Smokin' Hot
Director / Editor / Music
“Smokin’ Hot” was our Narrative project for this semester, written & directed by myself. In a distant future, the Earth has gotten so hot that it has become deadly to go outside and resources have become scarce. On a particular scorching day, we follow two roommates, who must retrieve an important care package that would ensure their survival, even if one of them will have to venture through the scorching sun. It is a satire on the ongoing issue of global warming, and what could happen if we let it go too far.
When I set out to do this film, I knew that I wanted to do something a little different from my previous work. At this point, I had mostly worked on personal introspectives & horror-esque shorts, so this time, I wanted to do something more experimental and entertaining. While for the most part, I had presented this absurdist comedic take on the topic, I felt I wasn’t very clear on many of the topics I wanted to touch upon, such as energy overusage, corporate monopolies and the idea of “the earth being so hot, it burns your body”. More importantly, I don’t think I really delivered on the “satire” aspect as I wanted to. My creative consultant Phi (who was also on sound) and I were fearing it could be too “on-the-nose” as “megacorp buying all of the water in the world” is a known dystopian trope, so I attempted to lessen it to a degree, but I’m personally not as satisfied with the end result.
As mentioned, I wanted to be very experimental with the production, especially with the cinematography. I had cited Sam Raimi in terms of his very campy and quick camera movement style, and we had attempted to replicate that, but I felt we couldn’t really achieve that during production, mostly due to time, not allowing us to experiment properly. There were also some shots that had to be redone due to how impractical it was on the day of filming and also, as mentioned, time. However, the ideas that came about during filming that we all collectively came up with ended up working out better than the initial plan and saved us a lot of time.
The score was exactly as I had hoped when me and my composer Prabhav Ganesh worked on it, focused on Hollywood-style epic orchestral music, with string ostinatos & loud brass melodies/marcatos, which made the film seem more dramatic that it actually was. We had decided on one single leitmotif, the friendship theme, to dictate a lot of the cues, representing the trust both Johnny-Joe and Bryan had for each other. The sound design also worked perfectly for the film, capturing the type of vibe I imagined for the film (especially the Evangelion-esque cicadas), though mostly because of our ad-hoc way of recording dialogue (as described below), this made dialogue editing difficult, but with audio editing tools, we made it sound decent.
Nevertheless, what we were able to present were made clear to our testing audience, and as long as that’s the case, I’m satisfied.
As I had expected, because of the circumstances we were presented with during filming, we were not able to do a lot of the ideas that we hoped we would. There were certain camera movements, shots, dialogue coverage etc. that was not possible to flesh out properly due to the amount of time we had. However, with regards to what we were able to get, I am quite satisfied with the final product we have. With these shortcomings, came creative problem-solving. For example, I’ve had to re-write a scene where it would be impossible to get the actor back for reshoots, and did it in a way where I could easily do it myself. It wasn’t ideal, but it made the scene work in the final edit.
As for the visual effects, while they could be better, I think that they look good when considering my skillset. While I do have experience with After Effects, it’s not my primary skillset, so with enough resources, I’d like to outsource it to a professional VFX artist to improve production value.
The contributions from the crew were definitely recognised during the test screening, such as Phi’s “subtle” sound design & Joshua’s style of cinematography (an audience member noted the interesting tilts and pans), and any problems they had were from aspects that were not finalised (e.g. colour grading and dialogue editing).
When screening the film, it was noted that the dialogue tended to sound “very absurdist, cheesy”, in which, while somewhat intentional, it wasn’t exactly the reaction that I had hoped. Though since the feedback considered this dialogue 'funny', I think in the end, it worked out. In addition, upon reviewing the film, I wasn’t able to deliver a lot of the characterization I came up with, such as Bryan’s laziness or Johnny-Joe’s perserverance. I found scriptwriting to be one of my weakest points, so in the future, I would like to either delegate to someone else or collaborate more with a writer so I can make my characterization skills better.
A personal problem that I had with the film, was the performances. With all due respect, the talent in the film were not actors, so I never expected them to give award-winning performances, but it became clear to me in retrospect that I wasn’t clear with my directions, and thus gave performances that didn’t match my vision for the film. It didn’t help that I was essentially juggling production responsibilities due to our cramped shooting day, so in the future, I would like to delegate many of these responsibilities to a producer / 1st AD & take time to learn the intricacies of drama acting to ensure I’m able to communicating what I want to actors more clearly.
I knew that my cast & crew had day jobs unlike myself (I work nights), so it was difficult to find a good day to schedule filming, so I had decided to use TimeTree to schedule everything and have it sync in real-time for the other crew. This made communication slightly easier, as they could instantly know of new events simultaneously. Additional communication was done via Instagram direct messages.
As part of pre-production, me and my DoP Joshua Santos met occassionally to discuss my approach towards the film. To do that, with our phones, we tested several ideas such as crash zooms, low-angle shots and whip pans. While some of these ideas ended up not making it in the film, it did inform my DoP on how I wanted the film to look, a very campy B-movie-style of cinematography.
To shoot the opening scene with Himawari Nakano, because of the limited time we had together, the scene had to be shot in one take, and although she is not fluent in English, she immediately understood what the scene called for, albeit some improvisation was noticed, but otherwise executed it perfectly.
To enhance efficiency, I came up with a plan to ensure we could get as much as we could. For example, all bedroom scenes regardless of where they were in the script were shot in 3-4pm. Since we had lost the exterior shoot, we allowed an extra hour for interior shoots, which allowed us to start experimenting with shots (e.g. the fridge scene was originally three different set-ups, but then me and Joshua (DoP) found we could execute them within one camera set-up, saving us minutes).
We scheduled two days of filming, with a studio shoot on Friday of that week. We had booked everything, the cast & crew had put in their notices at work, and we were about to start shooting until I had been notified that it would be raining that day, which was a massive problem. The whole narrative of the film relies on the sun, and the fact that we wouldn’t have sun that day would essentially make exterior shooting extremely difficult. As a result, we had no choice but to quickly schedule a re-shoot for the next day, which promised at least a little bit of sun. We spent the rest of that 8-hour shoot filming all of the interior scenes.
One aspect that is quite noticeable was the slow-motion scenes. Because of a miscalculation, we shot these at the wrong "slow-motion FPS" (50fps), meaning it actually looked faster than what we set out. For the longest time, the slow-motion appeared choppy, until I found I could use Adobe Premiere Pro's Optical Flow feature to fill in the frame gaps, so while it looks off, it was the only way we could get smooth slow-motion that doesn't involve reshooting the entire scene.
Another problem we encountered is that our sound recordist found that the loan store did not provide proper boom mics (which we then found inside the camera bag), and instead we attempted to experiment by utilising lav mics. One problem was that there was only one lav mic, meaning only one actor could be mic’d up, which resulted in a lot of the dialogue needing to be replaced in the ADR process. The next day, on our reshoot day, unfortunately, the sun was gone again, but this provided time for us to reshoot some sequences with CJ. Because Slade lived further than all of us, we didn’t ask him back for reshoots due to the inconvenience. It was around the end of the shoot, where we found the sun was up for longer than we thought. Only problem was, it was going to disappear in 10 minutes, so we decided we’re going to finish the exterior shoots in that time, and somehow we did, with no breaks and quick shooting. On Friday, we scheduled a shoot inside Western Sydney University’s studio, which had a green screen for the “news segment”. Nothing went wrong with the day, and we had extra time in the studio, allowing us to shoot additional marketing material for the film. I had worn an old suit for the shoot to appear as a news reporter.
i had decided post-production was going to involve everybody that was on-set to some degree, just to make sure I don’t have too much of the workload. Color grading was handled by our cinematographer Joshua Santos, where we sat together to ensure it looked as I wanted; sound design was mostly handled by our sound recordist Phi Tattersall, focused on creating soundscapes and foley; and cross-platform elements were handled by our actor CJ Vasquez, who was taking videos and photos whenever he wasn't needed on set. This was also to make sure I could fully focus on the editorial process, which worked out in the end based on many of the comments provided by the test screening audience, who cited “smart editing choices”. The scoring process with my music composer Prabhav Ganesh ended up being slightly different than we thought. Because of unexpected circumstances on his end, we had no choice but to pre-score the film beforehand, based on the storyboard, and any additional cues needed would need to be scored by myself. In addition, a lot of the cues needed to be revised to ensure it fit the edit, such as 2m05a (the mail scene), which had a couple of measures truncated to a somewhat awkward degree, but we made it work.
The cross-platform elements included a short behind-the-scenes featurette for social media, mainly touching on production sustainability. We were lucky to have CJ bring his own camera to shoot while preparing for shots, which added a candid feel to the footage. We also edited together news segments from the green screen footage, which will also be posted online as marketing material. I also participated in a directors' roundtable, speaking about the film, which is linked below.
Overall, while at times it was a very stressful production with a couple of mishaps, we managed to finish this production in a way that felt complete, and it allowed to explore alternate solutions that ended up working out for us, and in some cases, were better than the initial plan. Hopefully, with much better time management and improving on weaknesses, we could improve our production value to create a better production.