|
My Beautiful Korean Movie.
"Wonderful Days" is the most expensive film EVER made in Korea, live-action
or animation. Last I heard, it cost about $54 Million.
The film is not a simple 2-and-3-D combo job... Tin House actually built scale-model
sets and shot them with a 35mm camera. They then animated the 2-D characters through
and around the miniature sets and painted any missing set details with CGI. The
skies you see in the film are all real shots of clouds, slightly painted over with CGI.
It's a pretty visually amazing film and I'm proud to have worked on it.
All vehicles are 3D as well, but usually on a real miniature set.
The Koreans ran out of cash after filming the live-action sets.
They then freaked out because they didn't have the cash to finish the animation. They
went in search of gap financing to complete the picture, but no one would loan them the
dough because their script was so bad. All of the corporations willing to provide
gap financing to Tin House said that the script needed to appeal to a wider audience
than just the Korean audience that they had originally scripted it for.
That's when they called me and my writing partner, Jay Lender, in.
Luckily, Tin House had not begun production yet, so all Jay and I had to do was look at
the live-action sets and write an entirely new film around them. That sounds a LOT
easier than it really is, let me tell you!
We wrote a pretty good story and that's where the problems began... the Director of the
film is a commercial director who has never directed anything longer than 30 seconds. He
empasized Look over Story at every point and threw back in much of the weird, too-Korean
elements of the original film we had cut out (such as a little blind girl who SINGS a lousy
song about the environment every ten minutes) and a truly pointless and unmotivated self-sacrifice
moment at the end of the film.
At the end of the day, I'm not even sure that they gave us writer's credit (after all,
Animation is NOT covered under the WGA's rules for who gets credits on a film), but it
doesn't matter either way. Our script rocked pretty well for a first draft cobbled
together from bits and pieces of stock footage. Subsequent drafts got a little hinky
with the weird unmotivated character moments designed around
"looking beautiful" rather than making sense and singing blind girls, but hey,
I got paid so who cares what damage they do to their final film.
Harry Knowles thinks it looks great:
http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=14352
Want to Watch some Trailers?
http://wonderfuldays.co.kr/download/new_multimedia.php
|
