Darkness, My Old Friend (2008)

H

Huy Vu

Veteran
Hey guys, I'm excited to announce my next project after The Girl from Yesterday. Unlike that film I will only be DPing and leaving all the writing and directing to someone else. This will truly be a zero budget project because beside tapes and some other expendables we have no money left to spend. We'll be holding audition on Tuesday and hopefully start shooting by that weekend. There's not much info right now but I will be updating this thread with production journals as well as BTS and clips as we get further into production. Now, without further ado...

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Title: Darkness, My Old Friend
Est. Length: 30 minutes
Production: Audition on Tuesday February 3rd. Start date of February 9th, to premiere on March 7th.

Equipments: Canon XH-A1 with Letus Extreme/Letus Rail setup. Canon FD 50mm f1.8, 135mm f2.8 and 24mm f 2.8.

TRAILER: www.girlfromyesterday.com/Videos/DarknessTrailer.mov

FILM: http://www.girlfromyesterday.com/Videos/DarknessMyOldFriend.mov

Synopsis:

Ben is a college senior who is completely unable to relate to others on a personal level. Instead she breaks everyone she meets down into the sum of their personal belongings, and speaks to the objects, not the person. One day she meets and falls in love with a Jarrod, a fellow classmate. Only she's not in love with him; she's in love with his glasses! But as their relationship grows, can Ben and Jarrod discover the common thread that drawn them together?

Attached crew

Director/Writer: Irene Shih
Director of Photography: Huy Vu
Editors: Huan Doan and Huy Vu
Sound Editor: Alan Chang
VFX: Dory Breaux
1st AC: Ryan Thomas
2nd AC: Tracy Qiu
Composer: Sherief Abraham
Additional Music: Jina Youn and Julius Cheng

Actors:

Ben-Kathleen Mendoza
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Soy-Christy Yang
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Jarrod-Jonathan Amores
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Jet-Gene Wang
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Mom-Tara Tomicevic
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Dad-Thomas Tan
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First BTS pic, "The Family," we'll be using this pic in the film as well

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Just some quick test shots. I simply love the low light capability of the Extreme! These were taken when the sun was almost completely set.

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Early pre-lighting test grabs, with my co-editor standing in
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UPDATE: We had a HUGE turnout for audition today (21 people!), which is way more than we expected to get. It took about two hours to audition them all but we came away with some great choices for all the roles that we were very happy with. I'll update the page with headshots in a few days.

Got the near final version of the screenplay today and it's absolutely awesome. Some minor changes as far as settings have to be made, including one minor plot addition to accommodate our casting choices, but overall the script is solid and I'm very excited to start work on it. Also I learned from the writer that she had just taken the word "Hello" out of the title, so it's just "Darkness, My Old Friend" now. I'll get a mod to update the thread title.
 
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ANOTHER UPDATE!

DVXuser Alan Chang has agreed to come on board and do sound mixing for this project. This is certainly going to take a huge load off post production.
 
We had a group read-through today, everything is going well. Some scheduling conflicts as expected, but all and all it's a pretty relaxed schedule (one week for rehearsal/pre-lighting, one for shooting). Seemed ambitious for a 37 page script, but I'm confident we can pull it off. Script is finalized.

Sherief Abraham, whom I worked with on The Girl from Yesterday will also be scoring for this film, this time for the entire piece! We work very well together so I'm excited to see what he's going to come up with.

User Nic Aragon has once again been nice enough to lend me his lights for this film, plus some other very useful piece of gears (Thanks Nic!).

I've uploaded the first BTS pics. That's four out of six of the cast members who will be playing the family in the film. We're planning to frame this pic and have it on the background as a set piece.
 
Cryogenic Filmworks said:
Now I've got that damn song stuck in my head. Thanks. :Drogar-BigGrin(DBG)

Good luck on your project.

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Click to expand...

I shouldn't have looked at this thread... damn!

And yeah, good luck, looks like it could go well. Projects of this nature (character driven in an emotional way) always seem most difficult to me, but I'm sure it's being handled well.
 
Headshots added! And a few quick test shots!

Casalen, I completely agree. Character-driven drama is definitely not my strong suit. But Irene, the director I'm working with has a very strong grasp of the emotional contents and I'm sure that we're in good hands. We just spent more than two hours yesterday with the cast discussing their characters.
 
Some more test shots uploaded (2nd post). First shoot date this Saturday! We got DVXuser RyanT coming out to AC for us and he's bringing his Kessler Crane!
 
The trailer for the film is now up! The film will be premiering on March 7th and 8th at 8 pm on the UC Berkeley campus. It would be great if local DVXusers come out and see it! For more information, please go to

www.theatrerice.com

After an intensive week of shooting (usually lasting well into 4 AM each day) and an epic three day editing marathon, the director and I have finalized the cut of Darkness. Final run time is 33 minutes including credits, not bad for a 37 pages script.

There's still plenty of challenges ahead. Alan, our sound editor has about four days left to mix the sound and Sherief, our composer, has three days to come up with a score for this film. There's also some VFX stuff to be accomplished by DVXuser Dory Breaux. I myself hasn't had much sleep and are walking around in a perpetual fog. But here are some stills for you guys to enjoy. Sorry, they were down-rezz and compressed into jpeg, so they're a bit soft, but the footage itself is quite sharp, as befit the A1.

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