Beijing Film Academy – 2nd Semester

Several years ago I was asked to blog about my experiences studying at Beijing Film Academy (BFA) on my friend’s website Asianfilms.org (which has now morphed into AsiaPacificFilms.com, an excellent resource for streaming hard-to-find films from Asia and the Pacific). Little did I realize at the time that it would propel me to become the unofficial contact for foreigners wanting to come study at BFA, as the BFA English-language website was practically nonexistent. Eventually I put up a Beijing Film Academy FAQ post which answered most of the questions to which I was frequently replying. However, when Asianfilms.org disappeared, so did the blog entries, so I’ve decided to repost them here on my new (as of early 2012) website according to their original posting dates. Though a bit outdated, I think most of my impressions and the information I give about BFA are still very relevant, despite the unbelievably rapid pace of change that affects just about everything in China. The biggest change I’ve noticed over the past five years at BFA is that a bunch of the (acting) students now drive incredibly expensive cars (when I was studying at BFA in 2006-2007, there were far fewer cars on the tiny campus, and they typically belonged to the upper echelon of well-connected professors). I guess after paying off administrators and professors at the school to secure their children a spot (yes, it happens all over China, including BFA), these extremely supportive and loving parents still had enough money to send their kids off to school in BMWs and Audis. There are plenty of stories of other ways some less fortunate students come about their vehicles as well. But I’ll save that discussion for another post. For now, enjoy the naive ramblings of a much younger me back in my days of ignorance and bliss.

Just as I was finally getting into the groove of things, my second semester at Beijing Film Academy up and ended on me two weeks ago. Done. Over. Finisimo. Or however the hell you spell it. But actually the ‘groove’ I was getting into probably only had to do with the fact that the last month or two of classes we actually got to shoot something. And in 16mm, no less. But I’m not sad it’s over. It feels good to have ‘graduated’ from my one-year program here, even though I sort of feel like I’ve not actually gotten what I wanted out of it yet and would like more time. But that’s just my compulsive half talking. No more 8-5 schedule up at school in the same classroom everyday. No more sitting around listlessly in class attempting to appear alert while half of my other classmates sleep (the ones who actually still bothered showing up for classes this late in the school year… we had some ridiculously small turnouts – especially for the really bad teachers – considering we started the year with 60 clean-shaven, bright-eyed students ready to explore the vast world of cinematography). No more of the same boring Chinese food every day at the cafeteria (haha, or so I thought… so far I’ve still been going up to school to eat lunch every day). No more crazy teachers who don’t prepare their lectures and just spend the whole class telling us what a crappy director Zhang Yimou is and waxing poetic about how divine it would be to just shoot porn for a living (see my first blog entry on BFA if you want to know more about that ‘teacher’). No more dealing with the not-so-helpful people over at the International Student Center, no more taking the long way around to school (15 minutes) because the doors are closed to the trash dumpster next to my apartment (it’s only a 2-minute walk when the doors are opened), no more coming in to class 30 minutes late worried that I’ll disrupt the class and finding that I’m one of the first ones to arrive, no more classmates who ask me if ALL my hair is blonde (on a regular basis), and no more wishing I was out shooting something instead of sitting there in the same stuffy classroom for 8 hours a day. That’s right, I’m free! And not just from BFA, but from school in general. I do believe that this graduation will be my last. I’ve officially brought an end to my professional student career. And now it’s time to get on with that filmmaking career. But first let me get sidetracked by my blogging career and tell you some of the things that happened this past semester.

After a two-month winter break, we started classes again on March 13. My parents’ anniversary. I think they’ve been married eighteen years now (haha, that’s one of my funny jokes… kind of like the one where I tell people my sister and I are only 6 months apart in age and they don’t even flinch… always a good way to see if people are listening, which I find I have to do quite often… can’t figure out why… it’s not like I ever ramble or anything). Anyway, things started off on a pretty good note. I had been working hard on commercials and personal projects over the winter break and was ready to jump back into my classes. But the thing that really kept me on my toes was an upcoming trip to Hong Kong to shoot two of my friends’ films. Well, actually I was hoping to shoot one of my own as well, but I knew we probably wouldn’t have time. The trip started as a reunion between me and two very good friends from Hawaii, Henry Mochida and Crystal Chen. I had served as director of photography for Henry’s short film ‘Chopsticks’ that we shot very off the cuff in Tokyo last year, and Henry was itching to do another crazy project together. Our good friend Crystal, who had been in Henry’s Academy for Creative Media (ACM – the University of Hawaii film school) intro filmmaking class for which I served as teaching assistant, was spending the semester studying at Chinese University of Hong Kong (where I’d served some time as well back when I was still young), where she was enrolled in a filmmaking class. So we figured why not shoot something in Hong Kong, a city I was very familiar with, and despite the fact that I had less than favorable experiences with the not so amiable denizens of this uber-metropolis, I found the city itself to be one of the most photogenic places I’d ever been (I’ve heard Hong Kong inspired Ridley Scott’s futuristic city in the film ‘Blade Runner’… I read it on the Internet so it must be true). So Henry and two of our other filmmaking friends, Jen and Daryl, decided to hop on over to Hong Kong on some cheap airfare during their spring break vacation. And I hopped on a train from Beijing to Shenzhen (the Chinese boomtown just across the border from Hong Kong) for less than US$60. And while we were doing all this hopping, Crystal was busting her butt in Hong Kong setting everything up for us. Including finding us very reasonably priced housing in Shatin area (near her university) at a little hostel on the side of a mountain run by a Scandinavian Christian organization. For 125 HKD (about US $18) a night, we got a bed, three meals (only one of which we were ever around to take advantage of), and free laundry. WOW! Try finding that kind of deal down at the slummy Chengking Mansions in Jim Sha Tsui. I’d tell you the name of this hostel on the hillside in Shatin, but then it would probably be full the next time I try to go stay there. =0)

So we stayed in Hong Kong for about 10 days. We shot Crystal’s film for her class assignment, which Jen starred in, and we shot Henry’s film (also for a class assignment back in Hawaii), which Daryl starred in. And I got to shoot both of them, although this didn’t exempt me from making a cameo appearance (oh wait, have to be famous to call it a cameo, huh?) in Crystal’s film. As a film director, no less. So of course very little acting was required, and of course I overacted the hell out of the role. Which is why normally I stay put BEHIND the camera. But it’s not like we had a huge talent pool to draw from. Anyway, it was one hell of a busy shooting schedule, requiring us to leave very early every morning and come back very late. I’m guessing we were probably not the most popular people in the hostel.

Overall we had a great time, and Henry, Daryl, and Jen were quite impressed with their first take of Hong Kong. I quickly readjusted to life in Hong Kong after a six-year absence (well, I had stopped over there once or twice, but it had still been a while), remembering to lower my head and use the hard camera case as a battling ram when getting off the subway and trains (because those lovely denizens of Hong Kong I mentioned above don’t wait for you to get off before they shove their way in… not that this is any different from mainland China, but you’d expect better from the Honkonese after all the airs they put on about being so much more sophisticated and international than their cousins across the border), whipping my Cantonese back into shape (it came back much quicker and better than I thought it would… I was telling off annoying taxi drivers and pesky security guards in no time), and trying to feign an utter disregard for all human life around me so as to best fit in. Ok, so I’m being a bit extreme, but I’m not a fan of Hong Kong people or their cutthroat way of living. And it really did get to me when I lived there for eight months. And I really do find myself being a much nastier person when living in this kind of environment. But Henry and the others thought it was great fun seeing me argue with every last security guard that told us we couldn’t film on their premises. Of course they thought I was arguing any time I spoke in Cantonese, but that is just the nature of the language. It would certainly never be mistaken for one of the Romance languages, though the people who speak it do share some surprisingly similar characteristics to the French. =0p

We shot with a Panasonic HVX200 camera, the same one we had shot my film ‘Dao’ on in Hawaii the previous year and definitely my favorite midsize HD camera on the market. We didn’t stop with a nice camera though. Henry brought a Redrock 35mm lens adapter and a selection of very nice Nikon prime lenses so that we could shoot this film properly. The only problem is that between the camera, the adapter, the lenses, and a tripod, we were carrying around a LOT of equipment. Fortunately there were five of us, but with all the commuting we did every day (we were staying out in the New Territories and shooting down on Hong Kong Island… even with Hong Kong’s super convenient transportation system, it’s still quite a trek with loads of equipment) and our daily hike up and down the mountain to our hostel, it was pretty exhausting. Besides being heavy to lug around, the full camera rig with the HVX (5.5 lbs), the Redrock adapter (probably a good 4 lbs.), a lens, and a rails system holding it all together meant one heavy setup. And a LOT of the shots were handheld. We had no shoulder mount to use with this, and I didn’t get the luxury of a dedicated assistant. But it gets even better, because not only is it next to impossible to maneuver with this thing because of its sheer weight and bulkiness alone, the adapter flips the image upside down, making it damn near impossible to get an accurate feel for the composition in handheld shots and track movements. No matter how hard I tried to make my brain work backward (which my dear mother would argue it has always done), every time the actor went to the right, my brain instinctively saw him going left in the LCD monitor and went that way. But we didn’t have an external monitor to work with, which also meant that nailing our focus was also next to impossible, especially for shots with a lot of movement. So we ended up with several key shots with soft focus, a lot of ruined shots where the camera moves in the opposite direction of the action (hehe), and I personally ended up with one VERY sore back. But such is life. It was a great learning experience, a great project to work on with good friends, and a much-needed ‘break’ from Beijing.

I got back to Beijing at the beginning of April and got busy with classes again. The next two months really dragged along, as we were building up to the 16mm final project, but didn’t have anything to work on in the meantime. Fortunately my good friend and talented actor Roy Tjioe, who starred in my film Dao last year, came to Beijing for a lawyer’s conference in late April. He planned to stay a few extra days after his conference to see a bit of Beijing, and while attending my classmate’s karaoke birthday party, he and I came up with an idea for a short film on a whim while my drunken classmates belted out the best of China’s songs from the last two decades. So as soon as Roy’s conference ended, I borrowed a DVX100 DV camera from my friend’s company and in three afternoons we managed to guerilla shoot around the city and complete our scriptless project. I had two friends help on alternating days, one of them being my fearless classmate Jackie Goldfish who also put forth an outstanding (and absolutely hilarious) acting performance in the film. For the handful of extras in the film, I lucked out and found people on the street who also turned excellent performances.

On the last afternoon we had a chase scene involving two cyclos (pedal tricycles for carrying passengers), one of which was to be driven by an old man we hadn’t found an actor for yet. So in the late morning my friend Sun Ran (a friend I met when we were both acting for a film my first semester at BFA… she spent the last six or seven years in France, has long hair dyed bright pinkish-red, always dresses gothic, and has a car) drove Roy and I over to Houhai, a popular lake surrounded by the traditional Beijng streets and residences called ‘hutongs’ (and now teaming with gaudy neon-lit bars that light the lake up with a multitude of color at night), and wandered around asking where we might be able to rent cyclos. The companies that lead the tours there weren’t willing to rent theirs out, but one cyclo driver we talked to had some friends with their own cyclos. He called them and told them some crazy foreign guy wanted to rent their cyclos for a movie. They agreed to meet us, and the cyclo driver led us through a maze of hutongs to meet the guys. Their cyclos weren’t in very good shape, and the guys weren’t exactly what I’d call friendly, but they let us look at their cyclos and then we started talking price. They asked twice as much as I was willing to pay (which wasn’t much, but more than they would have made cycling people around in those cyclos for the same amount of time I’d be using them). On top of that, neither one of the guys was willing to act the part of the cyclo driver, and neither really fit the part either. I just didn’t get a good feeling from the guys and wasn’t too eager to rent their cyclos, but we didn’t really have any other options at that point, and it was already early afternoon and we had three scenes to shoot before sundown since it was Roy’s last day in town.

So we got the guys’ numbers and told them we’d call them after lunch. We wandered back toward the lake and found a nice little restaurant near the lakefront that had a limited and overpriced menu, but we didn’t have much time and didn’t want to try our luck at the surrounding bars. There were no other customers and only a lady in her 50s running the place who took our order and went to cook for us. As we waited, a bald guy who also looked about 50ish walked in with some vegetables and went into the kitchen. It was the lady’s husband, and when the guy came back out I struck up a conversation and he turned out to be a real character (and had the perfect look and personality for the cyclo driver role). I first asked if he knew of any place close by we could rent some cyclos for a few hours, and he beamed as he bragged that he knew everyone in their hutong (street) and could help me round up anything. As if he’d just waved his magic wand, within minutes he had two cyclos at the front door of the restaurant ready to go. Then I popped the big question, asking if he’d be interested in acting in our little movie. He laughed and said he’d just acted in a TV project that had filmed in their hutong a few months earlier and would be happy to help out. What luck!

Now all I needed were two more extras, one a young foreign girl and the other an old Chinese woman (unfortunately the lady running the restaurant was a little too young and had to stay and tend the restaurant anyway). While Roy and Sun Ran finished eating, I wandered over to the lake, long popular with foreign tourists and expatriates, and within 100 meters of the restaurant found a young foreign couple sitting outside of a café sipping coffee. I’m sure they were somewhat taken aback when a fellow foreigner walked up and asked if the girl would be interested in helping out with my little movie project. But she said yes, I gave a big “YIPPEE!”, and I told her to come join us around the corner an hour later so we’d have time to shoot the cyclo chase first. It turns out the girl worked at the Denmark Embassy, and despite not having any acting experience, her performance was very convincing!

Sun Ran later found an old woman sitting around her courtyard in the hutong we were shooting in and convinced her to come play the role. She certainly looked the part, but in explaining the part and the lines to her she didn’t seem to have much confidence in her abilities. And it didn’t help that Roy couldn’t speak Mandarin and communicate with her directly. But as soon as the camera started rolling the woman nailed her lines and the energy of the character with pizzazz. However, she didn’t understand the idea of doing multiple takes from different angles, and each time I called cut she would get out of the cyclo and start walking home. But each time we politely asked for another take, and each time she delivered. In fact, by her final take I was convinced this old woman had been a professional actress her whole life and was just putting on an act to tease us. She was fantastic.

And so somehow in the course of a few hours we managed to find two perfect cyclos, three outstanding non-professional actors, and shoot about one-third of the film. All in the confines of a small hutong a few blocks off of Houhai lake. To say that luck was on our side would be an understatement. And when I finally got around to editing the film several months later, all of the pieces from the chaotic, wholly unplanned shoot fell into place smoothly. In fact, the finished film ‘Banana’ was chosen to screen at the Hawaii International Film Festival later in the year.

So while my own personal projects were going quite well that semester, classes at BFA were not. It was a slow semester. A VERY slow semester. A lot of it was probably just me, but a lot of my classmates seemed to be getting worn down a bit too as the semester dragged on (assuming they had even stuck with it into the second semester). And certainly not because we were working too hard. Quite the opposite. I think for me personally a lot of it had to do with my tendency to rise to challenges but sink miserably in their absence. And there was certainly nothing challenging me for most of the semester.

The last two months of the semester we did finally get to work on a 16mm film project. But just like everything else at BFA, this project suffered from severe limitations. We were grouped into teams of a dozen students (and although at this point most of our classes barely even had two dozen students showing up to class, suddenly old faces began creeping out of the woodwork as soon as the words ‘16mm film’ were muttered), meaning about five teams for our oversized class. Each student was given only one 100ft roll of 16mm film (the equivalent of less than 3 minutes of footage), and each group was given the option to collectively combine resources and shoot one big project or let each student shoot their 2+ minutes of film stock for their own purposes. Then each group was assigned an ancient Arri SRII (a camera from 1982… a beast that will probably work for several more centuries no doubt, but outdated technology all the same) and a single stock zoom lens (forgot the specs, but ours was in horrible shape and had severe vignetting problems in the corners). Then we were left to our own defenses in terms of arranging with our groups how to use our single role of film. The department didn’t really care, as they placed no restrictions on the content of what we shot, but actually recommended that we not be frivolous and attempt to shoot an actual story, instead suggesting we use the film stock to shoot various light tests.

Fortunately we had the most talented and most serious group in the class, and we decided to go all out and shoot a short movie. But that left one small detail to be resolved: what story were we going to shoot? In the end we decided to let everyone write their own script, and then choose the best one and the writer would also direct while the rest of us took turns on the camera. When everyone came forward with scripts and ideas though, nobody agreed on a favorite. We were stuck at a stalemate until I came up with an idea that would let us all contribute to the story. It was simple: come up with an ensemble story that combined six smaller stories, with each of these stories written, directed, and shot by sub-teams of two within the group. So we went back to the drawing board for a large ensemble story that we all agreed on, and in the end my idea won out. Taking place in a hospital emergency room, one patient after another comes into the waiting room with a different injury (each more severe than the person before), and upon seeing the other patients in the room and their injuries, the new patient imagines a story for how the other patients might have gotten hurt. Each pair in our group came up with some wild ideas, everything from a vampire bite injury to a Kungfu showdown between a bored husband and his rambunctious wife. And the hospital scene itself, which I wrote, climaxed with blood squirting everywhere and a foreign doctor (played expertly by yours truly) rushing in to wheel away the victims. We had a blast shooting the project and did more bonding in those two weeks than the rest of the year combined, but unfortunately the department only telecined the footage in low-res SD (not even Beta) to preview in class, so we never got the chance to edit the footage into a completed film. Typical BFA.

In the end we had a graduation ceremony. The two Korean students in our class, who hadn’t shown up once since the second week of classes in September the year before, suddenly appeared to get their certificates. What’s more surprising is that the school actually gave them the certificates. But that figures. After all, they paid their tuition, and the primary goal of our program wasn’t to train cinemaographers, but to make extra money for the department (though what that money was used for I don’t know, as students are still shooting their 16mm film projects on old Arri SRII cameras). After our cheesy little ceremony in a dingy little classroom where each of our names was called and we went up to take our little piece of expensive paper (though again, not nearly as expensive as the equally useless pieces of paper I could have paid a lot more for back in the US), teachers and students went together to a restaurant across the street from the school for a big drunken orgy of a feast. I thought it was ironic how the teachers were actually much more energetic and involved at this final feast than they ever were in their classes. At any rate, everyone (except yours truly, who typically restrains from drinking in China for numerous reasons) was completely drunk an hour or so later and evidently stayed around the restaurant until late at night. I cleared out when some of my classmates started shaking up full 2-liter bottles of soda and spraying them all over the room. I guess they were so happy to be done with their year-long prison sentence that it took an over-the-top display like this to fully express their sentiments.

Wow, so I ended on a bit of a dark note there, but I guess that just mirrors how my year at BFA ended. Sorry if I don’t sound so thrilled about my BFA experience, especially the second semester. There were of course plenty of good things about it, and plenty of the bad things were more my own personal shortcomings, not the school’s. Perhaps this would be a good place to put a couple of Top 10 lists to cover both sides of the story:

TOP 10 THINGS I LOVE ABOUT BFA:

• The English-language room in the library that is stocked with tons of new film books
• Getting to hear very famous filmmakers (Chinese and foreign) speak often
• Getting to go to film school for a fraction of cost of USC
• Getting asked (and paid) to act in films despite having no professional acting experience
• Looking at the girls in the acting department
• Fresh fruit bowls in the cafeteria for as little as US $0.50
• (Most of) My classmates
• Having film events going on all the time
• Being surrounded by filmmakers
• Being a standout on the school soccer team

TOP 10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT BFA:

• Having new teachers stop 5 minutes into their first lecture and asking me in front of the class if I understand Chinese
• Having old teachers stop 5 minutes into every lecture and asking me in front of the class if I understand Chinese
• Getting a fraction of the education I might have gotten at USC
• Playing the token Laowai (foreigner) in everyone’s film
• Talking to the girls in the acting department
• Overdose of oil and MSG in the school cafeteria (and everywhere else I eat here!)
• Some of the people who work at the International Student Center
• Not taking the time to go to most of the film events going on all the time
• Being surrounded by filmmakers
• The fact that the school soccer team sucks

As you can probably tell from the lists above, BFA and I had very much the love-hate relationship going, one day having a violent domestic, followed up the next day by intensive make-up cuddling. Or something like that. It was a very up-and-down experience, and really it just mirrors my relationship with China overall. It seems like every time I live in this country or spend extended periods of time here I end up on a rollercoaster ride of emotions and energy levels much more severe than anything I ever experience in the US or even while living in other Asian countries, where for the most part I’m almost always a cheery person who rarely gets cross with people. In China, I’m full of energy and ready to go take on challenges the size of the country one day, but then the next day I’m ready to pull my hair out and catch the first plane back home. But alas, the biggest problem here is my own failure to fully adapt to the environment around me (and here that inability is not necessarily a bad thing), instead expecting China to adapt to me. Facing a ratio of 1,400,000,000 to 1, that’s probably asking a bit too much on my part. For now I’ll try to stick to the old ‘When in Rome…’ adage and make the most of my time here!