Pinilakang Tabing - Another fearless attempt on Filmmaking [Updated]

Amadeo Plaza. Panning shot. I bruised my heel after this pictorial. Now, I’m walking like a prick for a month already.

It’s a big dilemma in our part when we are tasked to make a film in school, knowing that us Journalism majors are not provided with enough facilities and equipment to utilize in the field of moviemaking. Talk about journ majors producing a feature film instead of docus or news vids

The first time we did a short flick was two years ago, when our annoying Intro to Film instructor ordered all second year Journ studes (that’s 25 of us) to compete with the junior Journ studes in a Film fest. For our instructor’s convenience, she assigned her Film Criticism class to, well, criticize our works, do the verdict, and declare the winner, which obviously was not anyone in the fest for the record while our instructor got home with our money supposedly for the fest proper. (Our plans of getting a refund didn’t even start).

Our first film, Istiryotayp, was all about the, as the name implies, stereotypical struggles of a Romeo and Juliet based couple. You know, langit siya lupa ako conflict. And because of our director’s insistence, a ‘brokeback’ couple was added to give the movie a little bit of, as the title implies, stereotypical third party twist (the struggling homosexual third party becomes blander and blander nowadays because of our mainstream moviemakers). I portrayed a stereotypical father named Don Zulueta who “owns everything but loved by none”, and then handled everything on the post-production. At that time we were so lucky to have an uber wealthy classmate who, not only that he has a son the same age as ours to mingle with, and a fortune to squander, but also allowed us to use his very stylish house that was used in “Maging Sino Ka Man” series.

His crib was so damn beautiful, we nearly had our clothes packed up for the mass migration. Magpapaampon na kami. Too bad, they’re selling the house for P17M in order to build a bigger, more stylish crib in Amadeo, Cavite.

Haven’t uploaded this movie yet but you may click this or the image below to view my lazily-edited bloopers of Istiryotayp.

Marian Rivera’s naked. Marian Rivera’s naked. Oweee! Lol.

It was a fearless attempt, though, considering the fact that we have never ever tried making a film before. Even our instructor who bragged about her part-time work with our late Pinoy movie supremo Lino Brocka few ages ago, didn’t even care about teaching us the basics of film making. Like how to utilize the light, the cam, and everything film gibberish. Thus, every scrap we consolidated into a 1-hour short film (hahaha) became our priceless gem for our block which we regularly watch each time we get together.

However, upon the start of our second semester a year after, our Laws of Mass Media instructor suddenly twisted his mind and ordered us to make a short flick about the life of a journalist. Take note: he insisted that the journalist we’re gonna use as subject for our film has already faced a case in court and had a court ruling already accessible publicly. Luckily, Ms. Ellen Tordesillas was so kind to accommodate us in just a short notice and had her interviewed (at the time when they filed a class suit against First Gentleman Mike Arroyo). She even gave us a free treat at Pizza Hut and introduced us to Ms. Sol Vanzi, a former ABC reporter. There had been a lot of sharing about the Philippine mass media while enjoying her delectable seafood fettuccini and her beef ravioli. So lucky to have Ma’am Tordesillas. I have already posted this film in my previous blog.

And now, with a few months nearing to tenteneen teteteneen, our new Film Criticism instructor gave us another task for our final examination—produce a short film and then thoroughly criticize it scholastically.

Well, here it is. Our third (and probably, unless someone tells us to do another one, our last) attempt for a (decent) film, entitled “S.M.S”.

S.M.S - A Trilogy (full version via Stage6)

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~~An updated full version of our film is currently being published in DailyMotion just so you want a better, faster streaming version of S.M.S.~~ DailyMotion has finally validated my movie as CreativeContent so now, you can enjoy watching it. You might as well check out my other Youtube, Veoh, and DailyMotion uploads of this film, as well as other videos in my account.

Via DailyMotion:

S.M.S - Sampalataya - Mata - Suwail (Full Version)Acronym for “Sampalataya” (Worship), “Mata” (Eye), and “Suwail” (Insolent), S.M.S is a wish-wash of some of the most forwarded stories via text messages. The movie actually starts with the introduction of “Suwail” characters while the scenarios “Sampalataya” and “Mata” are the text messages read by Andrei, the cellphone guy.The movie’s plot isn’t that complicated. A guy reads tragic text messages without knowing that his own story is a tragic text story by itself. It’s actually a simple film that concentrates on family values and, incidentally, faith– where the main characters always realize a grave fact in the end. If we proceeded with all the text messages, it might have been a 2-hour feature film.

SENSELESS FACTS:

Formerly dubbed ‘Project: Text Quotes’, S.M.S is a trilogy of tragic stories forwarded via SMS. Due to the loss of some of our colleagues’ cellphones and erasure of their inboxes, we tried to search these quotes on the internet.
In the original setup, the film rooted for nine stories, all with their scenario titles: the insolent son (”susi”), the atheist couple (”akap”), the ugly daughter (”manyika”), the car-scratching kid (”daliri”), the secretary child (”gatas”), the shortcut hesitation (”shortcut”), the one-eyed mother (”inay”), and the I-Love-You teddy bear (”bear”). However, due to [[insert cramming alibis, time mismanagement, and over-piled projects and activities in school here]], we managed to accomplish only 3.
Our shooting dates were barbaric. We always had conflicting schedules and late-comers. IT took us 5 separate working days to shoot.
We ran out of hospitals and clinics to use as our location so we decided to use our university slash Korean hostel for the hospital scenes.
We normally ran out of available light. Thank God Brightness and Contrast and Color Corrector is here.
We had a twin portraying Thei in the Sampalataya scenario. The other twin wasn’t supposed to act, but on our last shooting day, Johanster just had his tantrums. We asked his twin, Johannes, to replace him. Both of them had a hard time pronouncing the word “yumakap”. So we changed it to “yumapos”, which we found unintelligible after the editing.
I edited the movie for 30 f*ckin’ straight hours. Not because I find the editing difficult, but I tried to experiment on every conjoining of the sequences. Since Adobe Premiere CS3 is so f*ckin’ gluttonous in memory, I used an equally powerful, yet efficiently fast Sony Vegas 8. Yes, this nifty Vegas would even work seamlessly on a Pentium III-powered desktop.
Unfortunately, yours truly had a short stint in the film. I was initially placed on the ungrateful son of the one-eyed mom character (whose left eye looked like it just had a cosmetic vaginal surgery). But because I looked more like a father than a teenage jerk, they swished 5 tablespoons of egg white all over my face. Voila, la transformation magnifique—grande-pere a l’oeuf. (But does the doctor actor looks more adult than me? What do you think? :-))
I just love Zelle’s “Sabihin”. I love dark, angsty yet depressive songs like this. Wanna have a list? Because of You by Kelly Clarkson, My Immortal by Evanescence, My Chemical Romance’s “I don’t Love You” and the like. Therefore, I placed it on the credits portion.
My laptop has been all around our pre and post production—a log book of minutes of our meetings, a portable on-location monitor, a word processor, and a video editing workstation. Bugbog na bugbog ang laptop ko since every shooting and editing my thesis group, at the same time, use this laptop for our manuscript and all. Not to mention that I was also the Editor in Chief of our tabloid project, as well as taking the responsibility of a multi-purpose news reporter, layout/graphic artist and cartoonist of the paper. And never I had eyebags. I’m so thankful for Eat Bulaga for giving me a durable, hardworking notebook (teary-eyes)