The Merits of Hanging in There

The director of my short film, Jorge, recently posted a raw cut of about 50% of the footage from our short film. It is all just raw footage, (and his first draft at editing) so he hasn’t done any lighting adjustments, or added in any of the ‘frills’ yet (i.e. CG for sword clashes, full soundtrack.)

Unfortuantely a camera mishap also caused us to lose a large chunk of the footage, so he was only working with what he had, but even so, it still turned out fairly well. Well enough, at least to earn me the chance to present my film ideas to at least 3 different production companies. In that respect, despite everything that we went through, and even the loss of footage, it was a complete success. Especially considering that this isn’t even the final version.

At this point, we are preparing presentation materials for 5 or 6 films to 5 different production companies (both in the states and here) giving us a total of 25+ chances at success. The flagship script for the American companies will be Hip-Hop Assassin (now tentatively called ‘Hewa’ – Japanese for ‘Peace’), while Hip-Hop Samurai will be the ‘flagship’ script for the Japanese production companies. Although all 5 of them will be action films, the submissions vary from historical fiction to sci-fi to comedy, and as all of them are being professionally prepared with painstaking effort, I’m expecting good things. The other great result of the short film is that it won me the endorsement of Shimomura-san, my longtime mentor, as action director. With 40 + films under his belt, and an international fanbase for his work, I’m sure he’ll push the limits of what we can do as well. At this point, I’m not excited to see if it can be done- I’m excited to see which one will go first.

As for the rest of the short film itself, it will also be a part of the presentation package. The loss of footage meant a reworking of the story, but the new script is great, and I think it is actually better for it. The only unfortunate loss is the fact that Masa’s return to LA means an inability to retake certain parts of the fight, and that it’s only going to be half as long as it was originally designed and filmed to be. In any event however, Jorge has shown full well that he knows what he is doing, and I have full faith in his abilities to work miracles with it. He certainly has so far.