What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day 3

This entry is part 5 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

What I’ve learned today… Well, I’m freaking tired, it’s past 11:00am, I have classes in 11 hours, and we’re not yet done. In fact, we’re just on a break because the SD card in the camera got filled up. All of that isn’t something I’ve learned, but it is something that’s stopping me from putting together very much. I’ll try post some thoughts and insights tomorrow…

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What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day 2

This entry is part 4 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

Things I learned on day two of our shoot: Whatever the administrators say, refusing to turn on the heating system in our building until the ambient temperature is 5°C is evil. We’re not Inuit, after all. This isn’t normal in Korean housing situations, is it? It seems new to me… and our actors were commenting on how cold it is in our place. A cast and crew goes through food like nobody’s business. The helpful thing for a low-budget production without people to run off and get food is that, once you get time for a food break — can’t …

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What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day1

This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

We just finished day one of three shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja. I’m excited by the footage I’ve seen, and my feet and back hurt like hell. (It was a long day.) I should probably just go to sleep, as we have two more long days ahead of us, but I want to take some notes… so I’m posting now. Here’s what I’ve learned: Having one person around who is a serious pro-type, who is further up the learning curve than you are, and who is excited about the project, helps immensely. Miss Jiwaku asked a friend from her …

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The Music of Jo Hyeja Proceeds Apace

This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

I mentioned a while back that Miss Jiwaku and I are working on a Korean adaptation of the HP Lovecraft short story, “The Music of Erich Zann,” which we’ve titled The Music of Jo Hyeja. It blows my mind to say it, since last weekend was overloaded, but… we’re shooting it this weekend. We’ve got some of the locations locked in, we have some leads for things we need, and we just held auditions last week for the main parts. I was a bit worried, as one role in particular was seeming to turn out to be difficult to cast, …

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The Music of Jo Hyeja is a Go…

This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series Making "The Music of Jo Hyeja"

Well, I claimed that I got a lot less done this past summer in terms of my writing than I’d hoped — since I’d been hoping to draft a novel — but in fact, I did pull off something in my writing that I’m very pleased with: a script for a short Korean film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann.” I’ve reflected in the past on how challenging it is to adapt Lovecraft to a Korean setting, but it’s less so with a story like this one, since the horror is more simply existential; there is, of …

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