1.What is your role / contribution to the film in each phase?
For the production phase, I play the role of script supervisor/clapper girl/translator. I can multitask cause I’m a woman!
2.What have you learnt in each phase?
For the production stage, I played a very vital role as a translator since the story is in Malay and my director is a Chinese. It was quite a refreshing experience for most of my group members who are non-Malay speaking as this is the first time we are doing a film in a language which they may not be able to understand. So it kind of like teaches us to be more open-minded and embrace something new. What’s important is that we do the research before the shoot and familiarise ourselves with the script, and hopefully the filming will be smooth-sailing. Who knows…we’re doing a French/Japanese film next?
I also learnt to be more patient. We needed to work with a maid for one of the scenes and it was hard to communicate with her as she doesn’t understand and speak in English well. Thankfully, I could speak a little Bahasa Indonesia, which is similar to Malay but different in ascent. I had to teach her the lines and reducing them eventually to make things easier for her. We practiced through the lines thoroughly and even though it was hard for her to say out the lines in proper English, we eventually decide to keep it natural – it’s okay if she couldn’t speak in proper English, as long as it is still understandable and that she portray the correct emotions.
I also learnt that it is better to plan for an overrun schedule. Even though we still did overrun for the first day, it was due to technical faults and there were more dolly shots which needs a lot of time to set up. We were very thankful to have very understanding casts who were willing to stay with us till the end of the shoot at 12.30am when actually, the shoot was scheduled to end at 10pm! Things were better for the second day of shoot. Casts arrived on time, we had more crew and even ended earlier than scheduled.
So…now that the production has ended, all we hope for is that there the footage turns okay. Can’t wait to edit it!
