I recently had a first in my life in the form of producing and writing a live-action short, and it was quite the adventure. Considering that it was my first time having anything I've written be produced, it's pretty insane that production took place over three different continents with a professional crew filming it up in Vancouver.
The whole adventure was started by Mr. Osric Chau, who I'm proud to have as a friend and a collaborator since we started working together this past Spring on his feature No Stone Unturned. He signed up for a filmmaking contest titled The Mighty Asian Moviemaking Marathon (Or MAMM for short) which gave a very short period of time to develop, write, shoot, and edit a 6-minute short film based on a chosen theme. The theme that Osric chose was "Fairy tale" and so he and I began wracking our brains trying to come up with a good concept to pursue.
At first, I wrote a couple of scripts exploring a fairy tale narrative about a boy training to avoid being picked on by bullies (described in the narration as "trolls"), but both Osric and I felt that there just wasn't enough there - it had some charming moments but there wasn't enough heart so it was back to the drawing board. Next we decided to start exploring the idea of doing a kung-fu prologue or epilogue to an existed story - maybe an animated movie? Seeing as it's the Mighty Asian Moviemaking Marathon we started going through animated movies to try and find Asian characters whose stories we could expand upon. Quite quickly, however, we discovered that, outside of Mulan, there are virtually no Asian characters in any of the major American animated films except for one: Russell from Up.
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