshead. Their website is at www.thesagegateshead.org and there is a link to the film event here. Please go along if you can make it. Let us know how it goes!