Category: FILMMAKING

The Music of Jo Hyeja: Now on DVD!

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I couldn’t be prouder of my wife, whose first short film, “The Music of Jo Hyeja” is now available on DVD, as part of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival Classics Vol. 1 Short Film Collection. Well, technically it’s been out a little while, but a week or so ago, I think it was, she received her contributor copies of the DVD. How spectacular: images from all the films adorn the cover, but hers take a prominent place. What’s more exciting to me is: this is South Korea’s first Lovecraftian adaptation to the screen, and it did really well in that capacity. …

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Daerijeon: The Proxy War—Online Now!

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Well, folks, it took two and a half years—actually, almost three—but finally, Mrs. Jiwaku’s short film adaptation of the famous Korean SF writer/film-critic Djuna‘s novella (so-so translation here), “Daerijeon: The Proxy War” is online. You can see it over at Youtube, though I’ll embed it here for your convenience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jCdPB_PsDo Note, that’s set to autoload the English subtitles by Youtube’s caption function. You might want to resize the captions so they look good (and they look best in fullscreen mode). If you do enjoy it, please share it! That’s pretty much the biggest encouragement you can give her as a film director, and it will help …

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Brutal Rice Films—Out and Coming Soon!

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This entry is part 15 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

I’ve mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter, but my wife has been releasing the films she’s made so far on Youtube, every ten days in July. They’re Korean-language films, but with English (and sometimes other) subtitles. On July 10th, she posted her award-winning debut short “The Music of Jo Hyeja”, which regular readers will know is our Korean modernization of Lovecraft’s classic story “The Music of Erich Zann”: https://youtu.be/lUTjXyR0T50 On the 20th, she posted her second film, another award-winner; this time, it’s a Korean zombie apocalypse, “Environmental Pressures & Species Adaptation”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cd9jfJhMXY There’s one more film coming: the long-awaited “Daerijeon: The Proxy War”, based on the …

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Daerijeon Soundtrack–Insight Strikes!

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So, I had a realization the other day, while trying to wrap my brain around this project I’m working on. Essentially, the insight came in two steps. I was talking to my wife about creative ways to get around the fact we’re missing clips and video content that was originally mandated in the screenplay for our current film project. One of the points I made was that, since we cannot reshoot anything, it’s up to us to think creatively about how to rework the script to tell the story, while taking up the challenge of turning the missing pieces into …

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Musical Sketches

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So, I’ve just posted some sketches for the soundtrack I was working on in early March for my wife’s film project–that is, 대리전/”The Proxy War”. I won’t be doing any more work on the sketches till we have a rough cut, but I figured it might interest some people. This film is SF, comedic but also action, and yet in a lot of ways it’s conceived as being in the mode of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, which means that narration is a huge part of how the story gets across. By the way, the soundtrack material has taken up so …

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The Gay Marriage-Pocalypse

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This year, I’ve had two random people on Facebook who’d friended me for completely random reasons–one, a fellow saxophonist in Korea, and the other an Ezra Pound enthusiast in Indiana–completely lose their marbles on my Facebook Wall, after I posted something in support of marriage equality. The arguments are almost always the same: somehow my unapologetic atheism indicts my position; somehow they think I must be gay (presumably, because what heterosexual could support homosexual marriage? Ahem…); somehow gay marriage not being procreative is the problem, but not the only one (just one in a bag of trick arguments they pull …

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My Wife, and Her Ass-Kicking Ways…

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Yeah, she got another award: this time, it’s the Abby Normal Award for Innovation, awarded by the Zompire Undead Film Festival in Portland. (See the post on Brutal Rice Productions’ site.) (I’m not quite sure why my name is on there, since I didn’t co-direct. Maybe they felt that the “innovation” was related to the script, or something, I’m not sure… but in this case, I really wasn’t very involved in the making of the movie… just the story and one draft of the script, soundtrack, and a little scattered foley, none of which are things that give one “collaborator” …

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Thoughts On Ellen Oh’s Advice re: #DiversityinSFF

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While looking up a little more information for a post to add to my series on SF in South Korea (though the post is about Koreans outside Korea writing speculative fiction) I ran across this post at the website of Ellen Oh, one of the authors I’ll be discussing in that forthcoming post. Oh is the Korean-American author of a series of books titled The Prophecy series, which are a high fantasy trilogy set in what is (according to this interview) a fantastical version of Korea modeled on the Three Kingdoms period. (I’ll have more to say in a forthcoming …

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Under the Knife Trailer

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Well, I just heard back from my friend Josh Hoffman, who’s working on the rough cut for his indie horror/thriller film, Under the Knife. This is, to be clear, Josh’s film, not ours, though we did show up to help out on production for a couple of days during the shoot. (Which was, if I remember right, in February of this year, just before we left Korea.) Under the Knife is set mostly in Korea, and I’d sum it up as, say, “The Manchurian Candidate meets 200 Pounds Beauty.” (The latter is a Korea film about a woman who decides …

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