TR013 - Trịnh Thăng Bình / Không Sao Đâu - 01/2018

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updadated: 2022-03-10

The joy of used to study abroad in Việt Nam is that every now and then, there would be somebody comes for a visit.

After a couple of gap years in Australia, Jack Wytcherly decided to visit Việt Nam before heading back to the UK. This guy used to be one of my smoke buddies at night in boarding school. As we were chatting, I wonder when I would have a chance to come visit UK again to see old mates.

Before Jack left, I got a call from Vy (Chuột) that there was a MV that is in production and needed an Editor to join force. I asked about schedule and found that work would start as soon as Jack leaves the country so I took the job without hestitation. Took this opportunity, I came to visit the set and show Jack how far from the truth filmmaking really are.

My first impression was that the colours that the Director and the Cameraman had put on for the filmming was really attractive. Before I left, I asked the Cameraman if they were recording proxy files so I could plan ahead the transcoding process. I was told there were and so I felt great knowing I have time and can relax a little.

When I recieved the data, there were no proxy and so I lost 3 days just to transcode before I could start the edit. I learned from this project not to trust the Cameraman and have to check with my own eyes if there were no professional DIT on set.

At the start, everyone was a bit worried because they couldn’t quite see how the story would fit with the lyrics. After I read the script I didn’t worry about the story at all. But on my first round watching through the material I had very bad feeling. In hurry I started cutting a very rough draft and the problem became very clear that the pictures were going to be way longer than the song. I notify Chuột about this and the news got to the Director but I was ordered to keep going.

Knowing damn well that I would have to start from the beginning again after the first draft I still followed the order. My first cut was about 9 minutes. After seeing the first cut, I was ordered to cut it down to the length of the song. After the second cut, the Director immediately came to the edit room. We sit together til midnight and slowly the Director realised the problem I told him from the very beginning. If I am not mistakedn, the third draft was about 7 minutes long. Perhaps our Director wasn’t used to the speed of a music video and thus had direct the action with the pace of a feature film. Anyway, that was the last time I heard from the Director.

To continue, Trịnh Thăng Bình (TTB) came to the cut room. With no Director, I had to deal with the Singer with no knowledge of the production. I stated very earlier on that we could not make the pictures fit the music - story would be messed up and we would loose the audience. The problem was said was that if the pictures were longer than the song, we would have to do sound design for the film. TTB said he could take care of this for sure so my worries were took care of.

Through out the rest of the editting process, I thought Katleen’s eyes were going to pop out of the screen but other than that everything went really smooth.

The thing I was not pleased about for this project was that I kept mentioning we had to lock the pictures so the Online Editors can start their work. But TTB kept on trying to change the edit and so we missed the initail deadline. Also because of this, there are flause in the final film that can be spotted very easilly if the audience look for them.

While I was working, I got the news that the second episode was in the footage from the beginning. I really don’t know what they were thinking when they shot this film. The second episode were out of material just around 1 minute mark.

After some time published, I noticed a couple of pop MV would also do similar thing that made a short feature similar to this project. I don’t know if all the mess in this film has anything to do with that trend but there were definately a trend. I just read a couple of comments from the audience which made me realised that this log is a bit unneccesarry… but I just wrote the damn thing.

At least the story from Chí Tâm’s imagination was welcomed by the public.

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Credits

published: 2018-01-12

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Very long and in the film, it is very complete so please have a look in there.

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