I didn’t think music composition was a skill quite as loseable as, say, a foreign language, but today I got my comeuppance. While back in the old days I could have cranked out a whole minor piece in a day, I spent that much time just working out a few fragments for the score. (Okay, one reason is that I’m not all that great with the notation software and had a steep learning curve to climb; it’s really not intuitive in many ways, though I’m sure once you’re used to it it’s great.) One of the most frustrating parts of …
Tag: The Music of Jo Hyeja
Tinker Tailor / Nameless Gangster
Miss Jiwaku and I have lately seen two movies worth the price of admission: one that is #1 in Korea (범죄와의 전쟁 / Nameless Gangster — yeah, the English title is really unfortunate), and one that I’m pretty sure won’t be playing here for long: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I won’t say much about the latter beyond the observation that I learned something watching it: there’s no point in trying to watch an actually good, actually challenging movie in a CGV cinema. While I’ve gotten used to the audiences at anyplace except Cinematheque behaving like idiots, I hadn’t yet tried …
What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day 4
Well, there technically wasn’t a “Day 4” as this was a three-day shoot, but we worked about fifteen hours on our last day, actually finishing at close to 4:00am on Tuesday morning. I think it’s pretty easy to imagine why I didn’t have a lot of insights to post (or energy to post them) at the end of shooting last night. But thinking over yesterday, there are a few insights I have: Wrapping up shooting feels good no matter how bloody tired you are by the end of it. We sent our star home in a cab at close to …
What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day 3
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…
What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day 2
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 …
What I’ve Learned Shooting The Music of Jo Hyeja, Day1
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 …
The Music of Jo Hyeja Proceeds Apace
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, …
The Music of Jo Hyeja is a Go…
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 …
HP Lovecraft and the (Monkey) Puzzle of the “Good Lovecraftian Film”
I was talking with my friend Chris about a bunch of SF- (and, to a lesser degree, fantasy-) -related things the other day — one of those discussions where you are trying to get at the heart of how we read genre and why, reader/viewer expectations for genre texts and media, and so on. One of the interesting points that came up was how it’s so difficult to make a good Lovecraftian film, and the fact that people keep trying and trying. This has stuck out in my mind as a question to myself, since for a few months now …