housemate frenzy

Housemate (2005)
Producer: JerryWho
Duration: 11'44"
Language: Mandarin with English subtitle

Finally, I have found the time to shoot a shortfilm to compete in this year's Astro Chinese Short Film Awards. Since I see myself as an expert ghost storyteller, I figured I might as well put together a screenplay based on some of my experiences.

And for people who know me, some of my encounters range from scary to very scary. In order not to cause widespread panic and thus my chances of winning anything at all, I have decided to pick some really mild stories and piece them together into this short piece of work.

This is one project that has taken over 3 years to realize. It began with a bunch of friends from cyberland who are more virtual than reality; we had loads of discussions, and things seemed to be moving forward but suddenly stalled. That was my first taste of people who talk but not walk.

A year later, Astro organised the competion with Canon on the second year, being busy, I was certain I didn't have the time to do it that year, with or without friends. But I kept on working on my screenplay.

Finally, 2 weeks before the September 30th deadline of the contest for the third year, I told myself I better do it, or I will be no different from those people.

So, last Monday, with the help from 7 and MM, we shot the entire principal photography in 4 hours on location borrowed from MM's friend.

Weird things happened as we went along - I had an entire scene missing from footage.

But I finally finished cutting the short on the day after shoot, and did music and effects on the following day. Sound effects work was a long and painful process - scary films call for scary sounds, and I have a lot of those lying around.

I spent the rest of the third day working on the music, I composed, arranged and recorded a new track for the end credit run. It was a good experience as I had to practise my guitar playing and generally reconnect with the musical side of me.

MM recorded two nursery tunes that were transformed into some scary stuffs.

Total time taken to work on the project, excluding dreaming up the story: 4 days.

Pre-production was about 25-minutes, the time taken for me to drive from Cheras to my house in PH - the storyline was formalised as I drove home one night 2 weeks ago.

Anyway, the end result was okay, the short has an eerie feel to it, which I guess should be fine.

Wish me luck.