Stanley Wong's Nonsense: Last Straw Trailer and Sex Bell

The trailer for the short that I co-directed with Vince Cruz that played at the recent LA Asian Pacific Film Festival got posted. It had a really great audience reception actually. I was initially scared it wouldn't do so well because the whole production was kind of rushed and I wasn't super stoked about the script because I don't even drink boba. It probably won't be online for a while, but until then you can check this out.

I worked on another short last weekend as part of the AT&T Create-A-Thon Festival. After the LA Asian Film Festival I got depressed because I felt like I hadn't made that much, even though half of the year had almost passed. I got an email for this 32 hour competition thing and I started reaching out to some folks to see if they were interested in making something. Even up to the day before I still wasn't sure if I was going to go through with it though.

We didn't know for sure if there would be any parameters to how the short would be made, but thankfully Chris Lee (who was part of the We Kill Kaiju's team that I was a part of for channel 101) wrote a script out just in case there weren't any restrictions. Me and my roommate Phil went to the meeting and found out we could make whatever we wanted and we got home and started rushing to produce things so that we could shoot for the next day. We somehow were able to secure all the cast, crew, and locations before the night ended.

The next day was a bit of a whirlwind. Actors were dropping out and we were scrambling to fill those roles while still traveling to shoot and getting everything together. Surprisingly, everything actually all worked out. The only thing that didn't was the shoot we had planned in a subway train. We thought we were just gonna walk on to an empty train and start shooting, but when we got down there we realized that there were way too many people. We ended up just shooting it on the subway platform, but even then there was a lot of security that we had to avoid. At one point they came out and we hid all of our cameras and they stood there and stared at us and we thought for sure we were busted. Then all of a sudden they asked us if we saw a suspicious looking person carrying a bunch of trash and we pointed him in the opposite direction and finished the scene when they were out of sight.

I stayed up all night editing with Phil. We would take turns taking one hour naps while struggling to keep our heads straight. I really love the rush of being on set, but there was definitely a moment where I thought "I don't think I really miss this part." By the end of it, we came out with a pretty good movie and turned it in maybe 10 minutes before the deadline. We went to the screening and in my opinion I thought ours was way above everyone else's and sure enough we won. We got 40 $25 amazon gift cards. We ended up splitting it pretty evenly among all the cast and crew.

We did this 24 hour AT&T filmmaking thing and won 40 $25 amazon gift cards. Noice.

A post shared by Stanley Wong (@swong37) on May 7, 2017 at 5:11pm PDT