AFP Film #1
Saturday, May 26, 2007 |  
And that's it. It has been done. Over. Zippy. Zoppo. Zoozoo and whathaveyou.

This shoot cannot be appreciated by anyone without the knowledge of whatever happened before it and what happened on it. Like our main actor, Nader Tadros, said,"If anything, we should be making a story on all of you instead of us!"

Screw the others if they get an AD. Screw the others if they laugh at our SGD1,500 budget while they keep their SGD200. My team members have suffered because of my faults.. because of my story... because of my script... but god-fucking-damn... they never fucking gave up. And they made this happen. Respect? Jowell, Gabby, Rahman,.... they deserve it.

I'll update more once i get the pictures from our production stills guy, Kai Xiang. I really do hope he managed to get plenty of pictures (that are interesting) before he left all of a sudden. Seem to be having some problems to meet him now, tbh.

To later!
(p.s. Oh yeah.. the gunshots... wow.)


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UPDATE

I'm not gonna wait for Kai Xiang to hand over the pictures so that i can update this little blog of mine.

So here's two clips of the gunshots that we all wanna see. I think there's more floating around....


Here's our bad guy, Samy, about to shoot our hero before reaching for the bag of money. Our assistant director Shaun says, "Mark it" to initiate the clapper board clap, Rahman, our cinematographer goes "Frame", which means all i gotta do now is say, "Action!".

This was our bad shot btw... didnt like the part he got shot.

Jimmy Low was on set and he was particular about the real weapons. Firstly it's a real weapon and even though it's firing blanks, the air pressure itself could tear clothes apart. Andy Lau shot the butt portion of his jeans out one time. Another thing was we must never drop the gun.....

... well we dropped the gun and I got the knock on the head. Ever had a 50 year old man call you 'fucker' 20 times in a row? This shot required Samy to lay off a shot, grab the pouch, then BAM.. shot in the leg, drops to the floor and hides to the van. In order not to screw up a real weapon, we had to freeze-act in the middle to be able to switch to the dummy glock. I dont like freeze-acting the actors but well...

(fucking christ i couldve said all that in jsut one sentence couldnt I...)

This is the second clip. It's our hero, Nader Tadros (real name), hiding behind a wall, peeking out, gets back in cover, cocks the beretta, and BANG down to the leg of the bad guy.

You can see me hiding behind Rahman in this clip and if you dare question my manliness in the face of staged gunfire by the body posture I am in then I shall curse you to have a fetish for dead snails.
And there in the blue jersey holding the boom is my mental support, Daryl. Whoo! Without you bro i wouldve felt so lost. (I know what you're thinking. The answer is 'Yes')



During the shoot we had a crowd of people behind the camera, outside the fence, looking out of the windows. Everyone was watching. I was afraid. Afraid of what? I dont know. But just afraid. My talents were having fun though. In between shots when Rahman was moving the camera to the next set-up, Nader had to go back and forth to the crowd to sign autographs and take pictures with the aunties there.

There were some fake blood used in the shoot as well but it seems like noone found that special enough to film down. We also had a body hit effect planned but due to time constraints and the powers of the universe against us, we didnt use it. I regretted.

All in all these special effects alone costs SGD500 dollars. And that explains why nobody wants me to sit in the director's chair again (amongst other, more serious issues).

The film has been sent to be developed already and this Thursday the team and I are going down to watch the telecine process. It's basically where we see what we shot and tune up the image before sending it to the editing suite.
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