San Diego Asian Film Foundation Blog

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June 12, 2008

Interns Signing Off

Clint and Jonathan's Final Blog

High Tech High Multimedia Festival organized by SDAFF interns Clint Buchhauser and Jonathan Abhay

Our last big internship project at SDAFF was to put on a film festival at our school. Jonathan and I had been thinking about it for a while, but didn't start setting it up until about a week prior to it. We decided to host the film festival at lunch, and show a mix of student films and our favorite SDAFF films. Since our lunch is only 45 minutes long, we wanted our festival length to be about a half hour of footage. The films we chose from SDAFF were The Trainee, Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot, and Spam Ku. The rest of the time we had would be student films.

Once we had 2 student entrees, we were at a half hour of footage. Our next step was to advertise. We sent out 2 email blasts and put posters up all over the school. LeAnn also gave us an Ipod Shuffle as a prize for our film festival. This really helped give them a reason to come to our film festival, besides just to see the film.
Our film festival ended up being a success. We got a pretty big crowd- around 20 people. We also had some people in the audience who we didn't know. We were glad that our audience wasn't just our friends. The audience's favorite films seemed to be Spam Ku, Uno Shark, and Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot. People were also very excited when we raffled off the Ipod. As I read off the winning number, you could hear members of the audience saying “Awww” when their raffle ticket didn't match. A girl who had recently had her Ipod stolen won, and she was very excited about winning the Ipod. I had a lot of fun, and it was great seeing the audience laugh and enjoy the festival.

- Clint

Jonathan Abhay, Clint Buchhauser with George Lin

So this marks the end of my high school internship experience and this'll be my very last blog as the intern. I guess the culmination of my internship was represented through our final project. Which was for Clint and I to plan, market and run our very own film festival from the information we learned throughout the course of the internship. For this we had to plan every aspect of a festival, being the films we exhibited to marketing and campaigning. We managed to do so, and we also gave out an iPod Shuffle for a random audience member.

I'm glad that we got to do so many things through this internship from making movies to running a festival and I have learned so much in terms of how a business is ran. It gave me many ideas for what I am going to do for the future, whether it'd be in film or marketing or wherever.

- Jonathan

Jonathan Abhay, Clint Buchhauser, George Lin, Lee Ann Kim, Mye Hoang, and Daniel Matthews

11:28pm | Ryan Wong

Mye knows how to Cannes now

After 3 days of travel and the unfortunate timing of train strikes, I got to Cannes by a one hour bus ride from Nice for 1 euro. The bus was packed of course, because of the mayhem of the train strikes, but luckily I was small enough to squeeze in.
It took a day to get acquainted with the festival and the place I was staying at. Luckily I scored a bed in an apt 15 mins walking distance from the Croissette (the street with all the Cannes action) because I came in at the end of the festival as people were leaving early. Of course the downside to this is that I’ve missed all the great parties and opportunities for celeb sightings. But, since it’s my first time at Cannes, it’s better to ease into it all, right?
So the first thing I needed to do was pick up my all-important festival badge at the Palais (the grand center of Cannes). One of my roommies helped me with this, and I am eternally grateful to her. When you don’t speak French, there’s no one to help you and if you ask for help, you are obviously a rookie and you obviously don’t deserve to be at the festival. So needless to say, if she had not helped me, I would have never figured anything out. Anyway, after going through security, I was allowed to pick up my badge and limited edition Cannes bag. Any freebie is very exciting. Then my new friend took me to another area to show me how to use the terminals for requesting invitations to films showing at the Lumiere theatre (this is where all the fancy red carpet premieres happen). The Lumiere is the only venue that requires both a badge and an invitation (which is like a ticket, but you can’t buy it, so it’s called an invitation).
If you want an invitation, you have to constantly go to one of these terminals and check on the status of tickets. Everyone with a badge is ranked and I was a low-ranking person. Every badge holder is on the clock from the moment they pick up their badge. You start out with an assigned number of points (I got 100) and then every hour, points are added to your bank of points. If you have enough points and invitations are still available, you can withdraw points from your “bank” and get a golden invitation. And then if you’re that lucky, you get to dress up in an evening gown or tux for the screening. The process is a headache but I can understand why the process is in place. If it weren’t there, people would be collecting invitations and hawking them right and left.
Anyway, I had no luck with this system. My rank was far too low. I tried to get an invitation to see THE GOOD,THE BAD, THE WEIRD a Korean film making its World Premiere. It was so new, the special effects weren’t even finished. I heard that it was incredible, like INDIANA JONES meets KUNG FU HUSTLE. I also heard a rumor that Mel Gibson has picked up the US remake rights already.
I got to see some films at the Directors Fortnight which is a showcase you can actually buy tickets to. Tickets are only 7euro. One of the films was from New York called THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED and it was picked up by IFC for distribution. Shot on a very low budget, the film followed a pickpocket of sorts in a day-in-the-life style of filmmaking around New York City. The film won an award and before the film, there was a long awards ceremony for all the Directors Fortnight winners entirely in French. That part was a snooze.
I was in Cannes for the closing weekend and despite the fact everyone said it would die down, it didn’t. It was still packed and clausterphobic. Cannes is one of the most hostile and inhospitable film festivals one can ever attend. You’re on your own (unless you’re lucky enough to find an American who knows how to Cannes and is willing to help you). Ticket lines are either obvious or elusively hidden around the corner of some building you didn’t know existed and no one cares to help you find it so you might wind up waiting in the completely wrong line. You’ll constantly bump into security guards everywhere you go. They are ready to scrutinize your badge (and photo) and tell you you’re in the wrong place or that you can’t bring that camera inside. And take my word for it, these people are MEAN. They don’t care if you’re lost or confused, they want you to go away. And yet, everyone STILL has to go to Cannes. It’s still a sight to be seen. The scope of it is huge. I couldn’t even get a decent photograph that really shows the size of it. The Palais is just bigger than life.
The biggest savior at the fest was running into the AFI programmers. They were so helpful to me (the rookie) with their tips and advice. I had a blast spending late nights chatting with them, hearing stories about parties with Will Smith or Wong Kar Wai.
I also enjoyed walking around the Film Market. Imagine a tradeshow - like Comic-com with no toys and almost everyone is speaking French. But tons of publications and promo flyers are available to pick up with all the advance buzz of films yet to come or be made. One of the things I learned is that it is REALLY hard to book meetings with distributors in the film market. You kinda have to just “run into” people. This is mainly because everyone is using a SIM card on an unlocked phone and no one wants to use their precious minutes (including myself) to call you back. I bought hundreds of dollars of minutes (some by error) and used most of it to call my roommates or send text messages. A tip if you ever go to France: buy the ORANGE sim card. Orange has a monopoly at most stores, so if you buy a different brand of sim card, you are out of luck when you try to find a recharge of minutes.
Despite all the confusion and headaches, the trip was nonetheless very exciting. It’s the world’s biggest film festival and it’s in the beautiful French Riviera. Everything could go wrong but you’ll still have one of the most memorable and exciting trips of your life. I’d totally do it again and I’d do everything better…

8:39pm | Mye Hoang

June 08, 2008

The Slanted Screen

Clint and Jonathan's latest blog

Last week Jonathan and I watched this documentary called "The Slanted Screen." We stumbled upon this by doing our normal archiving work and George, then Mye, then everyone else, asked us to view it and so we did.

This prompted us the question, why is cinema in America equitable? This stemmed from watching and reading a book/documentaries by Jared Diamond called "Guns, Germs and Steel." Where he ask the same question on a grander scale.

Basically "The Slanted Screen" is a documentary about Asian portrayals in cinema. Jonathan pointed out seeing some of these actors in movies before, but the most notable ones were Bobby Lee from Mad TV and that guy from Mortal Kombat, whose actual name is Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. The film was basically a history of the first Asian actors in America Cinema. The film discussed white people, acting as Asians in yellow face and how these actual Asian actors felt about. Whether it would had been better to just cast actual Asian. It also discusses the stereotypical roles with accompanying stereotypical accents that Asians fill in for a movie. Such as a waiter, nerd, or in some cases a foreign exchange student.
This made Jonathan and I think about the roles that Asians actually have in film because of all the films we have seen at the office, we have been swayed to think that it's not that small of a minority anyways because that's all there is here. Just like at the end of the movie, we discuss that nowadays Asians are playing different roles besides the Bruce Lee roles. The biggest example of this is John Cho in movies like Better Luck Tomorrow and Harold and Kumar.

This also made us think about documentaries in general. How there are two types. Documentaries that make you think and ones that give you information or a retrospective. They're basically made with both goals in mind but the end result is all that matters and that end result is how the movie is left in your mind.
We both thought that "The Slanted Screen" was good in the way that it presents the history of Asians in cinema. The thing was that it didn t prompt us to want more Asians on screen because it kind of resolved itself in the end. Saying "yeah there's more roles in cinema nowadays." So we thought that it left very little room for discussion.

8:08pm | Ryan Wong

June 03, 2008

The Latest from Jonathan

Jonathan's latest blog

We are now in the cooling off period of the internship. Clint and I are now just doing all the repetitive tasks that help out the film festival in the long run, like cataloging all of the film festival's past movies. Besides that, Clint and I have been working little by little with our film festival/showcase that we are going to pull off at our school on June 6th.

Since finishing the second PSA, we've been able to watch some more movies so George (our mentor) just threw ten movies into a top hat that he was wearing and choose 3 movies at random. (* GEORGE's note: NOT randomly chosen, carefully picked to enhance their educational experience at the SDAFF.)

These were the movies and what we thought of them:

All American Meal
All American Meal was about some kids pondering about the normal foods of other cultures like how a cheeseburger is to American culture. The film itself was a short ten-minute documentary made by some high school kids from Seattle. All Clint had to say about the movie was that the kids were trying to act in a documentary when they shouldn't have to act. It had good footage and educational value for a high school student film.

Eternal Gaze
It must have taken a lot of patience to make a film like that with only 2 people, for 2 years, with one guy doing all the animation and the other just doing music. I was very impressed. This could play in front of a Pixar film as a short, in terms of quality.

Dragon of Love
When you think of people having fetishes in relationships, you usually think of the guy being the one with it. In Dragon of Love, it has a black woman who has a thing for Asian men. The main character is an Asian male who has always wanted to date a black woman thought his entire life. He finally comes across who seems to be the perfect match for him, but is sadly mistaken. As time goes on, he realizes that she doesn't love him, but just Asian men in general. There are some strange (inappropriate) scenes in the film, but overall it was well made with a good storyline and actors.

I now wonder what George is going to pull out of his hat next time we view some movies.

Jonathan

12:12am | Ryan Wong

May 28, 2008

Reel in the Vote Donut PSA

Don't lose your glaze. Your vote counts. Get involved.

Produced by Jonathan Abhay and Clint Buchhauser, an Infinite Energy Production

The San Diego Asian Film Foundation is challenging YOU to submit a 30-second public service announcement that promotes civic responsibility and democratic participation in the electoral and public policy processes. Your PSA should help encourage voter registration and participation in the APIA community.

The winner receives $1000 and a Sony HDF-FX1 HDV Camcorder (worth $3700), plus bragging rights; the winning PSA will be screened before all film programs at the film festival.