Peaceful Rise

So yesterday morning I met up with the 4 American special effects crew on this new movie and got in a van with them to go to Yi Xian, which is where they will be shooting. I explained to them up front that I had not signed on for the whole shoot, and was actually hoping to meet them first and see what I was getting into before I decided. Anyway, we passed through the town of Yi Xian, which was a complete dump, and then continued on to the middle of nowhere, which is where the shooting locations and housing are. The housing they had arranged for the foreign crew was this miserable little tourist resort, which was the best you could get in the area, and which was not even as good as my hotel in Kashgar. When the special effects guys expressed their dissatisfaction, the location manager suggested we take a look at the accommodation for the Chinese crew, in order to gain a greater appreciation of their high class treatment. Then we drove around more dirt roads to look at 3 shooting lo...

So, now The Kite Runner is almost over and I seem to have agreed to join on with another movie , starting immediately. My original plan was to take a well deserved break, hang around in Beijing until the 20th, fly home and then decide what I want to do next. But the special effects crew for this movie is coming over for a scout starting this Friday and will be here for a couple of weeks, and I thought I should at least meet them and see if I like them. They will be going home for Christmas, which will allow me to at least take a break for a couple of weeks, and then I can decide if I want to stay with them on the movie when they come back or not. I'm leaving for a town a couple hours away from Beijing soon to finish up the last two shooting days on Kite Runner, after which I am scheduled to come back and immediately travel to Hebei with these American SFX guys. I will not pass go, I will not collect my pay, and I will not attend the China wrap party. But whatever, the thought...

Take a look at some pictures Dagan took at my flickr account .

I'm too tired to spend much time writing about what I've been doing, but here are some pictures that Dagan took of the alleys we dressed last week for a day of shooting. (This is not real snow.) It's fun working on the set and following the team around. It's like being in a making-of like you'd see on a DVD. I'll hopefully get back with more pictures and more to tell later. I think basically you will all have to wait until the movie comes out and I can watch it with you and ruin it with my commentary.

I've been looking at a few odd jobs on the classifieds on That's Beijing, and I had a phone interview with some guy from an online clothing store for a position for "Procurement Specialist" which I think must be a scam, because he didn't call me back after I explained my confusion about how there's actually nothing for sale on his website. I also met with Carl Crook, who is in fact a really interesting guy, but didn't have any particular ideas about jobs for me. And I had a little translation deal which I lost when I was undercut by a poor Chinese person. This all turned out for the best, though, after I met with some friends I made through the hiring I had done for J&J. Like I mentioned before, everybody in this circle of film people knows each other, and these friends had happened to hear that they were short a translator on The Kite Runner , and suggested that I give this girl Sherrie a call, who was working on the movie and I had called in to ...

I quit my job. This is all I have been talking about lately so I will just sum it up briefly. On Saturday I went to my boss' place to put in some extra hours and mark up the script for VFX and SFX. This was to be the beginning of my long-awaited training. But the producers were coming in the next night and there was a lot of preparation that had to be done, so I actually spent the entire day fussing with my boss' little notebook computer to get the new schedule and translate and send it out, along with a whole bunch of little emails. I did this all sitting across from her in a coffee shop with an unstable internet connection, while she sat there making phone calls and lecturing me off and on for how poor suited I was for the film business. She insisted I work in front of her that day, because she said I would waste time making mistakes and asking questions if she wasn't there. It was so tedious to work on her computer with no mouse, no Chinese input, and unstable inte...

... is a translation for a colorful Chinese phrase for "rumor." Below is an interesting article which states that after the ongoing battle between Jackie Chan and Jet Li for the coveted role of "Monkey King" in this movie, with Jet Li coming out as victor, it turns out that actually Jet Li will be playing an entirely different role of a bad guy. What's more, according to a "leak" from "inside sources," Peter Jackson will direct the movie: http://stardaily.com.cn/view.asp?id=214187 Considering I just read the latest version of the script which came out on Tuesday and I'm currently dealing with hotel arrangements so that the producers and director can meet with people in Beijing next week, I'm either completely out of the loop, or this news is a bit off the mark. And I don't even know where they get the numbers about the movie's investment and Jet Li's profit share... Anyway my job can be pretty interesting sometimes, and ...