May 13 Behind-The-Scenes Discussion of SHANGHAI CALLING @ DGA

On Sunday, May 13, I’ll be doing a discussion called “So You Want To Make A Film In China: The Making Of SHANGHAI CALLING” at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival.  The talk will be at the Director’s Guild of America, Theater 3.  Moderating the talk will be my good friend and mentor, director Henry Chan.  

For people in the movie business, one of the most intriguing aspects of SHANGHAI CALLING is how we managed to make the film at all, on such a small budget, while still abiding by all of the complex rules for Chinese “co-production” films.    

Joining me (hopefully) will be Director of Photography ARMANDO SALAS, who has shot two more films in China than me.  Armado is the guy responsible for the incredible look of SHANGHAI CALLING, so this will also be a great chance for all of you directors and DP’s out there to ask him how he got certain shots, what it’s like working with an entirely Chinese camera crew, and why he keeps going back to China to shoot movies.  

We’ll also be screening behind-the scenes footage edited together by our 1st Assistant Editor NATE ORLOFF. 

DGA Theater 3 only holds 37 people, so if this sounds like your cup of tea, get your tickets soon!  (And make sure your Mother’s Day brunch is done by 3:30PM)

@danielhsia

Who’s down with DCP?

I recently traveled to Beijing and Shanghai for two private screenings of my feature film, SHANGHAI CALLING.  Traveling anywhere with a movie is complicated.  If the movie is on film, it will be in five or six enormous, unwieldy film canisters.  If the movie is digital, it is easier to carry but far more likely to get misplaced, stolen, or pirated and put on the internet.  (A particularly great concern when traveling to China.)  So, prior to departing Los Angeles, I consulted the head projectionist at Arclight Cinemas Hollywood and the experts at Light Iron about the safest and highest quality method of screening the film overseas.  The answer: DCP (Digital Cinema Package).

DCP is exactly what it sounds like: A digital version of your movie that you can carry on a small hard drive and play on any DCP server in the world (such as the Dolby Digital Server DSS 200, pictured above).  It’s the standard for digital theater projection, and it’s incredible.  Prior to our screening in Beijing, we projected the movie in the theater as a test.  The picture and sound came out perfectly — a huge relief after spending so many weeks and months tweaking the color and sound mix in Los Angeles.  There’s nothing more frustrating than working to make your movie perfect, and then seeing it play the wrong way in a theater because of incorrect settings on the projector or sound system.  With DCP, the settings are global — the movie will play exactly as you intended it, no matter where you are in the world.  Even in China!

Best of all, an encrypted DCP is completely secure, thanks to an ingenious system designed to protect big studios from piracy… but is, in my opinion, even more useful for independent filmmakers who have their entire careers riding on one movie.  Here’s how it works: 

1. The DCP is created and encrypted by a post facility (in our case, Light Iron). 
2. We go to the movie theater and copy the DCP from our hard drive onto the theater’s Dolby Cinema Server. 
3. Light Iron looks up the theater’s DCP certificate number on the Dolby database, then uses that certificate number to create a KDM (Key Delivery Message).
4. We load the KDM onto the theater’s DCP server.  The server connects to the internet, verifies that the KDM, and the movie is “unlocked” on that server only.
5. The screening time arrives, and the movie plays in perfect digital quality.
6. After the screening, the KDM expires. The movie becomes “locked” again and can no longer be played.

My favorite part is step number 6. The geniuses at Dolby set up the DCP encryption system so that the KDM keys can be set to the world clock (at Greenwich Mean Time), making the movie playable only in a predetermined time window.  This removes any concern that, after your screening is over, somebody might play the movie again in an empty theater while recording it on a camcorder, and then post it on the internet.

It also allows you to test the movie in the morning, leave the theater, and come back for the evening screening without worrying about anything.  For Beijing, we created two KDMs: one for 10:00AM to 12:00PM (the test run) and one for 6:30PM-10:00PM (the screening time, with some cushion for an early or late start).  In between 12:00PM and 6:30PM, the movie was locked and unplayable.  I didn’t have to delete the file from the server or leave an assistant in the theater all day to make sure nobody was up to any funny business.

All of this was incredibly helpful to us, because we are a small production with limited resources and limited crew.  

The only downside of DCP and the “normalizing” of digital standards across the globe is that theater projectionists are now hardly involved in tweaking the sound and picture for their theaters.  If the projectionist is new to the job (often the case in China, given how many new movie theaters open every day), he may know absolutely nothing about what constitutes “good” sound and “good” picture.  

We ran into this problem in Shanghai.  The theater we rented in had a DCP system, but due to an unforeseen disagreement, the theater manager would not allow us to use their DCP server.  As a result, we had to screen the movie on our backup DVD, which is in standard definition rather than high definition, and stereo sound rather than 5.1 surround.  So I took extra care during the test screening to try and craft the picture and sound to be the best we could get it.  

Several times during the test, I told the projectionist, “It’s not loud enough, I can’t hear what they’re saying” or “I can see a flickering line in the top half of the screen” or “There’s a hum coming out of the left channel.”  These were significant problems, but the projectionist with whom I was working seemed blind and deaf to all them.  It took him several viewings to notice what I was noticing, and then his adjustments would result in other problems he was also incapable of noticing.  I wound up spending an entire day tweaking the sound and picture to the point of being “acceptable” for the screening.  Afterward, I overheard the projectionist complain to my assistant, “Your director has very high standards.”   Actually, I have normal standards.  The problem was that he had no standards at all.

Of course, if we’d just been able to screen the DCP as planned, the projectionist would hardly have been involved at all, and the picture and sound would have been perfect. 

Check out the trailer for SHANGHAI CALLING. 

@danielhsia

Who wants to see Love in the Butt?

Using notecards to write a movie

Here is the view from my desk right now.  Immediately in front of me is my computer.  I use two monitors — the monitor on the right is rotated vertically so I can have documents open in page view.  Behind the two screens is my giant cork board, with notecards all over it.  These notecards contain the movie I’m currently writing. 

(Yes, I blurred the photo.  My intention is to share a little about my process, not give away what I’m working on.)

Notecarding is actually Step 2 in my writing process.  What’s Step 1?  There are no photos of that… it’s a dull, lengthy process of flipping through magazines, drawing pictures, walking the dog, going to the gym, and writing in my notebook until I settle on an idea. The notebook must be a Moleskine, and the pen must be a Uni-Ball Signo 207 Micro 0.3mm, although I have been known to use nicer pens if I receive them as gifts.  The idea I settle on must: A) have enough complications to last the length of an entire movie; and B) be interesting enough to me that I will actually spend months working on it. I have, before, started writing scripts that satisfied requirement A but not requirement B. Those scripts never got finished. 

Once Step 1 is complete, I start putting notecards up on the board.  This is a practice I learned from TV writing.  When you have a dozen writers breaking a story together, you all need to see the layout as the story materializes.  Some shows use whiteboards & dry erase markers instead.  I prefer notecards because it allows me to move a scene around just by un-pinning it, sliding it to the new location, and pinning it down again.  Moving a scene that is written on a whiteboard is a pain in the ass, and messy too.  But the advantage of using a whiteboard is that you can write in big letters, which helps if any of your writers have bad eyesight.  A lot of writers have bad eyesight. 

I divide up my screenplay structure in standard Hollywood 3-act structure.  (Act I is rising action, Act II is development / complications, and Act III is the climax / resolution.)  I prefer short first acts.  Second acts are the hardest to think of because they’re the longest part of the movie and sometimes writing them is like killing time before you get to the climax.  This is why bad movies feel so draggy and slow in the middle. The third act is easy to write, or at least it should be, because you probably had to reveal the ending to multiple people as you were bouncing the story off of them to get their reactions.  

I can’t write a TV or movie script without putting the whole thing on notecards first.  I have to see the structure, feel it in my bones, know the whole movie forwards and backwards, before I start the actual writing.  For me, writing is like building a house. Yes, I could just grab some wood and nails and start building, but I’d most likely end up with a shitty looking house that would fall down at the first gust of wind.  I need blueprints to tell me where everything will go and explain why the house will remain standing when it’s finished.  These notecards are my blueprints.  Maybe you (I’m assuming you’re reading this because you are also a writer) don’t need to do this.  I bow down to you, sir or madam, because you are evidently a genius.  

The notecard process is actually kind of fun for me because I love story structure.  When I first started in this business, producers and agents told me that I had a great sense of story structure for a young writer.  I guess young writers are more interested in packing jokes or thrills into their scripts and less concerned about how the script works as a whole. 

As you can see there are still some post-it notes up on the board.  Post-its are my “temporary” notecards.  My goal is to have those replaced with actual notecards by the end of the night.  Then tomorrow I can think it all over, and I’ll hopefully start typing up an outline later this week.  The outline is Step 3.  Yep, there are still a ton of steps left. 

Wow, this was a lot longer than I thought it was going to be.  Happy to field any questions if there are any out there. 

Shanghai Calling trailer launch day

We launched the first trailer for “Shanghai Calling” today, the movie that I’ve been working on for the past 3 years.  It was strange — I’m dying for people to see this movie, but putting footage out there for the public for the very first time was extremely nerve-wracking.  For most of the week I was fretting over video streaming quality and the logistics of getting it on our facebook page and website.  Then I was worried about how to get people to pay attention. Then last night I suddenly panicked that maybe the trailer was terrible and completely unwatchable.  

Trailer’s been up for 12 hours now and it’s doing well.  Thousands of hits, lots of shares and retweets, and the responses have been very positive.  But this is hardly the end of the road — we are still working hard to do the premiere at a festival, and having a trailer out there will help increase our visibility and perhaps get people talking about us.   

OK, that’s my first Tumblr post.  I’m tired.  Maybe I’ll break some more story before I go to bed. 

WAIT, I almost forgot: I had breakfast with legendary director, cinematographer, and producer Jan de Bont today.  He shot DIE HARD!  And he directed SPEED!  Really nice guy.  

So yeah, today was a good day. 

View the trailer at ShanghaiCalling.com