Monday

Murder of Crows on 2/02/2007



Even when you work on a movie doing only the BTS (behind the scenes) documentary coverage, it can be years before you see anything on screen, and I mean, any kind of screen, whether it be on the interweb or mobile phone screen.

So, alas, The Messengers, directed by Danny and Oxide Pang, is hitting theatre screens, finally; and all the BTS I (Eric) produced and directed on it is out there somewhere in the digital ether.

Here are a few links to see my work for the movie: The Messengers Webisode "Pang Vision"
( go to the "video" section ) And... Ghost House site (Mr. Rami's horror production Co)"

I directed 10 webisodes and 10 mobisodes (for G3 phones in Europe and Asia.) but because of the unknown vagaries of the movie industry only certain BTS webisodes are still around – one main reason is the webisodes gave away a lot of details about the story and effectively were spoilers, revealing too much about how scary the movie is. Also, they re-shot and changed the movie a whole bunch after I did webisodes on principal photography.

One thing I liked about checking these tag-team directors in action is, that besides pinch hitting for each other in the directing dept. (one brother one day and the other brother the next day in the director’s chair), these twin-bros directors would direct a scene, even a single beat, according to how they saw it edited in their head. So, on set, you’d invariably here Danny or Oxide yell “Cut,” right in the middle of an actor’s performance of a line because they knew they’d be on someone else’s face in the editorial; then, they'd move on to the next set-up on their shot list.

I knew about this directorial style as a way to save money in production from reading about Hong Kong films, but to see it in action really blew my mind. It blew the actor’s minds to say the least. I think it might be the first Hollywood film that was directed in this style.