Fighting Faith : Short Film

The last few months has been a very busy one for me and I'm very thankful for that.  Aside from working on the huge blockbuster "2012", I had the opportunity to work on a short film between shoot days on "2012".

The Storyline:

The film is called "Fighting Faith".  It's the story of Alex, a gang boss's son, who is being trained by his father's lieutenant, Kyran, to fight and help accomplish his father's goals.  Kyran, who fights with ice is his veins, is as loyal as they come.  He trains Alex to fight with the same hatred and intent that has earned him his position as Sun Yee's (Gang boss) right hand man.  Alex and Kyran are ordered to capture an opposing gang boss's daughter for leverage and Alex finds new power and motivation when fighting for the right reasons.

Sidenotes from my roommate writer, Chris Tom.

Alex is short for Alexandre, which means 'Protector of Men,' which is pretty

easy to understand.

Kyran means 'The Dark One,' or one who is kept in the dark. Cole goes along

the same theme.

Lucille is latin derived from the word 'light.' Lucille comes from Lucia,

which is an alternative name.

Sun in this case is self-explanatory.

The concept running here is going with the idea that if you're too close to

the sun, you'll be blinded to everything around you. This is, in a way, a

paradox because the sun is supposed to illuminate things, but instead it

blinds things. This is the same way with Alex because the 'Sun,' or the

boss, does not let him see that his weakness is really a form of strength.

Kyran as being 'the dark one,' also goes with this idea, in that it's kind

of a paradox; Kyran is trying to become the 'son' of Sun, but he cannot, and

therefore he's sort of a 'dark' one.

Pre-Pro-Post Production:

A few months back we had 2 students walk into our Wushu class observing us training.  At the end of the class after getting a heads up from our coach, Bruce Fontaine, they approached me and my younger brother Owen and asked if we would help them in their film.  Alison Chen, the director, and Vivian, her friend and assistant director were looking to do a short with some martial arts.  They found our club website and came in looking for actors for their film with a martial arts background.

That's Alison in the middle, Owen on the right and I'm on the left.  At the Wushu club.

After hearing about Alison's ideas and goals of this project, I asked her to send me the script and scheduled a meeting with the crew.  This was to be her final project in the Film program at BCIT and she wanted it to be perfect.  She was as ambitious as I was and that's the kind of passion that I love to work with.

I looked at the script and much doubt crossed my mind.  Her assistant Vivian did most of the talking in our first meeting, but after reading her script it was obvious English wasn't her first language.  I met with the crew and I have to say I was quite impressed.  She was definitely not a writer, but she had a lot of people that believed in her and wanted to help her out with this.  There were about 12 people at the first meeting, and all of them very competent at what they signed up to do.  She was very organized, and had all the scenes, shots and days scheduled and broken down in colour coordinated sheet.  I felt very bad doing this but I asked her if I could get my roommate, Chris Tom, to look over the script a bit and make a few changes.  That was hard to do with everyone there and after a short discussion of where he would go with the script changes we left it at that.

Chris looked at it and ended up rewriting the whole thing.  Haha..  I knew he would.  There were too many characters for a 30 minute short, many plot holes and honestly I didn't really understand the motivations of my character reading it through.  But after talking with Alison, we had a good understanding of the themes and messages that she wanted to show in this film.

2 weeks later we were on set and ready to shoot our first day.  Right away I was once again very impressed with the crew.  In terms of production value, this was quite impressive.  Still a long way from "2012" which I was working on the day before, but it was the biggest thing I've seen put together for a student film.  They had 3 cameras going.  The "A" Camera itself was a $20,000 set up (I'm really into filming equipment since I purchased my XH-A1).  And they had a huge arsenal of lights at their disposal.  Our make up artist, Xiao Ning, graduate from Blanche Macdonald, had her first experience doing make up for film.  A lot different than what I was used to, but I didn't say anything, just wanted to see how it would turn out.  She did it very similar to stage make up I would say.

My younger brother Owen.  First time doing any acting.  He did pretty good.  Aspiring stunt performer, he's well on his way.

From the first day, working out the framing.

The 3 day scheduled shoot quickly turned into 5 days.  I thought it was a little tight looking at the schedule, but we did very good on time, sacrificing safety takes!  Roland from "2012" would do 20 takes until he had everything perfect before moving on.  I was not ready for 1 hit wonders and many times I thought we were just doing a rehearsal and we were moving on after it.  God I hope this turns out well.

The female lead, Natalie Zhang and I.

One of the biggest things that I wish I could do over was the last scene.  It was the most emotionally draining scene and it was the first thing scheduled for that morning.  The problem I had with it was that it was Roland Emmerich's birthday party the night before and I had peeled myself away from that with 3 hours of sleep before this big monologue where my character breaks down and a big fight scene right after it.  Alison asked me to cry out of one eye.. I could hardly keep them open and Xiao Ning didn't have any eye drops.  We did it twice and moved on... I have no idea what to expect of that one.

And here's part of the cast/crew.  Left to right: Osric Chau (Alex), Rosco (Camera B operator), Owen (Kyran), Poken (Camera A operator), Natelie (Lucille), Alison (Director), Vivian (1st A.D.), Xiao Ning (Make up)

Overall it was a very good little production.  We finished!  That was the important part.  It is now going through extensive post production and should be finished in the next week or so.

More pictures up in album.