Interview with Filmmaker Paolo Dy by Jody Michelle Solis
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FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT Sam Concepcion plays the title role of Miko, a young boy whose quiet strange behavior baffles his dad. Interview with Filmmaker Paolo Dy By Jody Michelle Solis Paolo Dy’s Filipino short film "Miko" is selected the first place winner of the Bogen Imaging Film and Video Shorts 2006 competition. Starring Sam Concepcion and Raymond Concepcion, the story is a snapshot of a moment when a revelation brings down the walls that separate two people, a father and his son. Available for viewing at the StudentFilmmakers.com website, watch "Miko" at http://www.studentfilmmakers.com/bogenimaging/ . First of all, congratulations on your film! PD: Thank you! You wrote, directed, and edited, “Miko,” and also served as director of photography for the short film. PD: Yes. The film was something that I’d been thinking about for maybe a year, a year and a half. In its original form I wanted it to be twenty minutes. But to fit the requirements for this one particular thing we were taking it to here locally, we had to cut it down to five minutes. And I think it was good because it made us much more focused. It premiered at the Creative Guild Summit and also screened at the Cinemanila International FilmFest. 'Miko' director Paolo Dy PD: Yes. The rule for the short films playing there was to Photos by Christian Halili introduce certain topics that the Summit was going to talk about. The Summit had the theme of “awakening” – about the clarity of 36 studentfilmmakers July 2006 Raymund Concepcion plays the role of Miko’s dad First Place Winner of the Bogen Imaging Film and Video Shorts 2006 vision and so on, and so in a certain way, it fit perfectly for what I Maybe Filipino filmmakers such as yourself who have studied had been thinking about doing, so I decided to go for it. And abroad and in the US can go back and start their own film schools everyone supported me there. in the Philippines? What do you think can improve the quality of Filipino film and PD: A lot of the working professionals here have had training television, or do you think that part of the solution involves going abroad, and they do apprenticeships. A few of them have actually overseas for schooling? put up the film school here, the name escapes me right now. Yes, definitely there is a sharing of knowledge. Whatever they learn PD: I guess I’d have to agree with you that part of the solution from abroad, they do disseminate it here. I think also just as has to be that we local filmmakers and producers have to be more important or more important than the technical knowledge is again exposed to production ideas or filmmaking ideas and methods going back to the standards of quality that we need to instill. outside the country. We have to demand perhaps a higher standard of quality for ourselves. And that’s pretty hard to do because the How did you get started in filmmaking? market here cannot really support the kind of high budget PD: I didn’t go to film school when I started out, I was a business productions that are being done abroad. It’s really, really nice to be major. I actually have two degrees. I’m a Management Engineering able to participate in the whole resurgence of indie filmmaking and Economics graduate from Ateneo de Manila. But in the middle that’s going on around the world because we’re able to share of college, my dad lent me this video camera and this rinky-dink different techniques and different ideas about producing quality editing card for my computer… Me and my friends at the dorm films at a low budget … There are a lot of things that have to be would run around and just do different things – music videos, fake streamlined about local industry. And I think, yes, it helps a lot to commercials, short narratives and lots of little fun stuff. One of my be able to be exposed to ideas abroad. I was in Berlin this February friends showed something that I did to the head of the Jesuit for the Berlinale Talent Campus, and it just blew me a way – the Communications Foundation. He liked it, and that led to my first range of different ideas that we were exposed to over there, the job as an editor. I started out as an editor, then I started directing, range of different people that we were exposed to, and I felt like, and later on I turned to being a cinematographer as well. my God! I felt so bad, I wanted to bring all my friends there, all my filmmaker friends… What kind of camera did you use to shoot “Miko”? July 2006 studentfilmmakers 37 FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT PD: “Miko” was shot on a Panasonic DVX100. And very, very basic equipment. The actors that you cast to play the father and son characters, they’re really father and son? PD: They’re really father and son. Sam, the kid, was one of the students of my girlfriend, who’s a theatre actress. They’re both theatre actors. My girlfriend recommended Sam to me and said, you better use him because he’s growing up really, really fast, and he’s amazingly talented. In fact, a couple of months ago, he won this national contest here called “Little Big Star” for one of the major networks. It’s one of these talent competition shows, kind of like an “American Idol” thing. And he won first place! Something like one million pesos. And now he’s very well known. We did [Miko] before this whole thing happened, and we were like, wow, this is cool. My star is now a big star. [Laughs] The story in “Miko” is touching, clever, and very human. What inspired the story? PD: To a large degree that’s based on something that I experienced myself. I myself did not have glasses until I was in grade 5. I had no idea that I was supposed to see any better than I did. So until that age, I didn’t really enjoy movies, I didn’t really enjoy TV because I couldn’t see [laughs] that clearly, and if I tried to go near the TV, my mom would say, hey, what are you doing there? Move back, or you’ll destroy your eyes. [Laughs] So, in grade 5, we had this medical exam for the entire school, and they found out that I bad eyes. And the first time I put on my glasses, it was such a revelation for me to be able to see everything so clearly. So, yeah, a lot of it is based on my own personal experience. Some first-time storytellers might find the short story form more difficult. When it comes to putting together a short script, what is the key to creating an emotional impact? PD: I think you really have to at one point step back and ask yourself, what is this film about, and related to that, what is the turning point of this thing? What is the emotional breaking point of your story, where the whole thing hinges on, and how do you effectively lead up to that, and execute it because you don’t really have that much time. To a large degree, it’s in the same thinking that goes into producing a commercial, let’s say. You have thirty seconds to tell your story, what is the one thing you want to say? Same thing with the short form. What’s the one emotion you want to elicit? And that thing has to be the top priority, and everything else must serve that one idea, one breaking point, or one pay off. In the long form, you know, you have your first act, second act, third act. You have that whole structure, and you have a lot of beats to play with, but in the short form you have precious few... Is it easy to make a movie in the Philippines? PD: I guess you run into the same challenges you do everywhere else. It is cheaper here to produce a film. I mean in dollar terms, it’s way cheaper to shoot here. But of course raising the funds here is also difficult. Finding the right people to play your parts is also difficult. Basically the same challenges in different forms. With “Miko,” it helped that I already had a team in place that 38 studentfilmmakers July 2006 I’ve worked with on previous projects and with whom I was comfortable, and so the process was sort of streamlined for me, and that helped a lot in achieving everything within one shooting day. It took one day to shoot. How long did it take to edit? PD: I edited that in about a day… One day to shoot, another day to edit, another day for sound post production, and maybe another day for all the dubbing out that we had to do, and that was it. Is there any advice that you could give to say a first-time filmmaker who would want to shoot a film in the Philippines? PD: Find a local partner. Find a local partner that you can trust because of course coming to a different culture you really have to find someone you can trust to talk to people, to negotiate deals, find the locations that you need. It’s just like if I went to New York to shoot a film, I would have to find someone who knew the city really, really well, where to find the best deals for this and that… Find a local partner and spend some time here, and look around before coming over for the final shoot because there are a lot of things here that you can discover, lots of cultural things that can add character to a film.