Sundance - Day 1

So as part of a class through Chapman University, I'm spending the next week at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. This week, the News section will basically be my journal of the experience.

The 22 of us in this class flew this morning from LA to Salt Lake City, Utah, and from there we piled into a giant private bus that took us to Park City, about 45 minutes into the mountains. Park City is where Sundance happens. Usually it's just another sleepy mountain ski town, but for this week in January, Sundance explodes into its streets. I've heard that the businesses here literally make 100% of the money they need for the year in this single week.

Park City itself is kind of like an Alpine Disneyland - all the locals know that they make their money from tourism, so they really ham up the "adorable mountain town" atmosphere, complete with strings of Christmas lights, pretty wooden condos, and niche shops. Robert Redford himself, the man who started Sundance in Park City, said that Sundance, as a festival, as almost nothing thematically or aesthetically in common with Park City. They just rent the town for a week.

It's also damn cold - which should be no surprise in a ski town where you can literally board a lift from the center of town - but it's definitely a change of scenery from LA, where recently it's been about 80 degrees.

Later in the evening I attended the Sundance opening night party, which was a big hoopla in one of the resort lodges in town. We had tickets to attend, which made us feel very special. The place was absolutely crammed with people. It became almost impossible to move from room to room by the end of the night.

Still, it was crammed with filmmakers, actors, and press - no one immediately recognizable, but everyone wore badges that explained what their position was and what film they were there for. Everyone was in a chatty mood, and it was by peering at badges that I was able to talk for a good while with Greg Hajdarowicz, the Polish producer of the Spanish/Brazilian film Carmo, Hit the Road, which is playing at Sundance. I lamented to him that I was unable to get tickets to his film, and we chatted for a while about his upcoming projects. He mentioned that he's looking into making his next film in New Mexico, and we exchanged cards.

It all felt very Hollywood. But really, we just chatted movies. And that's the great part about Sundance - everyone already has movies in common.

"Corner Store" and "Silver Lincoln" up in Hi Res!

My two latest films are now up online, very large, on their respective pages. Check them out!

Eventually I hope to have the rest of my shorts up as large as these.

"Corner Store" Page Up, Video Conference, and "Nina" Updates

Corner Store is finally 97% complete, meaning it's missing one music cue and a few of the shots are still HVX digital shots instead of 35mm like the rest, but it's complete enough to show. Check out the new page:


On the page you'll find more information about the short and a bunch of hi-res frames from the film itself, which looks gorgeous in HD. I'm looking into finding the best way to upload the film online - I want the quality to be as good as it can be for a streaming film.

Just last week we had a video conference with Korea in Chapman's giant theater, where we premiered Corner Store and the film that we helped crew on in Korea, Children's Games, as well as a documentary about the whole exchange experience.

As luck would have it, the entire hour-and-a-half video conference is available online. You can watch, as separate chapters, the Intro, which explains the program and introduces all the main players, and the Conclusion, in which Stephanie Altishin, Corner Store's producer, and myself hold a Q&A with our Korean counterparts.

I've also been working hard on La Nina del Desierto. I met with Joaquin Garrido, a potential to play Javier, and he seemed eager to take the part providing his schedule allows for it. Daisy Robinson, the production designer, has been digging up wonderful props for the film, and a week ago I went out with some of the crew and tech scouted our locations. Boa Simon, the DP, and I started designing our shots based on my storyboards and shot a few tests:



The 2.35:1 aspect ratio is intentional - that's what the final ratio will be. When all is said and done it will be really interesting to compare the storyboard, the test shot, and the final frame to see how certain shots evolved.

Picture Lock for "Corner Store" and the Results of Fermentation

I just got back from a meeting with Robin Hartwig, the editor on The Corner Store, and we finally locked picture. That means there is to be no more messing with the video. The audio, both sound effects and music, however, will require ample messing-with in the days and weeks to come.

My good friend Dom Ricco has resurrected an old project of his, tentatively titled Visions of Life, and asked me to take a crack at his year-old script. I really love the premise. A wounded and bitter young soldier, confined to a restrictive neck brace, is stuck in a hospital room next to a friendly older Arab man, who describes in engaging detail what's outside their window. Though he hates the Arab man at first, he eventually has a change of heart, only to discover that the Arab man has passed on, and that he was blind - basically making up the scene outside the window.


I'm having fun with doing rewrites, and I'm really hoping that Dom can put this into production in the Spring. He was basically ready to go last year (some of the impressive storyboards are above) before he decided to pull the plug, probably because the script wasn't quite there yet.

Sometimes there's no cure for writer's block than letting it ferment. There's almost always a solution after you've put it out of your mind for a while.

"La Nina" Pushing Forward

With a mere two and a half months left until cameras roll on my ultimate passion project, La Nina del Desierto, the pre-production materials are flowing. We've gotten our schedule and budget approved by the school, and subsequently our Green Light.

Furthermore, storyboards have been finished (see top and bottom), and, perhaps most exciting of all, our production has been selected to receive a grant from Fotokem. They will develop, for free, up to 10,000 feet of 16mm or 20,000 feet of 35mm film. This means we can essentially shoot as much as we want. Thank you, Fotokem!

Now all we need is a grant from Kodak for the film and a grant from Panavision for the cameras...

In casting news, I suppose I can reveal who we were romancing to play the lead role of Javier, since we never got through to him personally, and his agent very politely rejected us.

Danny Trejo is NOT Javier Martinez!

Oh well. The good news is, I scoured IMDB for other similarly-aged, grizzled-looking, Mexican-American bilingual actors who've had a decent amount of acting experience (I'm suprised I found any at all), and I came across Joaquin Garrido.

Joaquin Garrido MIGHT be Javier Martinez!

He'd be perfect. I contacted his agent and she said that he's in Mexico currently, but should be very interested in the role. Fingers crossed!

That's it for now. I leave you haunted by the pint-sized spectre that is ... La Nina del Desierto.

M. M. No More?

I've decided to stop using "M. M. Rempen" as my pen/screen name. It's such a mouthful. And people don't know what to call me. Em Em? Mmmm? Eminem?

So now I'm just going to go by most of my full name - Michael Malachi Rempen. That way, those who know me as Michael or Mikey can call me that, and those that know me as Malachi can call me that too. End of story.

No movie news! But I did meet Sean Penn the other day.

Back to Booming

I've decided that this part of my site should be more than just a plug for myself. I was watching an interview with Jason Reitman, director of Juno and Thank You For Smoking, two of my favorite movies, and he said that when he was at film school, he would have like to know about what other big filmmakers were thinking and doing in film school to get to where they were. Other stories that might motivate him to keep going.

That led me to think that maybe it would be interesting if I talked in a little more detail about what day-to-day life is like for me at film school. Not that I expect to be some big director some day, and that these blog posts will be feverishly pored over by film students clamoring to follow in my cavernous footsteps, but at the very least, I'll be able to look back on this later in life and remember what was going on senior year. Dear diary...

This last weekend I was the all-important boom operator on my classmate Scott Sullivan's senior thesis shoot, The Gory Details. Though I was doing it for class credit, I felt like it would be fun to be back on set. I like being on set, and the boom operator is a great position. You get to be right there in the middle of the action, but you're not responsible for all the heavy lighting and grippage. You can chat with the actors and you get to do a lot of sitting down. When it is time to hold the boom pole, you build arm muscle. I remember reading somewhere that boom operators make a lot of money. I can see why.

I'm working on the script for a feature film, and it's incredibly difficult. After having spent so much time working on short films, I feel comfortable with short form storytelling. There's a clear beginning, middle, and end, with little room for tangents. But the feature is a whole other beast. I have characters and a basic plot, but I know that if I start writing, I'll crap out at page ten, out of ideas. I need to have it totally outlined on note cards or something similar before I can really buckle down and start writing. That's difficult to do.

The other hard part is that you can't force ideas. Ideas come to me when and where they feel like it, and not before. It's usually before falling asleep at night, when my mind is shutting down. So that means that writing a feature takes as long as it takes my ideas to settle into coherent forms that fit with what I've currently got. It'll happen, I'm sure.

And now for the plug. The Awards page has been updated to look shnazzier. I think it's pretty sweet.