from David Schmoeller

Objectifs Residency & Lab for Photography and Film

I’m very excited about my residency at Objectifs and look forward to meeting everyone involved. Even though our time-frames at the lab are staggered, I look forward to meeting filmmaker-in-residence Victric Thng and to see his program at the March 27th screening.

Even though filmmaker-in-residence Grace Lee and I will not be in Singapore at the same time, I hope to meet her in Los Angeles at some point, as I have family there and visit often. I would like to see if I can possibly screen the films of both filmmakers in Las Vegas as part of the UNLV Short Film Archive screening series that I program.

I saw Aaron Wilson’s residency project at the Objectifs Films screening at Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival and was much impressed. I also very much want to meet Royston Tan as I am a big fan of his work.

At the suggestion of Yuni Hadi and based on previous filmmaker-in-residence Aaron Wilson’s project (filmed in Australia and Singapore), for my artistic project at Objectifs, I wrote a short film script called WEDDING DAY that tells the story of three brides: one in Las Vegas, one in Paris and one in Singapore. Each bride is in her wedding dress when we first see them – and something unexpected (even calamitous) has happened to each.

I filmed the Paris segment while traveling through Paris on my way to the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival where I made a Media Rendez-vous presentation and collected new shorts packages for the archives. The Cinematheque Francaise in Paris had scheduled a TRIBUTE TO DAVID SCHMOELLER screening (PLEASE KILL MR. KINSKI, CRAWLSPACE and TOURIST TRAP) to coincide with my trip to Clermont so I decided to shoot this very ambitious section of WEDDING DAY during the day of the screening.

We managed to shoot scenes at the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame cathedral, a flower market, the sidewalk along the Seine river, in the metro, and at a cemetery – a very busy shoot). I will write a separate blog to describe this difficult but ultimately very successful shoot – and tell you about my amazing Parisian cast & crew!

The Singapore segment of WEDDING DAY will be shot during my Objectifs residency in March, 2007. The Las Vegas portion of the story will be shot in April-May, 2007 as part of the Master Directing class I teach for the Department of Film at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

At some point, I will try to make a link to the script available on-line as well as information on cast & crew in Paris (stills & dailies) – and the Singapore team when assembled.

Please feel free to participate in this blog – or email me at schmoeller@cox.net with questions, thoughts, anything at all.

I will be putting together my Singapore production team soon and I look forward to the staging and screenwriting classes I will teach at Objectifs and my two screenings at the Singapore Art Museum.

Until next time, I am filmmaker-in-residence

David Schmoeller