Glory Ngim On Training on Broadway

Singaporean actress talks about training at Circle In The Square in New York

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BM: So you recently got back from NYC, what were you doing there?

GN: Painting the town multi colours. Kidding. I was attending a summer program and spent two months training on Broadway.

BM: Lucky you! Could you talk about the summer program and the decision to participate?

GN: I’d been looking for an acting focused school that allowed me the opportunities to dig deeper into acting, as well as work on singing and dance technique. I auditioned for and was accepted into the summer Musical Theatre program at Circle In The Square, which is the only accredited training conservatory associated with a Broadway theatre.

BM: Tell us about the experience. Were there lessons that have stuck with you since?

GN: It was pretty amazing. I got well acquainted with NYC! The program itself was highly intensive and kept me on my toes. I got to sample a good range of training techniques in acting, voice, speech, singing and dance styles, and attended seminars and masterclasses with Broadway and NYC professionals. On top of that, I was right smack on Broadway and the Times Square district, so walking distance to all the big shows.

Some lessons:

1. Pack light but not too light. My leggings and scarves, thrown in only as an after-thought, saved me from freezing inside the theatre without a jacket!
2. Tap Dance is the hardest dance to pick up. Ever.
3. A fast and stable Wifi connection falls under basic needs for survival.

BM: You’re right. Connectivity is crucial in an era where almost everything is digitalised!

GN: Absolutely! Though I also really appreciate how scripts and scores tend to still be largely available in hard copy.

BM: What were your challenges during in the highly intensive program?

GN: I had to read a ton of scripts/ books very quickly, and I’m not a fast reader. So I just had to spend more time reading through everything la. Tap dance, which I’ve never done before but which was included in the program, was tough picking up. My ankles refused to obey my brain half the time! Thankfully, about half the class was at my tap dance level, so misery had company, but also the patience to slowly figure out the steps together.

BM: What else have you been working on this year?

GN: I played Adela in W!LD Rice’s ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ and Ena in Wee Li Lin’s short film, ‘That Loving Feeling’ for the 2014 Singapore Writers’ Festival. I also hosted the 2014 TYR Southeast Asian Swimming Championships (Diving), Panasonic Cooking Seasons 1 & 2 and Gleneagles/ BNP Paribas WTA Finals ad videos.

Photo: That Loving Feeling

BM: You worked with the casts in ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’. You also played the lead role in ‘That Loving Feeling’ short film. What was that like for you?

GN: It was an honor working on The House of Bernarda Alba. I am indebted to Margaret and Jo who took me under their wings and taught me much about life and acting. They are two actresses who I have great admiration and respect for. It’s always a pleasure working with Li Lin. We’d done a commercial 2 years ago and I was looking forward to working with her again. Through the film, I also got to meet my fantastic co-star Kamil, who’s been a source of inspiration and motivation.

Photo: That Loving Feeling

BM: Were there challenges that you faced during production? How different is it acting on-screen as compared to on-stage?

GN: Acting for screen requires more stillness and subtlety, and interestingly enough, that can use up more energy! Also, you get multiple takes in screen work, whereas if you flub a line in front of an audience during a live show, you can’t go back and redo it; you just carry on with the scene.

BM: How do you keep your balance in doing theatre and on-screen work?

GN: I have always aspired to do a mix of screen and stage work. It keeps things exciting and my brain is kept alive with each new challenge of finding truthful performance that is scaled to the right size (depending on whether it’s a stage or screen project). At the end of the day, it’s the truthfulness that’s the most important.

BM: Are you planning on further training in the future?

GN: Yes further training is always important, but for now, I’d like to spend some time applying some of the things I learnt this summer.

You can follow Glory Ngim on Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

How to write music for your web series

One very important element in any film, TV or web series is MUSIC. Sound and sound design is itself a very difficult and incredibly important element but that’s for another article. I just wanted to give a few hints as to how to create your own music for your web series.

When we were creating “What Do Men Want?” it was done under incredible time duress! We had approximately one month to write a 65 x 5 minute episode web series (that later turned into 13 half hour episodes). Nevertheless, we were writing as well as doing pre-production which includes casting, sourcing for locations, scheduling, finding costumes etc. When you consider that we ended up with 25 actors, 800 scenes and over 100 locations you’ll start to understand how daunting it all became. So the last thing on our minds was post-production which is a whole other beast altogether.

However, when we finally did get to post-production we realized after watching the first cut that we needed music and the search was on!

Stock Music

This is where most people will find their answer and to be honest we were going down this track too. However, when we saw the first rough cut with stock (corporate sounding) music inserted we knew right there and then we had to find another solution. Stock music is exactly that – STOCK – it rarely fits well. It’s hard to match one theme to another – which works for corporate videos but not well for narrative stories. Often it takes so much time to listen to all the music out there and find the perfect piece for each section of your web series that it can take so much less time to actually write and record it. Stock music can also be expensive depending on how many tracks you want to use. It wasn’t a good solution for us at all so we decided on the very daunting task of composing our own music from scratch. Daunting at first – but actually not too bad in the end.

Music as Story

My approach with music is that it is yet another character or voice within the story. It sometimes adds to a scene, deepens a scene or takes you on an emotional flight – somewhere that just speaking cannot necessarily take you. It can have many functions and if you’re clear about what a scene needs to achieve then you’ll start to know what sort of music needs to help you with that scene. Unless you have someone who knows STOCK music inside out I found that it was just easier to compose it. If you’re not a composer try and find someone who is and who is willing to help score your web series. It really does open up another dimension to your story telling.

You can get a sense of the various themes and music used throughout our series by just playing through all our trailers for “What Do Men Want?”

How to Record Music to your Series

I won’t go into how to write music per se as this will be like any art form – full of subjectivity. But if you’re on track to write your own music or have someone else write it for you – you may want to use Apple’s free GARAGE BAND which has a movie import function allowing you to just bring in your locked off edit and then literally play along with every scene that needs music. As you play you record. You can score the entire series this way with multiple tracks (multiple instruments). If you want to get a sense of an orchestral score check out PERFECT GIRL SERIES where I used all sorts of genres of music but finished with a full orchestral piece at the last episode.

The great thing is it’s all totally FREE. It even has a great DRUMMER feature that allows you to score using a drum rhythm that’ll change as you move your mouse or track pad. It’s as organic as conducting the drummer live! I used this a lot in Perfect Girl Series. 

Incidentally apart from Garage Band you may need a keyboard with MIDI inputs – just about any keyboard will work. I prefer one that has the full set of keys (88 keys) because I used to play the piano and I just can’t get used to little keyboards. This is the Yamaha keyboard I use – it’s quite old and there are many new updated ones.

As far as microphones – I use an Apogee ONE (which you can see below in the videos). It is both a sound card that’ll plug into your Mac and has a built in microphone. I love the condenser mic on the Apogee – it has a very natural recording tone. I used it for our theme song for “What Do Men Want?”

Create a Hook and Develop It

I believe you should treat music just as you treat plot and story. You should spend the most time trying to create a few themes that represent the feel, dynamic and sense of the story. Then develop these themes through the story. In “What Do Men Want?” there were a few themes that will play through an episode but I would always start with sketches or hints of the theme and then develop them through the plot concluding in a full blown piece at the climax of that episode. Often I will leave it on a kind of musical cliff hanger. I tried a similar thing with Perfect Girl Series too only this time the themes were developed throughout the series towards a climax at the 10th episode.

The hardest thing in the world is to write a “hook” or a catchy theme. This isn’t always necessary but it can help to deepen the story or to create a sense of familiarity. Catchy themes always get people saying things like “I’ve heard this before” or “I just kept singing that to myself” or “I couldn’t get that out of my head”. You may or may not want this to happen – but it’s great for serials particularly if you want people coming back! If you can – spend time trying to craft a great melody – many composers don’t really do this – but this is like crafting the foundation or plot of a script. It’s not good scripting if you’re just going to throw words at a script – you have to know how to select the few great words that will tell a compelling story. It’s the same with music. Just knowing the grammar of music doesn’t necessarily make you a good composer, in my humble view. Knowing how to put together a few great notes in a combination that’ll take the audience somewhere – into memory, wistfulness, emotive states is what is my aspiration for writing music.

My Friend My Home – Theme of  “What Do Men Want?”

Since this was a story of two bachelors looking for love and finding it amongst their female friends – I wanted it to feel like a loosely recorded song – as if a couple of guys just sang it on the couch after a night out. It needed to be simple, light hearted but sincere. So I picked up the ukulele which has that sort of sound and started riffing with themes. Bear in mind I only started learning the uke a few months before. I can only play a few chords but that’s enough to write thousands of melodies. Once I came up with the general melody I wrote the lyrics to fit.

And just to show you how easy it can be to record it all – even for broadcast TV – here’s me recording the song with just a ukulele and one harmony – recorded on Garage Band which you can see working in the background.

Variations on a Theme – “You’ve Got Me”

As an example on how to vary and develop your music or theme through a drama here’s another theme I wrote for “What Do Men Want?” I used the exact same ukulele chord progression for “My Friend My Home” and just created a melody on top of it. It again breeds familiarity and deepens the effect of both themes.

How to Make a Web Series

So you want to know how make a web series? But you’re not sure where to start? Well, I’m going to outline the steps we took to make a successful web series. Of course, “success” is relative and subjective. We’re constantly striving for more in terms of views, promotion, commissioning. But if we take a look back – we started a corporate video production company. We shifted into making a couple of short films. We were then commissioned to make a web series “What Do Men Want?” with 65 episodes that was then acquired by a free to air broadcaster as a 13 episode TV series. Our next series “Perfect Girl Series” has won for “Best International Series” at Atlanta Web Fest 2014 and is nominated for 8 awards at LA Web Fest 2015. We’ve also been invited to speak as panelists at LA Web Fest (one of the oldest and largest web series festivals in the world). So, in short, we have made a couple of successful web series but it’s always challenging going forward – trying to make it sustainable, trying to fund the next one… starting all over again. But for those of you on the verge of beginning or aspiring to make one – here are some tips and lessons we learnt on the way.

Stop Talking About It

Wannabe film makers and actors like to TALK a lot – about their next big project. We know because we’ve been there. Long coffees, long lunches talking about this or that idea and pretending to get feedback from each other. Talking about making a web series doesn’t actually get you there very fast. It usually goes something like this “I’ve got this idea about a web series… but I haven’t worked out all the details yet…” The reality is – it’s procrastination and if you listen closely to the conversation it’s usually full of excuses for why you’re not making it yet. I’ve been there when I was an actor wanting to create work AND now as a creator listening to others continue to talk about how they want to make something but haven’t done it yet. The excuses are many and varied – usually to do with “I want to make a web series but I’ve got to pay the bills” or “I’m just not good at writing” or “it takes too much time”. The bottom line is it’s really really hard to make a web series – or any narrative drama. It’s a completely different beast to corporate video production and it requires the ability and perseverance to create something from nothing. Everyone knows that’s the hardest part. Lots of people will jump onboard once you have a script but very few will actually write it. The script is the absolute foundation of it all. Nothing else happens without it.

Write the Script

Learn as much as you can about writing. I read every book out there about script writing in the past. There’s a bunch of them but these were my favourites:

• Robert McKee “Story”
• Linda Aronson “21st Century Screenplay”
• Christopher Vogler “The Writer’s Journey”

After that I did a screenwriting course that ran for a year and a half with live in sessions and monthly meetings with both our tutors and our writing group to give feedback on your newest development. This was primarily a feature writing program but I learnt so much about screenwriting – and I’d have to say no amount of reading could compare to even the first week of direct feedback from real produced, industry screenwriters. Learning from professionals will shortcut your journey by years.

Then, as painful as it is, sit down and write. Give yourself a structure – for our first commissioned series we had to write 65 x 5 minute episodes. Now, imagine how scared we were since we’d only ever done 2 short films! But, because we had a deadline, we had to write. Our deadline was intense – we had to write and pre-produce in one month. So every night my writing partner and I got on google hangouts and wrote plot lines in five minute chunks. We always tried to have some sort of cliffhanger at the end of the 5 minutes and to include at least a B if not a C storyline. “Keep it fast and moving along” was our mantra.

Forget about Script Software

When I say this I really mean – don’t worry about formatting and expensive software and learning how to use it – the hardest thing in the world is just writing WHAT HAPPENS NEXT. That’s what you should focus on. Get onto google hangouts with your writing partner and share a google text document and start writing plot points together. For example, this is the first 5 minute section of  “What Do Men Want?”:

• Bob pulls out huge hair ball from shower drain – WTF
• Bob confronts Jimmy about not helping with cleaning (Jimmy is almost comatose on the couch) – blame game.
• Jimmy talks about bigger, loftier issues, Bob concerned about health and safety and house rules broken – argue to a climax – Bob slams the door.
• Bob pleads with Jane (intro to Jane) to help convince Jimmy to break up with Ding Ding (PRC).
• Flashback – Jimmy picks up Ding Ding in Mandarin class
• Flashback to confrontation – Jimmy brags to Bob “free classes” – Bob reprimands him
• Jane pleads with Jimmy (phone call – Jimmy is very reticent about talking to her) – “Bob’s really concerned” … montage of feet on toilet seat, soiled toilet tissue in the bin, Ding Ding hocking a lugi, granny panties hung all over kitchen, Bob in the background dry retching. Jimmy: “We’re all one generation removed from the village – don’t you take the high ground… she makes authentic fried rice…it’s just nice to have someone there” Jane: “have you ever tried mine”. Jane “As long as you’re not using her”.
• Jimmy barges in on Ding Ding who’s squatting on toilet (oblivious) “Dui Bu Qi” she says “Mei Guan Xi, Wo da Bian le” – sub: no problems I’m just taking a shit. “Hao Ba” – “I’ll be out in a minute to start our lesson”. – Jimmy is slammed “Hao Ba” (down)
• Jimmy in Bob’s room (cleaning)  – explains that squatting is anatomically correct – but he’s going to break up with her.
• End tag – Bob trying to squat on the toilet

Dialogue is actually much easier than plot points and it’s the plot points that will really be the strong foundation for your series. Concentrate on that and then hang the dialogue on this skeleton. You’ll be amazed how easy it is to create dialogue once this is really mapped out.

Once you’re finished with your plot outline go over it again and again and make sure it’s tight! Don’t have loose ends – all events and characters should be absolutely necessary – they must play an important part in the story – driving the story forward or characters towards their objective. If they don’t – cut them out of the story. During my writing course we weren’t allowed to write a word of dialogue for 6 months. All we did was write plot outlines for 1 feature that had to fit on one page. This was a big lesson and a fantastic way to start.

Next, download Celtx, a free script writing and formatting software. It’s great, it’s free and it’s available on pretty much any platform. Use this to start writing your web series script once you’ve got your outline locked off.

Learn About Camera and Sound

Okay, not everyone will subscribe to this but we wanted to learn all about camera, sound and even editing because the biggest problem is always budget constraints and asking favours from industry professionals. The reality is, these days everything is available to us in terms of technology that’s relatively cheap and how to use it (tutorials on the web). This wasn’t available to us even 5 years ago when cameras were extraordinarily expensive or difficult to use. Nowadays we have cell phones that can shoot 4K video – that are more advanced than US$80 000 cameras 5-6 years ago! We can edit on iMacs that are faster and than the computers used for some of the best Hollywood productions created 5-10 years ago. That means you CAN learn and you CAN have a production house with equipment to do pretty much anything you want for probably under 5-6K. And learning about cameras and sound isn’t rocket science. There are thousands of tutorials and dedicated websites online.

Specifically – get yourself a camera like the Lumix GH4 or Sony A7s. We love the Lumix GH series and shot both our series with these. Our second series “Perfect Girl Series”  has been nominated for a Cinematography Award at LA Web Fest 2015. It was shot entirely on these fairly inexpensive cameras. The Sony a7s is a new favourite we’re currently working with for the reason that it has amazing low light capabilities.

Sony a7s – incredible low light capabilities.

Sound is really important. I’d recommend getting some lavelier microphones (the Sennheiser EW 100 G3 series is my recommendation) and a shotgun mic. We bought the Audio Technica AT897 shotgun ($199) which is cheap and really good – we haven’t had a need to upgrade yet and we’ve had our show broadcast on free to air TV with great results. We use a JuicedLink PreAmp to go from shotgun or Sennheiser into the DSLR. This is really good low noise preamplifier to help boost nice clean sound.

Recommended Shotgun Microphone for making a Web Series

Recommended Preamp for making Web Series

Post Production

We use FCPx on iMacs. It’s a great program – it’s cheap and it’s really all you need! Learn it and you’ll never have to depend on an editor again. We do all our color grading within FCPx. It really is an amazing piece of software. A couple of iMacs and FCPX is really all you need for your post production workflow – don’t let anyone tell you that you need thousands to hire an “online editing suite and professional editors”. You can do it all.

We do all our own in house music too. Of course not everyone can play or compose music but you’ll be amazed what Garage Band or Logic Pro can do with built in loops and rhythms. We actually compose all our music from scratch. But I just use an old keyboard with MIDI inputs  – connect it to an iMac and then use the free Garage Band to record the tracks! I wouldn’t say composing is easy – but the software nowadays makes it really pain free to edit, change and automate music. Garage Band and Logic Pro have a feature for creating soundtracks – where you can drop or import your finished film into the program and then basically play along with the visuals while recording. I wrote more about how to compose music for your web series or film.

Marketing and Promotion

Lastly and by no means the least – get your series out there. We knew little about web series festivals when we started but we researched and submitted our series into multiple web festivals. Some will love it, others won’t … it’ll depend largely on the judges. But one thing we learnt is that it makes a difference – winning awards and getting international recognition gives you plenty to talk about and the press like that! So do friends and family. Social media works but it works even better when you have something to promote. The reality is most people are busy with their own lives and will rarely take the time out to watch something you’ve made unless someone else gives it legitimacy. An award is just that – legitimacy from an objective party.

Winning for Outstanding Directing (What Do Men Want?) opened many doors for us in terms of meeting with potential new investors and buyers of content. Our next series did even better with 8 nominations and 1 win so far and these accolades convert into viewers on our website.

Watch PERFECT GIRL SERIES here.

Perfect Girl Series – Award Winning Web Series

Singapore Series Wins “Best International” Series Award

As the term “Web Series” starts to truly become a FORMAT or genre more and more web series festivals are popping up all over the world to embrace this new form of storytelling. Even well established film markets are quickly moving to accept web series or online serials as a format for competition and Atlanta’s film making community is no exception.

Just this week we were over the moon to hear that our web series “Perfect Girl Series” had won for “Best International Series” at Atlanta Web Festival 2014.  Amongst stiff worldwide and US competition we’re so happy to have a series from this corner of the world be honoured! It means that we can truly make content in Singapore that travels beyond our borders and speaks to people anywhere in the world.

We’re constantly told that content made in Singapore doesn’t travel. We believe that any content will travel if it has all the right elements – great acting, directing, writing, editing, art direction, cinematography, sound, music, makeup and hair, costume design… it really takes ALL these elements combined together to create a great story with nuance, depth and complexity regardless of where the story is set or in which language.

The same series was recently also picked to be a finalist in Rome International Web Festival and was then selected to play at the prestigious Rome International Film Festival at Auditorium Parco della Musica.

The humble beginnings of our “Perfect Girl Series” could never have inspired us to think of it being projected at this auditorium let alone the accolades it’s now beginning to receive. We have also since been honoured with 8 nominations at arguably the most prestigious and largest international web series festival in the world: LA Web Festival.

“Perfect Girl Series” has been nominated for awards in the following categories:

• Overall Drama Series
• Writing
• Directing
• Editing
• Lead Actor
• Lead Actress
• Cinematography
• Sound Design

Furthermore, we’ve been invited to speak at LA Webfest 2015 on two panels. This is only our second series – we’re overwhelmed with the international response so far and can only hope that this will inspire many more to take the step into making long form narrative content that has universal appeal.

Web Series Shot on Lumix GH3 and GH4 Nominated for Outstanding Cinematography

“Perfect Girl Series” by BananaMana Films has been nominated for Outstanding Cinematography at LA Web Fest 2015. This is among 7 other nominations:

• Outstanding Drama Series
• Outstanding Writing
• Outstanding Directing
• Outstanding Lead Actor
• Outstanding Lead Actress
• Outstanding Editing
• Outstanding Sound Design

While a lot more goes into the look and feel of a production (art design, costume, make up, lighting, composition) we would like to discuss the cameras we used because they helped us in enormous ways. I’ve used other bulkier, more popular cameras in the past and I have to say – its as much the tool you choose as how you use it.

The Lumix GH3 and GH4 Camera

We at BananaMana Films have always touted the prowess of the Lumix GH series ever since we started using them. We started with the Lumix GH1 years ago and were mightily impressed with its resolution and ease of use. The Panasonic Lumix GH2 followed with many new benefits not the least being that it was hacked by a brilliant Russian engineer, well known online as: Vitaly. This hack brought amazing resolution to the tiny GH2 with less moire and aliasing than many of its more expensive and seemingly more famous competitors. It’s tiny footprint, rotating LCD screen and micro 4/3 format meant it was incredibly light, could squeeze into corners everywhere and yet yielded amazing images. Jump a couple of years to the Lumix GH3 and now GH4 and Panasonic have continued to build on solid foundations.

The Lumix GH3 took the best parts of the hacks and gave us:

• increased bit rate with stability,
• multiple bit rates and compression codecs,
• gave us manual control over audio input,
• an extra stop of dynamic range (better in low light),
• live audio monitoring,
• time-lapse in camera,
• wifi control and previewing,
• much increased battery performance.

Here’s a video detailing just some of the reasons we decided to use the Lumix GH3 for our TV production “What Do Men Want?”

You can really see what a difference a camera like the GH3 will make in production by viewing some of these AUDITION vs ACTUAL PRODUCTION clips.

The Lumix GH4 brought many new improvements as well:

• 4k internal recording – this is huge – 4 times the resolution of 2k,
• improved dynamic range,
• 96fps slow motion in 2k,
• zebra pattern,
• improved OLED display,
• focus peaking,
• excellent battery life!

On Shooting “Perfect Girl Series” with the Lumix GH3 and GH4

So, when we came to shoot our second series “Perfect Girl Series” it was only natural to choose the Lumix GH3 and the GH4. We had just gotten a new GH4 and didn’t have time to practise shooting with it – so we ended up using it as our SPECIAL cam to get Slo Mo shots and 4k wides. 4k footage blew us away with the incredible detail in each shot – so much so it scared our makeup artists. Every blemish was now clearly photographed and there was little room for error. In general we opted for the GH3 for most scenes and then kept the GH4 way back if possible! However, we’re looking forward to the day we can use only the GH4 in 4k mode – next production.

We were very happy with look of the production rushes from day 1. Although we still needed to de-noise some darker footage from time to time – in general it was detailed, not overly sharpened and fairly easy to grade. The one thing we did find though was that it was always hard matching the GH3 to the GH4 – I’d always recommend using one or the other in future. Slow motion was fantastic on the GH4 – a little noisier than normal footage and so in retrospect we should have increased light (since you’re shooting more frames with a faster shutter speed). What was great with the slow motion function was the ability to immediately watch the footage back at slo-mo speed in camera so you could tell exactly what you captured. 96 fps is plenty slow enough too! We were constantly blown away by how long the batteries lasted. On this shoot (roughly 10 hours a day) we rarely changed batteries! Most times – each battery would last us the entire day! The footage from the GH4 (even 4k) was easy to import and much smaller than most 4k footage, I’m told. The compression is excellent without compromises like noise, moire or aliasing. We edited on fcpx and the workflow was easy and flawless. All the footage imported easily – we converted to ProRes in the background and just started editing! 4k downscaled simply by pulling the 4k footage into a 2k timeline.

At our launch screening we digitally projected the series onto a smallish cinema screen. Footage held up incredibly well. The series got into the finals of the Rome Web Fest and has since been selected to screen at Rome Film Festival at Auditorium Parco della Musica – a huge arena – we’re confident the images will hold up there too!

Auditorium Parco della Musica

All in all – we’re proud to get a Cinematography nomination and would like to thank Panasonic for continuing to innovate and listening to their users with the Lumix GH series. It really is a dream to be able to make films these days with equipment that fits into a backpack!

Watch the whole Perfect Girl Series HERE.

A few screen grabs from the series:

On Creating English Drama with Asian Actors for the World

Singapore’s national newspaper The Straits Times featured BananaMana Films’ Christian Lee and Jason Chan discussing their direction in content creation, why they’re based in Singapore and the issue of poor minority representation in American movies and TV.

John Lui (Film Correspondent for The Straits Times) succinctly sums up the current policy with Asian casting in Hollywood movies:

Is Hollywood, the factory that makes all its heroes light-eyed, fair-haired Northern Europeans – Jesus, Noah, Moses, Genghis Khan among them – ready to change?

Remember, this is a place that loves to borrow Asian stories, but is allergic to casting racially appropriate actors. The studios bend plotlines to breaking point so that “white saviours” can emerge in China (David Carradine in the Kung Fu television series) or Japan (Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, 2003; or, more recently, Keanu Reeves in last year’s 47 Ronin).

Oppo Find 7a Top Phone Camera Features

This is not a scientific review of any means. We are a production house always looking for great tech gear that will do things faster, easier, better and lighter than before. The Panasonic Lumix GH4 fits all of these categories and has improved our entire production process greatly. So when I was looking for a new smart phone that I could upgrade from my very old iPhone 4… I was looking for a few features that would help me in productivity and possibly in production.

Nowadays, we use our smart phones primarily as a camera – almost 60% of the time and as an internet reading and posting device 35% and possibly as a phone to make calls 5% of the time! So when looking for a new smart phone I wanted a device that could replace a good compact camera and a tablet. I wanted one device that I could surf on, research, make notes, post on social media, take great pictures, edit pictures, interact with a PC or Mac easily, transfer files easily and have great battery life. A lot to ask right? But I found one!

In a production company like ours – we use our phones daily for:

• marketing (taking, editing and uploading photos to social media)
• behind the scenes stills
• B roll of random footage from travels
• editing google documents
• taking notes, online research

So, what I was looking for in a phone – I eventually found in the Oppo Find 7a. These were the features that sealed the deal for me:

1) Has a removable battery: although I’ve not yet had to change the battery because battery life is so good (generally about 16 hours of normal to moderate usage) I wanted this ability in case I ever needed to change out the battery during a long flight or long day out on shoot. It’s so much lighter to carry another battery than to have a brick of a charger that then has to be linked to your phone for a couple of hours whilst it’s charging.

2) Battery charges in 45 mins on average. In fact in 30 mins you get a 75% charge with their Rapid VOOC charging system which uses a 4.5A charger vs the typical 2.1A charger which would take about 3hours. This has been a boon for me – saved me many times when I’ve forgotten to charge overnight. 30 mins later and my phone is practically full. Simple and quite a life changer compared to my old iPhone which required a few hours to charge.

3) Has expandable memory with micro SD card. I bought the 16 GB version of the Oppo Find 7a and then added a 64GB micro SD card for about US$ 50 but you can get a fast Samsung EVO micro SD card from AliExpress for just US$16.50! The memory is expandable up to 128GB. If you fill up your SD card – you can simply copy the 64GB card over to a new 128GB card on your mac or PC and off you go – you have a new phone with 128 + 16 = 144GB of storage for about less than 100 bucks. To put it into perspective the iphone 6 plus with 128 GB of storage is currently priced at US$ 1440.

4) Has a 50 mega pixel photo function or Ultra HD which allows you to take photos at 50MP size – the camera actually stitches 10 photos from the 13 megapixel camera into one. It works incredibly well even with shaky hands. Simply implemented and very user friendly. The 13 mega-pixel camera IMX214 CMOS sensor by Sony with an f 2.0 aperture which works well in low light – surprisingly much better compared to the iPhone 5s. I haven’t made any comparisons to the new iPhones yet but against the 5s the Oppo is a clear winner in low light.

5) The front facing camera is a 5 mega pixel camera  with a nice wide angle – great for group selfies or even regular photos as you’ll see from included photos below. To put it into perspective most phones have less than 2 mega pixels for their front facing camera. The iPhone 6 plus has a 1.2 megapixel front facing camera.

5 mega pixel front facing camera on Oppo Find 7a

6) 4K video: this blew me away – I’m able to collect 4k video footage to use on our broadcast productions wherever I am. Out the window of a plane, on my travels round the world – I have a 4k video camera in my pocket. I used to carry the Panasonic Lumix GH2 or GH3 with me everywhere but neither of them shoot 4k video. Why would you want 4k video? Well, when you downsize it to 2k you actually get incredible looking 2k footage with more color information and it’s very usable in any production.

7) Long exposure: ever wanted to do long exposure shots of night scenes whilst on holiday? In the past I’d have to get out my dSLR, big tripod, set the shutter speed – check exposure by shooting a few shots then decide on a nice exposure, set it and then shoot again. This Oppo Find 7a implements this function so beautifully. Just tap to focus lock, then set the seconds (up to 32 seconds) for long exposure and tap the shutter button. I use a tiny light weight tripod and it’s now always in my bag. Photos below to demonstrate the sort of low noise night shots you can achieve using this feature.

Taken using the Long Exposure Mode on Oppo Find 7a. 16 sec exposure.

8) The ability to shoot RAW and the ability to rename photos and add notes to each photo. Renaming is great particularly if you’re uploading to wordpress or blog sites and want to rename the photo for SEO reasons – pretty important actually. Also very useful when you plugin your phone to any desktop and use it like a hard drive so you can access your photos. This way you can search for and find photos you’ve previously labelled instead of having to either use another piece of software like iPhoto or image capture. You can deal with the photos like any file on a thumb drive. Really easy and user friendly.

9) The ability to re-theme your entire homescreen. I use THEMER, a third party app which allows you to basically create any theme or UI to use your phone with. Amazing!! Now, this might not be for everyone but once I started playing with it and downloaded a few ready made themes from others (free) I was able to have a homescreen that organized all my important apps into a screen that was always 2 clicks away. Efficient and great for productivity. This function has unlimited functionality – on top of the fact that I was just bored of the design of the Apple or stock Android home screen, flipping pages and having to manually organize apps into categories. THEMER does a lot of this for you. It’s plug and play but has limitless possibilities to add your own wallpapers, designs, widgets, live updated text (including info about weather, news, unread SMS’s, unread Emails, current music playing). For example one of the features I love is that I create a play and pause button on my homescreen to start and pause whatever I’ve been listening to from my music player. No need to open an app!

Free theme using THEMER app. Every icon opens a collection of apps.

Every app is just two clicks away. No swiping of screens. Easy to organize too!

10) Quick ability to close all apps in one click! Used to hate having to swipe to close each and every open app on the iPhone. Maybe there’ll be an update that’ll change this but there is a CLOSE ALL button on Android that’ll quit all open apps – great to reduce battery drainage.

11) NFC. Although I haven’t used this yet I’ve ordered NFC stickers that will enable me to simply touch the phone against a sticker on my front door to switch the phone from WIFI to Mobile data. It can be programmed to do numerous functions like the ability to quickly pair a phone to a speaker just by tapping. Very useful – I’m now habitually turning off WIFI when I’m out to conserve battery (so my phone isn’t constantly searching for an communicating with every WIFI network out there). Incidentally Apple has also introduced NFC on the newest iPhones but it can only be used with Apple Pay when it comes out in October 2014.

12) The micro USB interface is useful because it’s everywhere. The phone can be basically used as a hard drive when connected to a computer. You do need a free download Android File Transfer  but once you have this – you can basically interact with your phone as if it’s a normal hard drive. Drag and drop any file you like including music, photos, documents. Simple, user friendly – works! You can also plugin any USB hard drive via this cable and access files, movies and music. Particularly useful if you’ve got a pile of movies on a hard drive that you’d like to watch when on holiday. No need to move the movies to your phone – just plug in the hard drive, access the files and play! Simple! Elegant. User friendly. With the iPhone I used to have to convert movies to an iPhone friendly format, transfer using iTunes to my phone whilst worrying about the limited, non-exchangeable memory! Always a frustrating experience.

13) Screen quality – true HD quality – beautiful display. I’m watching HD videos on this screen at sometimes higher quality than on my TV!

14) Great speakers – except that it’s rear facing. However, it doesn’t seem to reduce the quality of the sound even when it’s resting on a table – the curvature of the phone seems to avoid blocking of the speakers except on softer surfaces like a bed or sofa. A large part of the great quality sound is attributable to their use of the Waves technology which won a technical Grammy.

15) Great price for a powerful phone. At about SGD$ 700 for the phone off-plan or $295 on the lowest plan it’s a steal. The iPhone 6 plus is currently US$ 1148- $1488!!

Here’s a comparison between the iPhone 6 plus and the Oppo Find 7a. He doesn’t mention many of the features I’ve added above which really make all the difference – at least to me! It’s also great to know that a phone that was released quite awhile before the iPhone 6 plus is in the same league and in my opinion surpassed the iPhone in may ways at an incredible price.

Here’s another great detailed review from STUFF  – this review covers the Find 7 which is the newest upgrade but the features are pretty the much the same – the main difference is that the Find 7 has a Quad HD display – pretty impressive.

Here’s more information from Oppo’s official website.

Long Exposure Mode – Simple but user friendly implementation

Photo from Oppo’s official website.

Here’s a video about the Ultra HD photo function:

Here’s a collection of photos taken on the Oppo Find 7a. Some night shots were taken hand held others were taken on a small tripod using the long exposure mode.

[pp_gallery gallery_id=”830″]

PRESS RELEASE:

First Win for Singapore at LA Web Fest

At one of the most prestigious international web festivals, the Los Angeles Web Series Festival,  Singapore production company, BananaMana Films, was awarded Outstanding Directing in a Drama for their web series “What Do Men Want?” originally created for the Singapore iPTV platform Toggle.sg. The two directors, Jason Chan and Christian Lee, were unable to attend but had one of the series’ actresses, Liz Lazan, represent them at the festival. This is the first time a Singapore drama series has been officially selected for competition by the festival and also the first win for Singapore.

Originally produced as a web series for iPTV the 13 half hour dramedy has since been picked up for national release on free to air TV in Singapore (Mediacorp Channel 5). It will air on October 21st 2014.

International Interest in Singapore Show

Before it even airs on Singapore’s toggle.sg or Mediacorp there has been interest from overseas. An Australian distribution company, Fred Media, is in talks to represent the drama series at MIPTV at Cannes 2014.
“The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive!” says Jason Chan (co-director, co-writer and one of the lead actors of the series) ”we are so proud to represent Singapore at an international level at the LA Web Fest and bring back an award. We think there is immense potential regionally to create drama serials that have a global reach. The fact that this series is already getting international recognition from both festivals and distributors tells us we’re doing something right towards making dramas that can cross borders.”

About BananaMana Films

BananaMana Films, established in Singapore, hope to create more dramas locally with regional cast and crew to reach a global audience. Their mission statement: to create long form, narrative drama with Asian actors in the English language (with a global reach). Though it seems like a niche that has challenges, both Jason and Christian (the company’s co-founders) believe they can make it work and that their first drama, “What Do Men Want?”, is already paving the way towards making this a reality.

Liz Lazan, actress, receiving the award for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series for BananaMana Films