The dashing Kazu charming and seducing the quirky Rei.

The seedy backalleys of Chinatown seen through our lenses.

The glorious setting for our story, New York’s Chinatown, fully saturated unapologetic for its shadows.

Here’s a production still of the seriously sensuous and seductive Shuya.

[Updated poster 2/14]

In our second cut now.  The story has changed quite a bit from the script, it’s now much simpler and leaner and we’re honing in on a new title too.   I’m still working on getting the story just right, Neal is now mixing the original score and Aksel’s out shooting inserts and a couple of pick-ups.  Here’s an early production poster which is very likely going to be changed as things progress but I think it looks cool so I thought I’d share.

Here are some screen shots and B-roll taken with the Panasonic GH1 of our Scene 15 aka the bar scene.   Richard stepped in as the bartender whom we quickly nicknamed Gunther after Richard told us that Gunther from the sitcom, Friends, was reportedly paid $500,000 to stay available although apparently he didn’t really have to do that much work … wow, I’m just whetting at the kind of film I could shoot for that kind of money.

Back to this footage, the scene is supposed to show Rei, Sunyi and Kazu getting wasted on a night out.  As is, it’s a little to long to fit into the film but some of these great shots should make it to the final cut.

Finally, for those of you who don’t know who Rila is (Google “Rila model”), what you’re seeing in this footage is a departure for her from her trademark bleached blonde hair … remember, you saw it here first!

It’s a wrap! Finished principal photography tonight and tomorrow we start post-production.  I can’t say how amazed and lucky I feel to have been a part of this project, I could not have imagined a cast and crew more talented and passionate about what they do than the lot I found myself with the last few days.  I’m humbled and grateful for their commitment on this little indie film.

Tonight should not pass without a special shout out to Khun Chavalit aka “Charlie”, owner of ERB Restaurant, for his hospitality and his patronage of our film shoot, what a rare and kind man.  Thanks to the restaurant staff for beiing so accommodating too and going out of their way to help us get out shots.

Tonight’s production pic is a shot from what’s now being called “Gunther’s Bar” …

Overall a good night with some great shots.  The evening did start out a little rough when our extras did not show up and we had to postpone two scenes and we found our recorder batteries were fully drained but we did complete 5 more scenes tonight.

We had dinner at ERB and love the owner Charlie, we hope to shoot a scene there.  ERB on Manhattan Avenue is fully staffed and manned by real Thais, they make no concessions, the Tom Yam Khai I tried was so spicy it must have stripped the top layer off my tongue!

Here’s a production photo from Scene 8, beautiful sihouette of Kazu and Rei’s hands plus a bonus photo of Derek Zoolander on location with us!

Just wrapped an exhilarating first day of principal photography, so much fun. We finished shooting 6 of 17 scenes.  Dinner the night before at rehearsals was Fornino’s pizza (a tough act to follow) but I thought Andreas pulled it off handsomely with some very welcome Thai delivery from ERB on Manhattan Ave.

Here are some outtakes of our cast seriously at work …

]]> http://seemslikefate.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/day-01-principal-photography/feed/ 0 seemslikefate Sunyi and Rei