"Contrasts" is the product of a collaborative effort between three students as the final project for the Moving Images class during Spring 2023.
This project is also the winning videopoem of the City Poems Contest, a part of the Vancouver Poet Laureate 2022-2024 Legacy Project (coordinated by poet laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam and judged by artistic director Heather Haley) as overseen by the City of Vancouver Cultural Services, The Vancouver Writers’ Festival and the Vancouver Public Library.
Contributions: Director, Editor, Director of Photography, and Sound Design
Tools: Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro
Equipment: Canon EOS Rebel SL1, Nikon D5100, iPhone 13 Pro
Team members: Wilson P and Nanop Y.
Time frame: March 2023
Our team unanimously wanted to create our videopoem based on Donna Seto's poem, "Contrasts", which is about her grandmother's experience of a changing and gentrifying Chinatown, because it invokes self-reflection.
After we were assigned our desired poem, we collectively drafted a shot list, storyboard, mood board, and video treatment pitch.
Our development plan for this videopoem kept changing because there were numerous options that we could take based on the poem's vivid imagery.
From the beginning, we knew that we wanted to have a Granddaughter character to be our film's protagonist, and initially, we had her surrounded by the Grandmother and Hipster characters. However, after a meeting with the teaching team, they convinced us to simplify our character list to one or two, the Granddaughter and Hipster, to create a simple but effective dynamic.
We spent two days in Chinatown scouting locations and shot the first draft with our team members as temporary stand-ins for our actual cast.
Improvement points highlighted by teaching staff and peers:
• work on the sound design
• increase the pacing of the graffiti scene via fast montages
• integrate shots of food and culture
• clearly identify the contrasting lifestyles of the characters
• tighten up the editing
After a week of team discussions and revisions around the feedback and critique we received after presenting our draft, our team re-shot our videopoem with the proper cast in place, and we changed some of the previous shots based on the feedback we received.
Cast:
• Brianna Wong as Granddaughter
• Milana Umrilova as Hipster
In addition to directing, shooting, and editing this film, I was also in charge of creating the sound design.
For this project, I wanted to create an original soundtrack; so I composed a simple four-chord progression and looped it using two contrasting instruments--the Wurlitzer electric piano to represent a modern sound, and a Guzheng to represent a traditional Chinese sound.
The author Donna Seto also sent us a high-quality recording of her poem, but we opted to use the recording that is posted on the Vancouver Public Library YouTube channel instead, as we felt that that specific version's tone and timbre fit better with the feel we were aiming to accomplish.
Through the creation of this film, I learned the importance of going outside the literal description of text to supplement an external source, and, as the director, how to refine an endless amount of ideas and potential paths to a sole direction.
Despite the many challenges our team encountered during pre-production, it has guided us to create a videopoem paying homage to the Chinatown of our beloved city of Vancouver. We hope that our depiction of "Contrasts" by Donna Seto can be a catalyst to improving the masses' knowledge of its deep cultural history and work towards a future where Chinatown can be revitalized in unity.
Our team and I sincerely thank Fiona Tinwei Lam and Donna Seto for their endless support and encouragement throughout the development of this videopoem; we couldn't have made it without them!