SHORT: Between Us

[Huy Vu]

Plot Synopsis: When a shy exchange student from Vietnam begins spending time with an American classmate, their friendship soon turns into something more. But will their cultural differences drive them apart or does love truly conquers all?

Hi guys, I haven't posted on the forum in a while and that's because I haven't been making films for a long time. That's why I'm very proud to be able to introduce my latest short film, "Between Us", shot in July. We're still in post production for sound mixing and scoring and I hope to release it in February. I'll be including stills, some BTS and a production diary of how the project came to be.

 

[Huy Vu]

 

[Huy Vu]

Production Diary
June 2nd, 2013: Darian, a friend of mine currently living in Vietnam, contacted me and says that he needs my help with a short film to accompany his latest music video. The concept: a romance between him and an American girl. Not much to go on but I was intrigued by the theme and promised to give it some thoughts. The problem? He'll only be in the US until the middle of July, which means this gave us less than two weeks to write the script, do casting and get the crew and production together.
June 10th, 2013: Panic is setting in. Almost nothing was ready. Writing the script proved to be extremely difficult due to the subject matter; it's a challenging task any time you want to write a story about race. From the beginning I wanted to do a honest and thoughtful examination of the relationship between people from two completely different cultural background, but we had no idea what to focus on or whether there's a line somewhere that we shouldn't cross. Wild ideas are brought up and discarded ("Maybe I should profess my love to her shirtless in the rain.")
On top of that, we still haven't manage to find a lead actress because we had no script. All we had were the dates that we had to shoot on in order to meet the deadline before Darian had to leave; finding available crew members were proving to be problematic as well. Frantic casting notices are sent out. We're shooting that weekend.
June 12, 2013: Finally found our actress! Brianna came on board literally at the last minute, script unseen. I promised her that the script would be ready in two days, and she was actually fine with it. If it was me I don't know if I would have done the same. In desperation, I turned to a friend of mine for help. She's an amazingly gifted writer and the only one I know who might be able to turn things around on short notice. She promised me a draft by Saturday. We're shooting Sunday.
June 15th, 2013: The script arrives...and it is not what I'm looking for. My friend did a great job on short notice but the tone and the characters simply wasn't right. I was in SF at the time and with our backs to the wall, I grabbed Darian and Eric, our AC, for an emergency writing session. On the drive back to San Jose we began to talk about the things that we've experienced as Asian Americans, and amazingly out of those shared experiences we begin to cobble together an outline that we felt very strongly about. Three hours later we had a script. Incredibly, I had also managed to secure a crew on short notice. The shoot was on.
June 16th, 2013, Production Day 1: We had known from the beginning that we want most of the story to take place inside of the calligraphy shop that Darian owned. Not only is it gorgeous in term of production design (see stills), we would be able to shoot large chunks of the film inside relatively unmolested. The only problem? About a month ago somebody had smashed the large glass windows inside the store, and traffic noise was unbearable. Not an ideal situation, but we shouldered on knowing that ADR was a very real possibility.
We went for 14 hours that day. Everybody was a real trooper and we managed to cover 9 out of 12 pages which were all of our interior locations. The footage looked amazing. Everyone went home at 2 AM bone tired knowing that there was an 11 AM call time ahead.



June 17, 2013, Production Day 2: We did our two exterior scenes in downtown San Jose. Everything went smoothly until the part where one of the supporting actor had to scream out a racial epithet and we realized that there were kids around. Thankfully we were able to grab the shot in one take without creating any disturbance.
Brianna had suggested Mt. Diablo as the location for our next scene, and we drove there just in time to catch Magic Hour. The location was truly gorgeous. It was down to one last day, and one last scene.
June 22nd, Production Day 3: We shot a restaurant whose owner Darian knew. I'm simply amazed at the connection he had and the doors that he were able to open to the production. We did had some trouble finding extras but were able to shoot around it in the end. Against all odd, the film was wrapped.



September 24, 2013: After 3 months of editing I finally had a cut ready for ADR. As expected the audio from the day shoot in the shop was unusable, which made editing quite difficult. In addition, I discovered that we had lost 2 full setups because we failed to dump the card properly. Thankfully we were able to cover the scene using other takes, but the loss was definitely a blow. After a few weeks of back and forth on picking the studio, juggling schedules, we finally had our ADR session.



November 23rd, 2013: My composer informed me that he won't be able to start working on the film until January. Bummer. But on an extremely positive notes, my animator finally finished working on our end credit sequence. Simply put, it is breath taking.