In conversation with McKenzie Stubbert

I had the great pleasure to lead a post-concert Q&A with Emmy Award-nominated composer McKenzie Stubbert at the album release/listening party for his latest LP, Waiting Room. On August 28th, the audience gathered in the Community Room at the South Pasadena Public Library for a live performance of selected tracks from the album, with Stubbert on piano accompanied by harpist Jackie Urlik. In the words of the composer: “I hope incorporating developing technologies into our work continues to be as human-centric as possible and that recordings and live performances reflect that, conveying it to an audience in a manner that helps them feel it on such a deep level they value it more.”

Waiting Room was released by Curious Music on August 18th and is available to stream anywhere, as well as on 180-gram vinyl and CD.

Teens In My Twenties: The Interview with ERIKA POH

Teens In My Twenties, the debut EP from multi-hyphenate composer-performer-singer-songwriter ERIKA POH, springs to life from a vivid musical palette influenced by Broadway melodies, R&B and symphonic masterworks. With lyrics leaping from irreverent to contemplative, her latest collection of songs explores the doubts of young adulthood with intricate harmonies woven from a large cast of collaborators and friends. I recently sat down with ERIKA to discuss her artistic journey that led to creating Teens In My Twenties, and what uncharted emotions and new sounds she has yet to explore.

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Describe some themes on Teens In My Twenties. What motivated you to write about these things at this point in your career?

ERIKA: “Teens In My Twenties is about a coming of age. It’s about unrequited love, daddy issues, social anxieties, failed dates and the fear of growing up. While the music seeks to mask these anxieties with humor, it is this very disguise that exposes its vulnerabilities and sensibilities. It’s a body of work that questions societal expectations of growing up. It questions the need to feel like growing up is a point of arrival or even a process in which the individual emerges from it having everything figured out. I think all these thoughts/phases are what I’m currently going through right now in my career which is what compelled me to write this. These thoughts are always something I struggle with, and this body of work validates these feelings—it tells me that it’s ok to live life right now.”

I’m curious, how do your methods for composition inform or contribute to your pop songwriting?

ERIKA: “I think my music theory knowledge definitely affects the choices for voicing and counterpoint that I make in my music. Sometimes I notate BGV (background vocal) voicings or even keyboard voicings that I later track in the DAW, just to make sure that the dissonances make harmonic sense. I think another direct influence from my compositional training is my ability to write string arrangements! I love writing, arranging, and recording string arrangements—and I love doing this with my long-time collaborator and violinist Olena Kaspersky. You can hear her playing in my arrangement on ‘it’s too much.’ Other than this, I don’t think I often intentionally think about how my classical background affects my writing, it just probably exists and affects it in subtle ways!”

April 26th, 2023: ERIKA POH performs at SONIC ACTIVATION, a collaborative concert between dublab and the USC Thornton School of Music. (Photo by LZ)

Tell us about your collaborators on Teens In My Twenties. What roles did they play in the songwriting process & production?

ERIKA: “All the collaborators on this project are my good friends. Many I play with in my band, including Jacob E, Manny Martinez, Julia Levin, Terako and Hailey Wild. Mostly, they follow the charts/MIDI demos that I give them and record their parts over these demos in their own style. Charlie Hallock also helped me record and produce vocals on some of my sessions. In addition to these friends who collaborated with me as session musicians, I also co-produced with several others who contributed to the songwriting and the sound of the EP. JC Chiam, Samvel Krajian and Grace Miedziak co-wrote ‘Teens In My Twenties’ with Yafeu Tyhimba. JC was pivotal in helping me conceive of and record this first EP of mine. I learned a lot from JC—I learned about recording musicians and how to be in sessions. He also produced vocals and did initial production mixes on some of the songs.”

Photo by Ally Wei.

Pick a distinctive sound from one of your songs—something that you feel makes it unique. How did you achieve this in the studio?

ERIKA: “I believe that the unique sounds I have on this EP are always a result of collaboration. ‘Imaginary Man’ is a song I co-produced with my precious friend Samvel Krajian. There are so many sounds that Samvel contributed that made it really unique—the metallic drums, synth warbles…it’s difficult to describe, I think you just have to listen to it! I have no idea how he does it so I couldn’t tell you how these sounds were made. I also want to know…”

Describe a key collaborative moment in the making of your debut EP.

ERIKA: “On ‘like u,’ I collaborated with Frank Wendelin and David Hernandez. They both played classical guitar on the track which is the backbone of the entire song. I knew I wanted a soft, gentle guitar sound and both Frank and David were so open to improvising and devising the guitar voicing, harmonies and melodies with only a basic guideline/chart from me. This is what really transformed the sound and made it the track that it is today.”

ERIKA POH performs at CASA. (Photo by Vincent Leo)

What challenges did you overcome making Teens In My Twenties? What did you learn about yourself in the process?

ERIKA: “I think this EP helped me overcome my fear of producing. For a long time, I’ve only worked in acoustic mediums or in notation. Before writing this piece of work, I had limited experience in recording or making electronic music…or even working in DAWs. Making this EP was a process, and it gave me more experience in processing raw audio, but also conceiving music in MIDI and samples instead of notation.”

How have these songs developed the more you've played them live?

ERIKA: “I think I’m trying to find new ways of presenting the pieces, trying to find new arrangements to play. I’m playing with new people all the time, so that always changes the sound.”

What are you looking forward to in your evolution as a composer & songwriter?

ERIKA: “I’m looking forward to a more direct, bold sound in my next few works. It’s such a vague idea—while Teens In My Twenties is more of a coming-of-age album, the next body of work will be an emergence, a kind of coming-of-self. I also look forward to exploring more classical music techniques in pop music writing: notating synth line/notating electronic samples, creating orchestral textures and playing them all together within a song.”

ERIKA POH. (Photo by Sean David Christensen)

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Teens In My Twenties was released on May 12th, 2023 and is now available across all major digital streaming platforms. For all upcoming shows & releases, stay connected with ERIKA POH on Instagram at @pohsterika

The Moveable Fest Interview: Sean David Christensen on "What I Had to Leave Behind"

Stephen Saito of The Moveable Fest interviewed me about my collaborative creative process making What I Had to Leave Behind. I was flattered to describe the production hurdles I had to overcome with my team, once again reminded how grateful I am to work alongside such amazing people. It was enlightening to hear his perspective watching my film for the first time, and I hope you'll enjoy the discussion!

Animating memories with Charlotte Arene

Charlotte Arene is a filmmaker & animator specializing in stop motion and After Effects. Having long been a fan of her intricate work visualizing memoirs, monologues and dreams, I commissioned her to direct the music video for “I Miss the Old You.” Our collaborative process took place over email and international Zoom calls, each of us exchanging reflections on the song’s themes of loss and regret. My aim as a producer was to build a sandbox with enough fertile ground to support Charlotte’s process with the trust that’s essential for a creative partnership. She describes her instincts creating something that resonates with the lyrics & melody just as strongly as with her philosophy as an artist: 

La mer à boire (2020) by Charlotte Arene.

“Five months prior to Sean offering me the visualizer for ‘I Miss the Old You,’ I’d taken a deep dive into the huge boxes of photographs and negatives stored in my parent’s basement. I was looking for childhood pictures of my older sister to animate them into a short film. It was to be my wedding gift for her and her fiancé.”

“As an animator, the experience was exhilarating. As a sister, it was extremely moving. What I felt as I went through these hundreds of photographs was surprisingly akin to sorrow, and it was still lingering at the back of my mind when I first listened to Sean’s song and imagined how I could respond to it.”

Concept art & animation notes by Charlotte Arene. (Photo courtesy of the artist.)

Sean’s sister flies a kite at a family picnic, circa 1990. (Photo courtesy of Christensen family archive.)

“I knew I wanted to work with photographs again, and Sean was very open and generous when I asked if I could work with some of his childhood pictures. We exchanged via email, made a selection, and discussed how I could stage them. Early on, I was fixated on the idea of a force of some kind, pulling those photographs away from a desk or a wall…a physical representation of that tug I felt when I listened to the song. It started off as a gravitational pull, then evolved into a surfing motion. Finally, it settled on a strong wind. It’s funny, in retrospect, how the idea got lighter.”

“The minute this image took root, I saw something in three pictures of his sister I hadn’t noticed before: she was holding onto a string, so fine I had missed it at first. The string led to something upwards and out of frame. Then it hit me. She was holding a kite. The image just fell into place and I knew this would be the perfect photograph to animate. I’m glad it resonated with Sean and I’m very grateful to him and his sister for allowing me to use it.”

A conversation with “Lata” filmmakers Alisha Tejpal and Mireya Martinez

A meditation on class and space in South Mumbai, Lata frames the life of a young domestic worker (the film’s namesake) within contrasting privileged and prohibited interior worlds. Director Alisha Tejpal and producer Mireya Martinez, who both co-wrote the screenplay, shared with me their creative process shortly after the screening of their film at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

ARCHITECTURE, DISTANCE & PRIVACY

Tejpal: Before even knowing the story, the film was very much structured around the idea of wanting to capture modern day, post-colonial architecture and spaces in India that reflect the ways in which even urban architecture perpetuates this system. The home is divided in particular ways, there's particular corridors and doors that cut access. The quarters that the help live in are so segregated, both in sound and in location. So, this idea of wanting to have this architectural element play a role as a character in the film was very important to us. We started to script keeping in mind that the film would at first just be this look into small, segmented spaces of the home, and as the film proceeds, we open the world so you get a sense of the architecture of the entire space. The sound of the outdoors is what would guide us in understanding how far Lata is from something, how much she can hear or can't hear.

Martinez: I remember while we were writing the script, Alisha said something very funny to me...that she couldn't ever envision the film in a close-up. It's almost like her brain had a block where it just all took place in single wide takes that cut into each other.

Tejpal: Yeah, that's true. I do think the film benefited from my not-yet-advanced filmmaker brain in the sense that when it came to editing, I was still unable to fully comprehend shot sizes. So, my natural go-to response has always been wides. The framing of the film was very much an attempt at maintaining distance from the lead as a constant reminder to the audience that the filmmaker is of a different class and caste, right? That the filmmaker is an outsider, and I’m not in any way proposing to give a voice or be a voice for the various actors. They have their own voices and very much have the agency for it. That isn't my job or my place to do. In some ways that dictates the distance, as well as this repetitive reminder, even to the viewer, that we are looking into a life that also has its own privacy. We had a rule with our DP (Director of Photography, Ravi Kiran Ayyagari) that no matter what, the camera always stays at eye level. Even if it's not the best, most beautiful frame – we meet Lata at eye level, no matter what. As much as you are getting access to, I am getting access to as well. The access, in this case, is being controlled by Lata and protecting and preserving her own privacy as well.

PROTECTING THE VISION

Martinez: It's a very close creative collaboration. I was a co-writer and a producer and a creative producer. I think all of those roles may sound like a lot, but to me they make sense. The writing component was the one that stuck more to being a co-writer, whereas the other roles merged into one, becoming a facilitator for Alisha's vision – also a protector of the vision itself. Firstly, you're supposed to take care of getting what you actually need for the film. I think for awhile she (Alisha Tejpal) had a very strict, theoretical idea of what she wanted the film to be. But the whole time I was like, "Okay, I understand that it has to hit these aesthetic constraints that you want to reach. And you want it to do XYZ on a theoretical claim, but where’s the meat? So, a lot of our co-writing exercises were more about dragging out the meat and putting it on the page. The script. As a producer, it was just about—

Tejpal: As a protector.

Martinez: (Laughs) …as a protector.

Tejpal: I want to know this too.

Martinez: I think as a director, if you're doing too much, you’re bound to stray away from the thing you want to make. I remember that because I'm also a filmmaker and I definitely struggle, or have struggled in the past from trying to do too much, which I think is part of what makes me a reasonably good producer.

Tejpal: I like the term “protector,” and I think that's where the role of a creative producer comes in, depending on the relationship. It's not about how many shots you can get and how much of the film you can get. It's about figuring out what serves the film best.

Martinez: This is a silly example, but as a director—I was trying to shoot this short film. Alisha was on camera and it was my own project. I wrote the script about a little girl whose turtle dies. I was doing too many things at once, so I went and ran out to the rental house to get a little fake turtle. But between the stress of directing and the shoot and all of these things, I forgot a key component, which was that the turtle was supposed to be the size of the fish tank. And I ended up renting a tortoise.

Tejpal: A tortoise. (Makes shape with hands)

Martinez: And that's what I tried to not let happen to Alisha. It's about catching all the things that would distract her from what she's actually trying to make.

Director Alisha Tejpal & producer Mireya Martinez (standing, first and second from right) review their camera setup on location in a residential apartment in South Mumbai. Crewmembers Hetal Dedhia (Gaffer) Vandita Jain (1st Assistant Camera) and Director of Photography Ravi Kiran-Avaggari look on.

OCCUPYING THE SPACE

Martinez: We had a very leisurely schedule, which was a choice. The pace was very slow, it couldn’t have been made any faster. Sometimes we’d have an hour-long break in the middle of the day because if we have control of the set, why don’t we do what we would like in the real world? There were moments where the crew would look at us and just be like, "Why are we waiting for the sunlight? Just light it.” And we had to stick to the original vision and wait for the light outside to naturally change.

Tejpal: Just to add, I think the biggest thing we learnt from all of this was that you have to serve the project what it needs, right? I don't think it would’ve been possible to have made Lata without non-professional actors and on a tight schedule. If I want this woman's presence to fill the frame and I want whatever her body carries to find its own meaning within the space, then I need to give her time and time doesn't necessarily mean with the camera rolling. So, we shot over five days. We could’ve done it in three, but we gave it time. There was time for her to repeat the gestures, or the living room shot where she swept. She must've swept eight times before we even shot it.

Martinez: Or just be there.

Tejpal: Or just be there, and I think it had all of that. It's not something you can rehearse, right? It's muscle memory. And it's the way your body reacts to objects. And I think all of that infuses the frame. And for that, we had to make sure the base of the film permitted her to keep up and to sort of experience the space and give her the space to do that. But we also used it like a framing device, right? Because we don't really hear her name until the end of the film, so it became a play on who does the audience latch themselves onto in the first scene? When a film opens, there's a certain expectation of story and how we read story and where we latch ourselves onto what stories we think are worthy of our attention. And similarly, what characters usually tend to dominate stories. We were interested in also playing with that, the ways in which we attach ourselves to upper class and upper caste characters in the frame almost instantly, because the working class is always usually the background, unless sort of “made a protagonist” by a specific cinematic language, like a close-up.

Martinez: It’s something that I believe in, and I think Alisha does too. I think when these choices have a true history, or depth, or are thought through, usually people feel it even if they're not consciously aware of that depth.

Tejpal: It’s something we both agree on. For cinema to be accessible, it doesn't mean it has to be passive. It can still be cinema that demands participation and that if you leave the room with questions, then I think that's more interesting to me than giving you all of the answers. I think in some ways, both of us resist this idea of cinema being universal and this idea that it speaks in the exact same way to everybody. I think there's a beauty to not knowing everything and that it's okay for a foreign audience to watch something about a particular environment in India and not know. As long as it allows space for participation and space for questions, I think it's successful.

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Lata will make its European premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, June 2nd through 6th.

A conversation with Sundance 2021 filmmakers Julian Doan & Brianna Murphy, “Raspberry”

A young man (played by Raymond Lee) struggles to say goodbye to his father for the last time in Raspberry, from writer/director Julian Doan and producers Brianna Murphy and Turner Munch. As they prepare for their film’s world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, my conversation with Julian and Brianna revealed how their observations on relationships between the living and dead influenced the making of this short, and what it offers to audiences as a way to reflect on the grieving process.

Julian: It was a Monday at like, 3 PM. I was in the middle of working and I looked at my phone and had a missed call from a 310 number that was maybe ten to fifteen minutes ago. But there’s no voicemail or anything, so I thought maybe it was someone at work or someone asking about a job, so I called them back. A woman answered and she went, “Hello?” And I’m like, “Hi. I got a missed call from this number.” And she was like, “Who is this?” And in my head, I’m like, “You called me. You probably know who this is.” So I told her my name and she said, “Oh, it’s Heidi from Sundance.” Immediately I was really excited but also really on guard. For some reason, I don’t know, I was expecting they were calling us to tell us “It was great, but…”

Brianna: They don’t call you. (Laughs)

Julian: (Laughs) I know. 

Brianna: They don’t call you for that. 

Julian: So anyway, she was like, “We watched Raspberry, we thought it was great, and we’d like to invite it to Sundance 2021.” I tried very hard not to lose my cool. So I went, “Yeah. Oh, that’s great. That’s really awesome,” but inside I was freaking out. I kinda wish I’d let myself freak out a bit.

Brianna: Well, you told them maybe. (Laughs)

Julian: Yeah, so pretty much we didn’t know. We didn’t know what to do with this festival season with COVID and everything. Things were so uncertain. I sort of asked her whether or not the invitation still stands if we wait a year. And she said, “No you’d have to re-apply.” I don’t know what I was thinking, but I asked, “When do you need to know by?” She was like, “I mean, as soon as possible. Preferably by the end of the week.”

Brianna: (Laughs) Oh man.

Julian: “Okay. I’m like 90% sure it’s a yes,” I said. I think I needed to call someone. I needed to call you, at least. It didn’t feel real. I texted you, right?

Brianna: No, you called me, but I didn’t answer because I was in the middle of working. Then he texted me and said: “It’s not an emergency but call me when you get a chance.” I texted back: “Maybe six o’clock when I get off.” This was three hours away. (Laughs)

Writer/Director, Julian Doan

Brianna: So he called his friend Bernard, whom he shares good work news with.

Julian: Yeah, I just needed someone to freak out with. So, I’m telling him everything and he goes, “Have you told Brianna yet?” And I was like, “I tried calling her and she told me she’d call back tonight.” And he was like, “No, you need to tell her to call you back now.”

Brianna: (Laughs)

Julian: It was like I hadn’t thought of it. (Laughs) So then I hung up the phone and I texted her again, “But like seriously if you get like five minutes just give me a call.”  

Brianna: So, I call him back and he says, “I just got some amazing news, do you wanna guess what it is?” I have no idea. “Really?” he says, “you have no idea, what that news could be?” He said, “We’re gonna be Sundance filmmakers.” In my head, I imagined this is what people who want to have children feel like when they find out they’re pregnant for the first time. It was pretty unreal. 

Julian: I heard some sort of whimper on the other end of the phone. Are you crying, are you laughing? What’s going on? 

Brianna: I was crying. Laugh-crying. I felt like I smiled the whole rest of the day. Maybe they couldn’t tell because I was wearing a mask.

Julian: I had been writing a lot of this stuff over the past two years, when my dad passed away, and honestly a lot of that is just literally what happened, so it didn’t take a lot of creative extrapolation to put it down into a scene. I guess what it was is when I’m going through all of that, it’s just a lot of observations, like watching my brother and how he’s grieving and watching my mom and thinking about how I’m grieving. So, the first step is you need to attach it to a character. There needs to be a character who’s experiencing these things. That’s probably the easiest way in for someone to watch it. It’s essentially combining all those emotions into one person.

Brianna: In discussing making it and discussing the script, it is a very personal experience for you, but at some point in their lives – everyone deals with somebody dying. I remember when my grandma died, she wanted to have her memorial service in her home. When they brought her casket in, it was very solemn and they put her in the parlor…and then when they opened the casket it was sorta like, “ta-da!” It felt like a magic trick, like a reveal, the way the guy did it. Like, “here she is!” It was so weird.

(From left to right) Raspberry crew Jiyoung Park (2nd AC), Eddy Scully (gaffer), John Mattingly (1st AD) and Litong Zhen (1st AC) set up the next shot as director of photography Geoff George sits with writer/director Julian Doan to preview the framing. Production designer Jake Woodham looks on.

Brianna: I think there is something universal in this story. I think people don’t necessarily know how to put a description or word on it, especially in Western culture. We go to great extents not to deal with it. In other cultures, people spend a lot of time mourning a body…literally touching a dead body. We’re like, “we’ll ship it off to the morgue,” somebody else dresses them, somebody else buries them. Not to say that everyone does that, but I think there’s a universal quality to some of the emotions in this story, that I’ve experienced and other people related to, in reading the script.

Julian: Whenever I’ve talked about my dad dying, Brianna talks about that story with her grandma, and then I’m like, okay—it’s not just me. Someone else saw that this is awkward. When you’re watching someone die, people do weird things. And then once we started getting the actors on and other crew members, and you start talking to everyone about it…everyone’s got that story. Then you go, “okay, it’s not just for me.” As you talk to more people in the creative process, then you start to realize, through them, that it works. 

Brianna: What happened was he (Julian) wrote this script and uploaded it to a Dropbox that is shared with Ray, one of the actors. He read the script and said, “Oh, this is really good. Did you mean to share this with me?” Julian forgot he had saved it to a shared drive, but after Ray said he liked it, the script started getting shared around a little bit more within the friend group – among people that are filmmakers as well. We’d been talking about “maybe there’s a chance to make it,” sometime in the future, as this nebulous sort of thing.

(Center, from left to right) Actors Gihee Hong, Alexis Rhee and Raymond Lee prepare for their next scene.

Brianna: In February, my best friend’s father, Michael, died suddenly from cancer. He very swiftly declined, and in the span of a couple days from going to the hospital—died, very unexpectedly. We got the call that he had died at three o’clock in the morning, and then later that day we were doing errands and Julian’s friend called and said, “Hey remember that script you wrote?” He works at a soundstage up in the valley, and he said, “We have a free weekend. If you want to shoot it, you can come up here and shoot it for free.” It was this day we had just gotten this really horrible news, and then found out we had this opportunity to make this. For me, it felt very cosmic. We knew we’d be flying to a funeral in the next couple of weeks as well, so there were a lot of reasons not to do it, you know? For me, it was more of a motivating reason. This feels right. For whatever reason this feels like a gift we’ve been given right now.

Julian: We had just heard the news not even twelve hours before that call. It almost felt like, if we don’t do this now, what did he die for? It felt like that, like when someone dies—there’s a goodbye you have to prepare, like writing a eulogy. “I don’t know if we can do it in two weeks,” I said. And Brianna said, “Let’s just start trying.”

Brianna: I told my friend, “Hey, we got an opportunity to make the film. We found out the day your dad died.” And she was like, “He’d totally want you to do it.” (Laughs) Which, he really would’ve.

“I think there is something universal in this story. At some point in their lives – everyone deals with somebody dying.” - Producer, Brianna Murphy (pictured above)

Julian: There’s an energy on-set shooting it. Obviously, it exists in your head for a while. We cast people, some of which I’d worked with before, some I hadn’t – so there’s always some trepidation. We didn’t have time for rehearsal.

Brianna: We had a one-day shoot. 

Julian: We didn’t know how this was all gonna shake out. Who knows? But the moment we knew we had something was right when Raymond Lee, the lead actor, does that emotional turn with his father. 

Brianna: Ray had talked about “wanting people to kinda be afraid” of what is going to happen when he moves over to that bed. 

Julian: We planned to have that shot later in the day, for him to work up to it…but he did it, and we were just staring at the monitor like, “Oh my God.” 

Brianna: It was all in one shot. It was the first take.

Julian: My jaw was on the floor. I was stunned. I can’t believe he made that so real.

Brianna: And then we cut, and Julian was like, “Alright, let’s do it again.” (Laughs) Our 1st AD was like, “Can he do that again?”

(From left to right) Writer/Director Julian Doan and director of photography Geoff George.

Julian: We felt really good after we shot it. Ray and the rest of our cast—Alexis, Joe, Gihee, Molly, Matt, Harry—these actors were so generous and gave these unexpectedly grounded, raw performances. It was even better than what I imagined going in.

Brianna: What’s special is people noticing all of the little details that are in the movie that the entire crew thought about. Little touches that highlight the absurdity. One friend noticed the detail of this Asian family having all of their shoes by the door, and the undertakers come in and do not remove their shoes. The pamphlet that the son flips through, with the image of a covered wagon, is a play on a pamphlet called “Gone from my Sight". It is commonly given out in hospices with instructions on navigating the end-of-life process, like a "how-to" manual on grieving. It’s a very similar style picture of a tall ship sailing off onto the horizon, or whatever, but it’s this metaphor of death using a very white and Eurocentric image that’s not something this Asian family would relate to. People picked up on that. It was special knowing that the edit and direction gave people the space to notice that.

Julian: For me, I actually felt a little disconnected from the emotion of it, working on it, because my dad passed away two years ago—so I’ve had a couple years to deal with that grief. I felt a bit more activated, in terms of creative engagement, even though we shot it in the house and the room that my dad died in. 

Brianna: It’s not a soundstage. We actually found out on the day of Michael’s funeral—that we lost the location, so Julian spent most of the funeral seeing if he could permit his stepmom’s house.  

Julian: I wanted to be present for the funeral. Emotionally, mentally present—but I was on my phone a lot.

Brianna: It was horrible. But we had to keep this train moving. We had to figure this out.  

Julian: Which was always how I’d imagined it, of course—when I wrote it, it takes place at my dad’s house. So, when I visited the soundstage I was thinking, how do we make this look lived-in? How do we make this work in a very short amount of time?

Brianna: It was totally a blessing in disguise. 

Julian: We wouldn’t have been able to pull it off at all. There’s a lot that could’ve been very hard to deal with emotionally, shooting in such a personal space. It felt kind of weird, to be honest, but I felt very excited to do it—which at some level maybe felt wrong inside me, but I didn’t let that stop me too much. My stepmom was so gracious with us shooting this film in the house, and she was even excited to watch the process. She kept taking behind-the-scenes photos and wanted pictures with the cast! (Laughs)

Writer/Director Julian Doan prepares actors Gihee Hong and Raymond Lee (seated, left to right) for their next scene.

Julian: I always knew my dad would appreciate it. I think after talking to actors and other people it gets a little bit distanced. They become different people—and it’s not me. None of the characters I even necessarily think is me. I don’t think of that character as my dad, it’s just the scenario. It wasn’t too hard, but of course there’s times when I just wish my dad was still around to share it with. Actually, the morning we were shooting, it was five in the morning—I was picking up coffee and Brianna texted me and said, “I’m super excited we’re doing this together. I’m really proud. I wish your dad was still here and we were making this film about someone else.” I wish he was at the house and we were like, “Hey, we’re shooting here!” 

Brianna: (Laughs) Yeah. “Hey, thanks for letting us use your house!” 

Julian: Obviously, I would love to share it with my father. It's ironic because it wouldn’t exist without him dying. But I know he would absolutely have loved it.

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Raspberry premieres at the Sundance Film Festival, January 28th - February 2nd in “Shorts Program 2”. Tickets are available now, with the Explorer Pass granting virtual access to all 49 short films in this year’s festival, as well as “New Frontiers” and “Indie Series” programs.

NewFilmmakers Los Angeles / Stage 5 - A discussion about "The Duel" →

Since 2007, NewFilmmakers Los Angeles has been providing a home for artists to share their creative voice in an environment that supports truth in cinematic storytelling. In addition to their monthly film festivals, DocuSlate, a entire day of documentaries, was added to their yearly programming in 2016 to increase awareness and widen opportunities for representation of true stories and personal narratives on screen.

Last December I enjoyed sitting down with NFMLA Board Chair Danny De Lillo for a discussion about my creative process behind The Duel, and the unique challenges inherent in “translating” someone else’s truth. As an artistic custodian of my own family experiences which have been transmuted into past works, making these connections during our discussion was illuminating for me, and helped me better appreciate the delicacy required for handling something as fragile as memory itself, especially when it belongs to someone else.

About: "NewFilmmakers Los Angeles (NFMLA) is a non-profit designed to showcase innovative works by emerging filmmakers from around the world, providing the Los Angeles community of entertainment professionals and film goers with a constant surge of monthly screening events."

A conversation with Jared Duran of Limited Engagement

Last weekend, I was made a guest of Limited Engagement for a jaunty discussion of the craft of storytelling with writer/host Jared Duran. The Phoenix-based arts & culture podcast focuses on engaging with artists of all types, from music & the performing arts to visual art and writing. It was a delight to speak with Jared about my latest film, The Duel, and join his roster of fantastic previous guests. Tip: If you're looking for something intellectually stimulating to keep you company while you work, I highly recommend checking out the Limited Engagment archives for a fantastic collection of other artists discussing their processes and compulsions. (My choice of words) 

iTunes link:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/le-41-sean-david-christensen/id1163029224?i=1000386753204&mt=2