good turnout at 3 mins fest

The 3 mins. film fest at root division was over and i think it was much better than i expected. The turnout was great, more than 100 people attended and since the screening venue was so small, it was totally overcrowded and most of us had to stand on the two sides of the room... (Thanks to the promotion at  SFweekly and also Chronicle - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/09/NS3QR...Read more

3 mins film fest coming this sat in downtown sf

last week I have spent an afternoon to make a 3 minute short film, and it will be screened at "The Three-Minute Film Festival" hosted by Root Division, a non-profit art organization based in the Mission area this weekend.

Besides my film, some of my friends also have their films lined up for the fest. Don't expect

anything very formal or artistic, it is more like an informal but fun event and so if any of you in town wanna see some interesting short films and have a drink, do drop ...Read more

Antonioni and Bergman

So two of the world's greatest directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman passed away on the same day of July 30 2007...

I really don't know what to say...... there are just too many miserable news for the international cinema recently...

writer's block

Wow, it has been a while since I last wrote an entry...

life is just as boring as usual, everything is in progress but not much update. I think what I am experiencing now is more like a writer having a writer's block.

There are many ways to solve the problem of writer's block, but for me, I guess the best way is to just keep writing. Inspiration and creativity come during the writing process. It seems that if you are idle for too long, you just lack the initiative to move on. That's why I think the best way to ...Read more

Cafe Lumiere - The Eastern approach

Cafe Lumiere, one of my favorite movies in the last few years. It is definitely not an easy film to grasp, a lot of my friends couldn't even finish it, and some are totally baffled and don't know what the director wants to convey.

What I think is that, it may not be an excellent film, but then it is certainly not as difficult to understand as it looks like.

So...Read more

The Superman experience

I just got the dvd of Superman Returns, yeah, it is not a new film, but somehow it was on sale at the store and so just decided to grab one.

Although Superman Returns isn't quite a very good film, it is an important one for me, coz it just brings back quite a lot of old and new memories...

Back in the days when I was a kid, my brother and I always loved to dress up like superm...Read more

A not so bright summer day

It has been quite a while since I last wrote anything. My internet connection seems to be having quite some problems and every night it just goes on and off, making it very difficult for me to get online...

So the biggest news last week was probably the death of Edward Yang. When I first read about it, I was kinda shocked. Even though I have heard about rumors for a number of years sayi...Read more

allergy

yesterday my friend came to my home, and she just couldn't stop sneezing and blowing her nose, and it was all because of my dog...

thinking about that, since i started raising my dog 7 years ago, i am always having a hard time with the allergy problem. i remember back when i was in hk, the humid weather and air-con always drove me crazy, but once i came to the states, its' all gone.. but since my dog came, the allergy just started to come back...

allergy isnt a curable disease, i mean, sure there is treatment you can take to s...Read more

Actors: Professional vs Amateur

I am sure most new filmmakers have had the struggles of whether to use professional actors or not. I have worked with both actors who have received fomal acting training and ones who are inexperienced, I think to answer this question, it depends heavily on the nature of your project most. But then, I guess a very general opinions about the two types are as below:

The good things about trained actors are that they know what they are doing on the set. They know how to develop their characters, they know filmmaking is all...Read more

The decline of art...

"The artist cannot, and has no right to, lower himself to some abstract, standardised level for the sake of a misconstrued notion of greater accessibility and understanding. If he did, it could only lead to the decline of art... Marx said, 'If you want to enjoy art, you must be artistically educated.' The artist cannot make a specific aim of being understandable - it would be quite as absurd as its opposite: trying to be incomprehensible."

Andrei Tarkovsky in Sculpting in TimeI totally agree with this quote ab...Read more