Green Ninja: Origins (Day Three)[Behind the Scenes]

Watching the Babak Sarrafan and Jim Orr work with the Crazy Dragons at the Pao-Hua Buddhist Temple was an indescribably amazing experience. Today I really got to see hands on, even though behind the camera most of the time, exactly how a film crew and real production must operate, and how important each individual person was in relativity to the overall efficiency of the production. In a production you are forced to adapt to unexpected situations, as in this instance where we just were told to show up on the day of the shoot, then refused at first, testing the patience and creativity of everyone involved in order to get the problem solved. Fortunately, everything was worked out and the footage was amazing! Shots out to the costume crew for doing an amazing job on everyone, I was really impressed!

Kevan Hom did a spectacular job playing the Green Ninja, as did Professor Greg Lagera (who is really a Grand Master in real life!) and the rest of the Crazy Dragons. The shots were incredible inside of that temple. The Green Ninja:Origins is being shot 70’s cinema style so the film carries that look in the feature, and with the purposely off over-dubs, this film will really be something special. Dr. Eugene Cordero came out again to show his support, with Nick Martinez and Amy Holsten doing an amazing job keeping everything on point and in-line. I only wish we could turn this into a full length feature film!!! Cant wait to see the finished product (gonna see if I can sneak my way into post somehow….).

I also got a chance to sit down with the Director of Photography Jim Orr to discuss his involvement with this project and other projects he is working on, including the directorial debut of Alicia Keys’ first film. Jim was really cool and gave a lot of insight regarding film vs. digital filming (chemistry vs. pixels), and explained how this project, Green Ninja: Origins, was being shot 70’s style look, which is why the Panavision ($350k) camera is being used, which would have been the same camera used back then. Very cool. I could tell that Jim was very excited to work on this project, and loves working with enthusiastic students who are eager to learn. Good people.

Overall, this project was a blast to work on and I had a lot of fun. It is definitely a great hands-on learning experience to be able to be a part of a real film crew on a real film set, something that a lot of other universities and programs just don’t offer to the their students. I was very fortunate to be a part of something to special and so multi-dimensional that it is still a little hard to grasp. I have accumulated about 70GB of footage that I will make some BTS videos so that you guys can really see the behind the scenes action!! Great job everyone!!! ITS A WRAP.