Photography, Videography, Actor
This school project was a semester long project made possible through the collaboration of Vancouver's Poet Laureate, Fiona Lam, as well as poets from the City Poems Contest.
Working together as a group of three, my primary contribution to this project was helping with the camera work. I was involved in the renting of equipment, as well as helping to shoot footage involving the behind the scene content for the purposes of documentations. I also helped play a role in producing the film, from story boarding to shot production listing and even acting
Brian Baldueza
Wilson Pham
Nanop (Peak) Yansomboon
'Contrasts' is the poem my team and I chose for the semester long project for the Moving Images class in the spring of 2023. It is a poem written by Donna Seto. The poem explores Vancouver Chinatown, and its changes from the past glory days full of life to its modern gentrification state
Choosing a poem based about Vancouver, we worked closely with the poets to create and develop our narrative project. At the end of the semester, we submit our poems to the City Poems Contest to be judged and compete against other schools.
The Vancouver Poet Laureate's City Poems Contest is a two-stage project designed to foster public participation and appreciation of poetry related to the historical, cultural, and ecological landmarks located in the Vancouver region
We started off reviewing the poem itself, and then create a logline + synopsis that we felt aligns with the poem to help us frame what kind of video we wanted to do. Of course, not only us, but for the people who will be viewing our poem as well
Thought none of us are of Chinese descent, we wanted to treat the poem with respect while at the same time interpreting the poem in our own way. Thus the most challenging aspect of this poem was to not recreate a literal interpretation of the poem as Donna's poem has very vivid imagery
I contributed with the research as well as inspiration for what kind of ambience we wanted our video to have. Most of the images on the mood were selected by me. We knew we wanted to capture a similar mood to that of older film footage, so most of this step was brainstorming and researching.
Once that was done, we moved on to creating the storyboard together. This was perhaps the most challenging part of the assignment, as we had to go through multiple iterations. To this end, I would like to thank Fiona Lam as well as the teaching staff for helping
Here are two storyboards. The top one contained the original storyboard, and the one below is the modifications we made after receiving feedback
This rough cut of our video was created for the purposes of receiving feedback as well as check in during class in terms of where our project is and whether it needs more work or if we are on the correct track. We spent two days in Chinatown, and decided to use ourselves to fill in for the cast. We did this for two reason. 1) We did not want to waste the actor's time when we ourselves were still not sure of our storyboard and direction. 2) We wanted to experiment and see what would work around Chinatown that we haven't considered before, and use that in our film. The result was on the actual shooting day, we could be as efficient as possible minding everyone's time
The feedback given by the teaching staff and peers are listed below;
Being in a team of three, naturally many of us wore different hats and helped each other out. However, to help keep order and structure this was what we put down as our primary duties & responsibilities.
I primarily helped;
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
.JPG)
One of the main concern about shooting was the weather, as we had some snow leading up to the weeks of filming. To avoid having our actors come out in the rain/snow, we decided to scout the location we would film first, as well as sort out camera angle, positioning, atmosphere, composition, etc. It was a good opportunity to go back to our storyboard and make the adjustments based on the location we scouted
During the rough cut, we did not have actors ready for shooting. Thus, we had to get ourselves involved more intimately in the project. I and another team member decided to step into the role of granddaughter and hipster. We thought to ourselves, "if there is any time to make mistakes, this would be the time". We did make a lot of mistake. For the first 30 mins of filming, we were trying to figure out why our photos were so overexposed, everything was white
I ultimately walked away from this project acquiring many new skill sets. It was the first time I had cast actors for a film, and though I was not directly involved in that process, I was there to observe along the way. Asides from contacting cast, I also learned how to take feedback for improvement, iterate, and refine an idea again and again until it vision becomes clear. Outside the technical aspect of this project, I also learned the value of not making the obvious, but to expand and explore creativity. Especially with 'Contrast', there is a lot of powerfully vivid imagery in the poem, so I would like to especially thank the Poet Laureate Fiona, professor Kate Henessey, and teaching assistant Julian Iliev for pushing us
Chinatown archival footage and images provided by the City of Vancouver Archives
Our vision changed many times, starting from our original interpretation and idea of the poem, and has gone through multiple iterations after feedback. We had to do all of this before we started filming, and we still found ourselves going back to story boarding to change certain scenes or try to capture certain moods. Personally, by placing myself in the shoes of the granddaughter character, I found myself thinking and reflecting deeply about the state of Chinatown. Before this project, I always thought Chinatown was a dead city. A ghost town, and had preconceived prejudice on the location. However, afterwards, I quickly realize how wrong I was. Chinatown is still very much alive, there are business running, and it's full of life. I really walked away from this project feeling grateful to learn more about a community and a part of Vancouver often misunderstood or prejudiced against, and I hope that this project can help to battle those preconceived mindsets and prejudice about this place
.JPG)
