Waiguoren the dianying

Discussion Open Forum
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Buoyed by our spectacular success with our recent production of “Taipei Idiots the Movie,” we at “He left right? film studio and film school” have gone into production on our second feature “Waiguoren the movie.” So far all we have is a title but it seems like a fun way to improve our Chinese. The idea is to make the world’s first Mandarin movie with foriegn actors. What do you think kids?

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I think it needs an exclamation mark.

Waiguoren!: The Dianying

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Waiguoren!: DianYing (there should be no ‘the’)… with special guest appearance by Elton John.

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O.K. We at “he left right? brain film school and language school” are open as a cow in heat to suggestions.

By the way the concept has evolved somewhat over the last ten minutes.
The idea now is to make a film that portrays waiguoren as the mulitidemensional personalities that we actually are. Flawed, funny, struggling, emotional, conflicted etc etc.

Work with me people. I’m struggling here.

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The background soundtrack should be live and unedited (roaring traffic… low frequency oscillations)…

The foley should be added live, but off camera, supplemented with simple Chinese opera percussive instruments and the suo-na.

There should be a

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Uh… what’s a foley?

Anyway forget all that technical stuff.

I like the bits about the live unedited soundtrack, taiwanese profanity and and sepia nude…

I was thinking more like three hour running time though.

Maybe we can get sandman to blow his horn for us.

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It’s a catheter inserted into the bladder through the urethra to drain urine, and it’s usually capitalized. I definitely wouldn’t want to be on camera while receiving one.

90-120 minutes running time.

The “the” definitely adds character to the title and I siggest it be retained. Perhaps you should start a poll on this, bob?

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And mud wrestling.

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I agree Jeff I like the “the.” Maoman’s suggestion to add an exclamation mark is a good one though.

So anyway how is this for a basic concept: Four Mandarin students have been given an assignment to video their daily life insofar as that involves using Mandarin. Each character is introduced as he makes his way through his day and towards an evening rendezvous with the other students at which time some English might be thrown into the mix. Include some zany, poignant, beautiful, young, old, rich, poor, characters (not hard to find in Taipei - tell them it is a school project) and have funny stuff happen with some people in on what is going on and some not.

I don’t know what would happen when the group meets at night but I have had some small success just filming groups of people until something funny or wise happened and then cutting out the junk.

It would be nice to have a digital camera a computer and some editing software I think but in fact I am a technological nincompoop so…

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I’d call it “waiguoren the dianying” (as in make the movies more “waiguoren”, if you know what I mean), “Waiguoren! - The Movie” ist just too obvious. I’d prefer sepia rude over sepia nude, make it more realistic, although for commercial purposes I’d allow some degree of nudity - you could have your guys interact with scantily clad garbage collectors in the heat of summer, get some sweat, dirt and physique in there!

As for the closing congregation of your aspiring Mandarin Men, why allow English? I’ve always enjoyed those pretentious young foreigners (I like the term “happies” as put forward by somebody on this forum) speaking in broken Chinese, give the audience a laugh, too, don’t make your piece unnecesarily ornate, heavy!

Don’t worry about a camera and all that either, just do it, waiguoren the movies!

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Uh…foley is the craft of sound f/x in cinema. You know…clop, clop, clop, clop…two coconut husks~voila!..a horse!

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Thanks psalmanazar

Xpet we have a similar concept in mind I suspect. There is no way to produce something that will look really professional so make it obvious from the outset that it is not professional and then endeavour to make it look and sound as good as possible regardless. Nice sound and picture can be achieved on a video 8 (my camera) if you light carefully and stick to interiors or really zoom in when shooting long distances outside.

I also like the heat and dirt bit. That is exactly the sort of thing I have in mind. Check out Full Frontal with Julia Roberts, Brad Pit etc. It is Hollywood’s idea of a low budget flick. I think they shot it with the leftovers from Oceans eleven or something.

Basically what I like to do is establish a situation where some good conversation is likely to occur and then film what happens. When you edit it you can really get creative and mix it up in ways that may not have seemed obvious when it was shot. In this case the whole thing may need to be somewhat better planned but the idea is to get a film that captures the actual conditions of life here: on the street, the bus etc. I would hope to be able to get people to really relax and think and have some tender, insightful conversation. Then again something completely outrageous - ala sepia nude waiguorens - would be good too. It would be kind of nice if not all the waiguorens were white guys. I think you know what I mean about that being a bit tired.

I should mention that this is not exactly a commercial endevour just yet. More like a fun thing to do on our language exchanges.

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Sorry but all five of my dictionairies are broken. What is a solipsism?

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Solipsism is sometimes expressed as the view that ‘I am the only mind which exists’, or ‘My mental states are the only mental states’. However, the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust might truly come to believe in either of these propositions without thereby being a solipsist. Solipsism is therefore more properly regarded as the doctrine that, in principle, ‘existence’ means for me my existence and that of my mental states. In other words, everything which I experience - physical objects, other people, events and processes, in short, anything which would commonly be regarded as a constituent of the spatio-temporal matrix in which I coexist with others - is necessarily construed by me as part of the content of my consciousness. For the solipsist, it is not merely the case that he believes that his thoughts, experiences, and emotions are, as a matter of contingent fact, the only thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Rather, the solipsist can attach no meaning to the supposition that there could be thoughts, experiences, and emotions other than his own. In short, the true solipsist understands the word ‘pain’, for example, to mean ‘my pain’ - he cannot accordingly conceive how this word is to be applied in any sense other than this exclusively egocentric one.

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Sounds pretty lonely. Anywho part of the buzz that comes from art is the shared experience of it. The breaking down of barriers. The realization that this “thing” affects others in a similar way at least insofar as it causes the same tears, laughter, discomfort, excitement etc. I don’t imagine solipsists make very good artists.

By the way this is the sort or dialogue that might be interesting for the film. Of course it would have to be translated into Mandarin and reherased. I concieve of this movie of ours as being loosely scripted with loads of room for improvisation. Something like a good English class.

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Or like a good Grateful Dead concert.

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So does the Taipei Idiots movie actually exist? Or is this all just hypothetical?

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I have the perfect opening.

NEWS REPORT: White guy is led into police station, hiding his face under his coat. Police lead him past protesters who pelt him with eggs. They are all beautiful young women.

“It’s not what it looks like!” he protests. “It’s not like that at all!” The camera zooms in, then goes all fuzzy in a flashback.

AIRPORT: Scenes of same white guy leaving airport, checking into hostel, applying for buxiban jobs…

to be continued! (maybe)

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Tetsuo - I am not certain that hypothetical is exactly the right word. Delusional, phantasmagorical…

Screaming Jesus - I like the way you think. However it must be remembered that this is a “no budget” movie we are making and as such the logistics will need to be kept to a minimum. In fact I was thinking this afternoon about scrapping exteriors all together and just lighting one interior space really well.

From what I know about story telling what you need basically is a few compelling characters thrown into some conflict with each other, nature or themselves. This conflict drives the story and the story drives the dialogue. If we can put together some characters and then give them an interesting goal or conflict then action and dialogue should flow from that.

So if anyone has any ideas for an interesting scenario… I was thinking that perhaps they could be sitting down to hash out a translation of some short stories or something. Of course the translations would have been done ahead of time. Anyway what we need is good convo. Perhaps the same thing could be done inside a car as a the “parcticipants” head toward some fateful destination or other.

We could make a thread out of writing the script.