Click here to view the Urban Invasion Blooper Reel!
The concept of Urban Invasion first came to me when I was sitting on a toilet in a shopping mall. It occurred to me that I was in a public space, but for a few minutes, this space was mine and no one would intrude into it. It was then I began wondering about the nature of interaction in urban spaces.
Why, for instance, is it acceptable to be within 50 cm of a person when in a large crowded area, but not when that same large space is empty?
I knew I wanted to somehow draw attention to the social and personal boundaries of public spaces, and I knew the best way to do that was to disrupt them. For example, if you're in a toilet cubicle and someone sticks his head over the top of the cubicle door, you would be outraged, but at the same time you would also become aware of the artificiality of your privacy in an urban space, that people don't infringe on your privacy not because they can't, but because it's not the right thing to do socially. I didn't want the film to disturb people per se, just to get them thinking and observing the fluid lines of interaction between people in public.
By this time I'd understood a basic concept that had been missing in all my previous films: story before idea. You can begin a conception of a film with an idea, but by the time the film is ready to go the story must have primacy. There is no film without a story to tell. Films about, say, racism are rarely about racism in the way an essay can be about racism; rather, a film might tell the story of someone affected by racism, and through the character, the film might explore the issue, but it cannot be about it. Even documentaries are stories first and ideas second. So I sought to frame the idea of fluid public spaces within the story of a young man who is engaging in a solitary activity (reading) in what is essentially a public space (Singapore city). Reading is a simple, universal activity that everyone has engaged in at some point, and it helps provide the necessary context for everything that happens in the film. It makes the film immediately much more accessible than, for example, Suffering for Success - who hasn't been rudely interrupted when trying to concentrate?
In this film, because the main character (the Bookworm) is so inexpressive, the music - if you can call it that! - had to shoulder the responsibility of setting the mood. I'm not much of a film score composer... the score was the result of sitting in front of Garageband's Musical Typing, attempting to knock out a melody that could give the film some rhythm. In that respect I think I succeeded somewhat - that rhythm becomes the Bookworm's "voice" in the film, and every time his book-reading is interrupted, so is the rhythm. This is something I only noticed in retrospect. I wasn't thinking about the "disrupting" of the score during the editing process, I simply went by what looked, felt and sounded right to me.
"Scoring" the film (I use the word "score" here loosely) was an essential experience. For amateur filmmakers, the score is always one of the most troublesome aspects of filmmaking - because it's rare that an amateur filmmaker has access to musicians who understand the demands of scoring, and who can compose and perform a film score, and it's nearly impossible for amateur productions to secure rights to songs on major labels. The amateur filmmaker typically has two options: public domain music, or no film score. Even then, public domain music can be subject to some types of intellectual property law. I tried editing Urban Invasion with no score, using instead some Orchard Road background noise, but without music the film was a drag to put together. It lacked pace and direction (not an uncommon problem in amateur film in general) - without music, the film was unfocused, the Bookworm was not immediately set up as the key character, and you just didn't know where the film was going. You could say the film lacked rhythm - without that eight-bar pattern ending in an open cadence, it wasn't clear that there was any progression in the plot taking place (a weakness of the script - see Hindsight). Trying to edit the film without music made me realise that I could not do without the score.
It's not exactly the greatest film score on earth, but it was important for me to learn in practice the challenges of film scoring, the impact it can have on a film, and how drastically film music can affect the mood and feel of a film. As audience members, it's easy to marvel at how the score of, say, Pan's Labyrinth integrates itself into and accentuates key plot moments - but the experience of scoring (badly) as simple a film as Urban Invasion gives more depth and clarity to the appreciation I have for film music.
I could - and should - have written Urban Invasion without dialogue. Since the film was meant to explore the boundaries of space, a dialogue-free film would have returned the focus of the film to the visual and spatial aspect of the interaction. If you look at the Orchard Road marketer sequence, it's one continuous shot of dialogue. Remove the dialogue, and the camera is free to frame the spatial interaction without regard for the nature of the verbal interaction. It would have opened up some very cool possibilities. Imagine this:
The Bookworm is approaching the main pedestrian walkway.
Cut to: the Marketer with her clipboard, scanning the area. She sees the Bookworm.
Cut to: Bookworm walking towards pedestrian walkway. A shadow falls across his path. He looks up.
Cut to Bookworm's view: Marketer approaches.
Cut to Marketer's view: Bookworm makes eye contact, then immediately looks down and walks ahead. Marketer walks past Bookworm, orienting herself such that she's always facing him. By the end of the sequence, she's ahead of him, facing him and walking backwards.
Cut to a shot from over the Bookworm's shoulder: The Bookworm's head is down as he walks, and in front of him, the Marketer is waving her clipboard while walking backwards.
I think it would have been far more engaging than what I actually did in the film.
I was, however, very pleased with the way the shot on the bus, where some random person falls asleep on the Bookworm's shoulder, turned out. The script called for the Bookworm to fall asleep on the stranger's shoulder and attempt to headbutt her awake, but in practice, it looked extremely unnatural. It was a while before we figured out what was wrong and how the scene should be played. (You can look at some of the outtakes here.) The eventual result had just the right feel and rhythm to it. There's no music over that sequence - the visuals carry the story well enough.
I noted earlier that the music does a lot of the work in pushing the plot forward. The problem, I think, is because reading a book is a passive activity. Normally, characters set out to do something because they're in a disequilibrium, and they're trying to do something to return to a neutral state. In Urban Invasion, the reverse was true: the Bookworm begins in a state of equilibrium, gets disrupted, returns to his state, gets disrupted again - there's no buildup, there's no chain reaction, each episode is independent of every other. Something had to shoulder the burden of keeping the plot going, and this time it fell to the music, when really I should have worked it during the writing process such that the plot and script had this responsibility instead.
I also learnt while working on Urban Invasion the challenges of shooting in an outdoor space, where lighting conditions were constantly changing. You'll notice the shots are often overexposed. It was first time using the Panasonic DVX102B and my inexperience shows: many shots are not as focused as they should be, and - especially on the blooper reel - you'll see I was too slow to react to changes in lighting. I'm not a regular photographer, but that will have to change if I intend to get behind the camera myself on future films.