I spent this summer following 98 Chicago Public School students from 25 different high schools as they embarked on an eye-opening program. Join Conscious Planet Media as we show you how the students engaged in both classroom and hands-on learning, and became catalysts to the powerful green movement.
Project Green HEALS part I shows you a quick overview of their journey. I shot and edited this as part of my work for Conscious Planet Media.
My friend Pat Bishop was awarded a grant from Northwestern’s Adshop to film a spec commercial for Kafein, a popular hangout among NU students, located at Chicago & Davis in Evanston, IL. He asked me to help out with sound on this project, and since we had such an awesome time working together on our 280 project, I jumped at the opportunity to work together again. It truly makes a difference who’s working on the crew with you. The team Pat lined up made all the difference in making it such an enjoyable half-day shoot. Plus, who can resist a little doggie on set? :) And to top it off, we all got our choice of smoothies/milkshakes on set as a crew member. Sweet. Thanks Pat!
Kafein Spec Commercial from Pat Bishop on Vimeo.
For our final RTVF 380 project, Marshall, Jory, Jane and I had initialy conceptualized a piece about the state of communication in today’s world, where it can be superficial and distilled, stripped of the richness of personal connection in electronic media. 
People can be so close (in proximity) and yet so far away (on an emotional level). We wanted to tell it through the story of a lonely guy finds himself engaged in communication on a far deeper level through letters in a bottle.
We just learned to shoot with the Arriflex BL-16, a pretty cool, but kinda awkwardly-shaped and heavy 16mm film camera.The first major hurdle to using this camera, was learning to load film into the magazine in complete darkness. It’s difficult enough threading the film through the little nooks and crannies of the equipment when you can see it during practice! Doing it completely blind in a changing bag to avoid accidental light exposure was definitely a challenge.
We shot this in 16 hours. Got ourselves out of bed at 4am so we could have a beautiful sunrise backdrop on north beach. Mother nature didn’t seem to like our idea and decided to make it a cloudy day. Since we had no car and no dolly, our trusty dorm shopping cart served as both equipment transport and as a moving seat for me as i held the camera.
We waited for the evening magic hour to shoot our last scene so we’d have sunlight shining through the multi-colored glass bottles that lined the
windowsill to cast pretty colors onto the table.
We also experimented shooting a long take at 12fps so it’d have a sped-up effect after film processing. It turned out pretty well, considering we were racing against time to get the shot before daylight went away.
Overall, a great experience!
Fresh and piping hot from the oven! :)
Shuling Yong 