Again a lovely arrival at the Excelsior hotel on the upper west side of Manhattan where to my surprise a small suite was awaiting me. Very little time though to enjoy the hotel’s amenities or do much sight-seeing… I just quickly unpacked and prepared myself to go to the reception which was a couple miles away from the hotel on the other side of Central Park. So there it was, my little sight-seeing impromptu… walking across this lovely park to get to the reception. Such a pleasant feeling despite the rather cold fall season… with all the falling leaves, the joggers, the children and parents, and this indescribable feeling of being a stranger in such an immense city…

I got there a bit early so I just decided to walk around and immerse myself a little bit more in the city… Finally I found myself in front of the foundation… a historic carriage house built in the early 20th century renovated on the inside by famed architect Peter Tow. I entered the space and was greeted by the lovely programs officers Jennie and Sharu… and so the night started… a night where you mingled in a small community atmosphere alongside artists like Christo and Jeanne-Claude, film industry guests, fellow filmmakers, the foundation’s trustees and great staff.

The location is a great space that promises an exciting screening for our film next week! More about it soon…

selected photos… (a few one staged self-portraits just for fun and a little drama ;)

I can’t tell you how delightful an experience it was at Hawaii International Film Fest (HIFF)! The HIFF staff welcomed me like a indie filmmaker star and made the whole journey so enjoyable… I can’t thank them enough: from Anderson, Audrey, Chuck to Natalie, Frank, Janis, Brigid, Jamie, Sean, Jason, Jeff and the many other staff members there!

I arrived on Saturday October 11th quite late in the afternoon after a long day of traveling from Chicago to LA to Hawaii… I never thought it’d actually be such a long flight! I was so glad to land at Honolulu Airport under a picture perfect warm sunset and be picked up by Frank, a HIFF volunteer driver with his giant white truck! So he drove me down to my hotel on Waikiki beach, and we managed to go to the hospitality lounge by the movie theaters to pick up my delegate package from Jeff, the hospitality coordinator.

Along the way, Frank also picked up a couple from the HIFF theaters… little did I know that it was Roy executive producer of movies such as The Departed, The Ring, The Grudge, etc… So I kind of talked casually to him on my way to the hotel and explained what our movie was about. I believe it was a little hard to sell it to him as well, Someplace Else is not exactly comparable to hollywood films as you well know… we’re just such a small little film with a budget litterally 1000 times lower than any small hollywood film.

Alright, so I arrive at Moana Surfrider and wow… this place is a looker… it has an old colonial look to it, and sports its own beach… But I felt a little jet lagged by then… so I knew it was going to be a short night… still I was so happy to have a view of the ocean from my room number 777! It’s funny, I like numbers in my life, and 777 is a pretty fetiche one for some reason…

Sunday was the Meet the Filmmaker evening at HIFF and it was truly a great occasion to meet up with many industry makers/shakers/filmmakers! I made sure I was quite alert while also enjoying a few drinks chit-chating by the ocean front, and snacking on the great little hors-d’oeuvres from this place called the Rum Fire. I met with past HIFF winners and A-list film festival winners… It was all quite enlightning.

Then the showing of Someplace Else came on Monday October 13th at 7pm. Our film was shown at the same time as another film by famed french director Desplechin. So it was quite an honor to be part of a lineup with such films being showcased, especially for a small feature like ours.

The Q&A was quite something… as we had to leave the movie theater and go to the cafe area in the cinema… and there were about 15 people or so following us to that Q&A area… Questions ranged from “how long the movie took to make?” to “how one really becomes succesful?” to “how is vance in real life?” to “what is next in your life?”. From what Christa told me, a famed German filmmaker/critic, “the audience got a real treat with what you’ve told them and will remember it for years”… let’s hope so.

Before the showing, we had this lovely reception organized by Modern Luxury (the magazine that makes Chicago Social) at a swanky Hotel called Hotel Renew… a sort of green hotel with a zen asian feel. It was great there as I met with a few more famed filmmakers and industry makers. But I had to rush quickly out of the place to go to the end of the film’s screening for Someplace Else and the Q&A.

Tuesday was the awards ceremony for the festival… and I sat right next to the executive director of The Vilcek Foundation, the regional VP of Louis Vuitton, one past academy award nominee, and a famous film critic… quite a lineup… and everyone was truly very nice!!! There was no prize for Someplace Else, but I knew that already… but I was so happy that our film was selected already and moreover got distinguished and honored to be profiled as part of the American Immigrant Filmmakers on Profile series by The Vilcek Foundation in New York City alongside much more established filmmakers who’ve previously won many awards… so it was all quite something!

And then Wednesday came and I had to pack and leave this wonderful place… one last stop to Farrington High School where I was scheduled to give a speech to teenagers studying media production. Despite the bad projection and audio equipment, the experience was great and I saw many kids really into becoming a filmmaker! The advice I had for them, not to get lost in the medium itself but use the medium to convey what you want to convey… and also have lots of perseverance… it’s a very tough and competitive field in the movie realm… and making a film these days is only half-way through getting the film seen by a larger audience such as theatrical or broadcast or DVD.

The playing field has changed so dramatically these days for indie filmmaking. Nowadays any film that’s not produced by the majors are called indie films, even if they sport A-list starts or budgets in the millions of dollars… so Someplace Else isn’t certainly part of that indie realm… It’s most often likened to a DIY film.

Finally I was interviewed by Jason Soeda from HIFF: you can read more about the process of making the film here:
http://www.hiff.org/filmmakers/qa-2008-kai-duc-luong.php

Mahalo!

K

As you know, making a film takes a few years of one’s life, and during that timeframe, many things come and go.  The lives of many of the characters in the film were often changed throughout the course of this film, not so much by the film itself but by things out of the movie’s control, like a close person’s departure from this world, or the many challenges coming our way in our daily kind of life - break-ups, job loss, the daily grind… For Vance or myself, it was no different.

To summarize the film, in a one-liner, “Someplace Else” is the real-life portrait of an older bluesman’s upbeat stance on life who inspires the younger filmmaker to let go of his fears and pursue the career of his dreams. For some, it could have been pursuing a career in photography, for others one in singing, or sports, the arts, dancing, yoga, travel blogging, politics, or what comes your own personal mind…

Aboard this journey “Someplace Else”, an array of familiar characters as diverse as life itself will come and go on and off screen… people from all walks of life… the everyman/woman we know, the bluesman or musician from our favorite local music spot, the italian mama who could be everyone’s grandma, the street signs, passersby, and details of architecture that we look at on a daily basis… all of it, transposed in an engagingly rhythmic, personal and poetic fashion.

In case you are still wondering about the film… just check some of the audience reactions that we’ve collected below after screenings. You can also go read the warm press we’ve received thus far at http://www.someplaceelsethemovie.com/press.php

Hope to see and speak to some of you for its premiere in Hawaii!!!

Kai - Director of “Someplace Else”
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“I really enjoyed the film and the glimpses into your life. Thank you. Wonderful story and depiction of Vance.”

“I loved the movie, keep going”

“Unusual,  poignant, effective, enjoyable!”

“Beautiful Film, the two bios or bio and auto-bio was revering and inspirational. Truly enjoyed the ordinary image sequence, raindrops, traffic, airplanes, clouds, etc. Visually stunning. Thank you.”

“I was disappointed not to see any candy licking!! I did enjoy the guest vocalists and thought their inclusion was indicative of Vance’s carefree style… Overall a very nice piece and lovely effort.”

“The gas station scene was my favorite, the movie made me think of this place or my place or our place.”
“Enjoyed the movie a great deal. The way the camera was used was very enjoyable so were the mini-music videos… Great job!”

“Great capture of Vance’s simplicity and complex world.”

“Beautiful vision. Keep going.”

“Awesome! You are so cute!, We love you!”
“Super! Merci” “Enchanting, touching, a refreshingly personal film that shows how everthying meaningful is personal.”

“Very touching. I was truly enchanted. Bravo vous deux!”

“Wonderful film: I thought it made Chicago look beautiful. Even in the highway rain! I thought the gas station scene was brilliant – The only part that didn’t jive with the story (for me) was the focus on the keyboard player’s family. They weren’t “important” to me. Vance and Kai were the people/characters that I cared about, wanted to spend time with. Good luck!”

“Nice Job!” “Delighted, enchanted”

“Well done! Quality film”
“It was very interesting and down to earth. Some of the way you filmed made my eye hurt. The boat scne was calming and that song was beautiful. The scene with the kids was cute but it was sort of a tangent. If your intent was to characterize Vance, I am surprised you didn’t interviewed him more, or his band mates. Although I offer my opinion, take it or leave it. If you are proud of yourself and your movie that is all that matter.”
“Very poetic! Felt very connected to the story. Also great photography and music inspiration.”
“Lovely!”

“Well done! Especially the scene about ‘Kai’s life’.”
“Love the intimacy of the movie. A true art movie. Felt like a poem at some point or a book. Thank you.”
“Thank you for a beautiful, entertaining movie. There were so many really beautiful full of emotions, really terrific moments”

“Great job Kai + Avisheh”

“Unusual, poignant, effective, enjoyable!”

“Visually stunning.”

“Enchanting, touching, a refreshingly personal film that shows how everything meaningful is personal.”

“Wonderful film: I thought it made Chicago look beautiful. Even the highway in the rain”

“Love the intimacy of the movie. A true art movie”

“Thank you for a beautiful, entertaining movie. There were so many really beautiful full of emotions, really terrific moments.”

Wow… So we had it… Our premiere of “Someplace Else” at the Gene Siskel Film Center last night… for the Asian American Showcase in Chicago.

I can’t tell you how overwhelming it was to see people from all walks of life come together at this event… People were all expecting a documentary… to tell you the truth… after they came out the movie, they were all very ecstatic about the film, because it wasn’t a documentary that they saw… but something else!

Words like “it was fascinating” “I was impressed” “I didn’t expect it to be so affecting” “It moved me really” “What a great idea to juxtapose these 2 stories together” “It was such a great package from start to finish” “It is so nicely done, a bit of everything, a book, a poem, a film, a docu” “It made me want to go listen to the blues” “It was so cool to hear the whole theater bursting into laughter” “It was full of feeling and naked honesty” just came over and over… We were so humbled by it really.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting so much enthusiasm for it… perhaps because I have probably seen the movie somewhere around 200 times already, in various versions of course, and even though I can’t stop loving it still, I just don’t know really how people will react to it… perhaps also because of the feeling of exhaustion that I had after squeezing in one last bit of strength left in me to get the final edit done for the showcase, pulling many nights without sleep pretty much to give Avisheh the final cut for the HDCAM conversion of the film for the showcase.

So we did it… and it was such a relief to let things go live on their own a little… Today I have post-premiere decompression syndrome… I feel much lighter but also can tell how exhausted I am after all this. It was a non-stop race till the premiere, some dozen versions of the film made and remade… voice overs added, sequences changed, juggling back and forth from PC to MAC, MAC to PC… Camcorder to Final Cut to Color to Motion and so on and so forth…

I feel something in me has now been let loose. I guess I have given something quite deep inside of me, gave it away for the audience to perceive, or not, but it has been given away. So in that respect it is now officially gone. I can feel that… like a baby that has grown very very quickly, that I nurtured with all my strength and dedication in a short amount of time, and has now reached its adult age, ready to live a life of its own, with its ups and downs, just like any life.

On a much lighter front, we hope those who’ve enjoyed the film & Q&A (Everyone right? or almost) PLEASE HELP US SPREAD THE WORD TO FRIENDS AND CONNECTIONS.

YOUR SUPPORT IS SO IMPORTANT TO US. IT WILL BE THANKS TO YOU IF WE MOVE ON TO MORE FESTIVALS AND GET DISTRIBUTED!

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at contact@someplaceelsethemovie.com if you know of someone interested in distributing this film in theaters or on TV or know of connections to film festivals.

Kai

Dear all,

We made it!!! 3 years in the making (I know compared to other films it may sound reasonable which is true), but still… for a no-budget, low budget, first feature film, kinda thing… quite grueling… there were times we really didn’t believe we’d finish it… as you may tell there’s been a huge gap between the last blog post and this one ;p. Because we’d actually lost all of the edited material in the summer of 2006, and tried our best to salvage those feisty nasty hard drives but just couldn’t… more on this a bit later in this post ;).
As I’m writing this, we have just shipped our first batch of DVDs for film festivals all across the world… So watch out for us!
Randy, our great webmaster and cinematographer/sound recordist for the movie, asked me to share some views on the whole post-production process… so here I am attempting to do so :).

I recalled reading an article about 2 years ago when Miranda July talked about her experience of making “Me you and everyone we know” (I’m sure some of you have seen it and liked it, I did ;) and more specifically on how she and her editor just spent an entire month or so locked in their studio/house to finish the edit of their movie… I thought, man, this must be something! and I was somewhat scared at the thought we’d have to do this… especially given that, well, we just didn’t have either her budget to afford a full-time editor, nor the connections to find a really good editor for that matter.

Anyhow… after our data loss incident, the project was on standby for quite a while… I guess we (the crew), all had to move on with life after the movie production was on a standby… Randy aka cinematographer moved to San Fran after film production, Anne aka art consultant left the country, Avisheh aka co-director suffered a terrible loss, Julien aka “Mister I help anywhere I can” (camera operator/assistant editor/morale support) was busy with a new house, and Sebastien aka “Mister I love the blues” was busy searching for job…

So after the project was paused for a little over a year, post-production editing resumed at the start of the year 2008.

Because such a long time had gone by since then, it was an awefully daunting task to go back to it. But since I had just left my corporate job on new year’s day pretty much, I had nothing else to do but focus on this movie ;)… and this turned out to be a good thing… especially given that I was just out of a very serious relationship ;p… so really focusing on something helped me keep things into perspective… enough about this… you can watch the movie to understand what I’m talking about.
For the technical people, we had basically ingested all the raw footage on mainly 3 disks, about 1.5 Terabyte worth of information all in all… because unlike a feature film, the documentary exercise consists of well a lot of raw material that’s neither scripted, nor easily transcripted… more on the lessons learned later of this whole exercise.

All the raw material (over 100 hours to go through) batch captured was done on a PC to my greatest lament… because in the past year or so, I had switched from PC to MAC platform for all my editing works. So it was somewhat of a stepback to have to go back to PC instead of using Final Cut Studio.

But well, we just had to do it. Because editing is a process that could last forever, we had to set ourselves a goal. And because my brother came to the rescue of this ailing project, I had basically no choice but bite the bullet and prepare things for his 3-weeks of editing presence to help finalize a rough cut for the movie, by batch capturing more, picking out scenes I wanted in the movie, etc.

Thanks to his direction and precious help, we were able to get a rough cut in those 3 weeks time, spending days and nights just about, in our newly created office room where I live focusing on the screenplay and going to the essence of things. Me mostly picking out the scenes I wanted, my brother helping with directing me and letting me know whether it was really meaningful to keep this scene or not… then working on picking out the interviews we wanted, the concert scenes too, and weaving the story first, before attacking the visuals… This was especially challenging because I was so used to creating both layers together as editing goes on, but given the timeframe, the former process was best… I wished I had all the time in the world to create the kind of all encompassing work that we wanted to have at the start of the movie, but it was just not possible in the timeframe set forth, and this was a good thing. Following the preliminary rough edit, a small series of screenings were made amongst friends to hammer out the things that worked and didn’t work for the movie.
I can tell you, it’s really daunting to show your work in the midst of editing to a crowd of attentive, friendly yet critical friends… in the end, we were able to get the best out of everyone’s thoughts on the edit seen… clarifying things out, taking things out, adding other things in… to create a final product that is as clear as possible, yet keeping hopefully a good and compelling audio-visual rhythm throughout the movie.

Throughout the whole editing process, many discussions pertaining to the screenplay in general, helped us really push post through, and I gotta thank my brother for helping us on this part, even though it was hard for me to just let go of my visual and artistic inclinations and rather make sure that the narrative is making sense.

So I guess some of the lessons learned and wishes are:

- Editing is just not editing, but a lot of talking before hand to make sure that what you edit will make sense in terms of narrative. I am one of those so used to short edits (like music videos) that I’ve learned to tame myself a little in terms of making too many things all at once at the expense of losing the audience… still I like to let myself loose once in a while (see what was done for the trailer… haha… pretty speedy)

- Next time, if I do, make another documentary, get transcripts generated right after each shooting day… that way, it’s so much easier to sort through the raw material in post.

- I wished we had a 35mm adapter at the time we shot our film… those things are freaking awesome… though I guess in low light conditions, it would have pushed us even more at spending time setting up lighting for it.
- Hammer out the screenplay as we go through our days of shooting… I guess we just all were busy at work, and so given all this, it is pretty amazing we completed the movie still!

Voila, I could go on and on… on this whole editing ordeal… but I guess I will leave out some of the mysteries of it…

At this moment, we are focusing on the promotion of the movie to get it showcased at film festivals, etc. Please WATCH THE TRAILER IF YOU HAVEN’T YET and HELP US SPREAD THE WORD :))). I’M SURE YOU ARE AS EXCITED AS WE ARE NOW THAT YOU’VE WATCHED THE TRAILER ;).

Great news already, we’ve got two festivals lined-up already… one in Chicago and one in France… awaiting for more… Until then,

Lots of love and gratefulness to all the people who’ve made this movie happen, and have contributed in one way or another at making it all happen… from the dear crewmembers, to the characters that played part in the movie, to the public, friends, and family support.

Let’s continue our journey… someplace… anyplace… as long as we keep on going, we might just all get somewhere… and if we stay with it, don’t quit it, we might just get it ;).

Love,

Kai

So… as things stand… the first 30 mins or so of the movie is edited… phew… what a long winding road… a journey in and all of itself… I cannot tell you how much I believe in the movie having rewatched most of the edited scenes so far… All I can say to you all - myself included - is patience… I played and replayed so many sequences and takes… those when Randy kept on removing his wide-andle lens back and forth even at moments when the best of the action is about to happen (ha ha!)… or when the camera just all of sudden goes wacko for no reason… or when one of us operators are in the field… O well… that’s part of the editing fun - to remove all those haps and make it seem as seamslessly enjoyable as possible! As it stands, I can watch john walls’ wife and kids scene over and over again and still find it endearing… I probably saw the final edit some 20 times… the previous scene (scene 7) maybe 5 times… scene 10 some 30 times, scene 11 another 30 times… scene 1 maybe 25 times… scene 2a and 2b, another 20 times… that’s a lot of viewing… to the point where it’s obviously hard to know truly how effective and powerful one scene is… Ohhh well… we’ll see… All I can tell is that we’re trying to be as picky as possible and still it’s so hard to remove the 30 secs that need to be removed in a 5-6 mins sequence… We started from 1hour10mins for scene 7 and trimmed it down to about 6′50 so far… I don’t know how far down I can go… so I’m leaving it as is now and ready to move on to a crucial sequence in the movie… the introduction of Vance… Ah… FINALLY!!! Wish us luck y’all….

Another week-end spent editing John Wall’s interview and scene with his family…. while Julien helped us with capturing more footages from someplace else… boy it’s hard… Avisheh was very sick due to the very cold weather or maybe some bad wine… but here’s an example of her dedication despite adversity… where she’s taking some of my secret French medicine called “Efferalgan” by UPSA… works like a charm when it comes to cold and pain relief… hopefully so…