Happy Birthday / Yang Fan is Born / 生日快乐
A Short Film | November 2007
This is a story of two strangers with the same birthday. The first one, a quiet boy, receives a phone call from his girlfriend that she wants to break up with him. The second one, an apparently socially active girl, wants to find some solitude on her birthday. But something happens that draws the both of them close together.
Official selection for NPAR 2008 in France under the title Yang Fan is Born.
Watch film festival release | Medium quality | Official website
Yang Fan is having a bad day. His girlfriend dumped him, no one remembered his birthday, and is isolated by American college culture. But maybe this birthday he will awaken from the self-imposed exile youthful pathos.
This story of touching and occasionally comic redemption is a collaboration between the student film club (Purple Valley Films/Rain Stars) and Computer Graphics lab at Williams College. It was created as an animation test for combining new digital effects with real footage. The film casts emotions as moving paintings and intercuts them with rough, disorienting footage of the compressed social interaction of college life. Of the 120 shots in the film, 75 have custom programmed “painterly” effects designed to emphasize the water and nature symbols that depict the inner state of the characters.
The film was shot directly to digital video at Williams College on a short two-day schedule in 2007. Post production took about two months to build the custom rendering effects, manually adjust parameters and effect code for every scene, dub all dialogue, and build the foley track.
The painterly effects involve selective detail reduction, saturation and tone adjustment, canvas texturing, coherence, pigment flow, and pen outlining. The effects were designed in the GLSL programming language so that they could execute on graphics accelerator cards. This allowed technical artists to change scene parameters interactively and made it possible to render the entire film in HD in about an hour on two computers for daily screenings during post production. This technique cut production time substantially and encouraged experimentation.
Project description written by Morgan McGuire.
Two Articles Featured Recently:
Come watch movies that deal with Sex, the idea of “Perversity”, and Gender with PVF
Every Friday 10pm in April!
Eyes Wide Shut: April 11th
-Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film staring scientology’s Tom Cruise
Pink Flamingos: April 18th
(There will be an after party.)
-John’s Water’s 1972 cult classic. A movie that seeks to find”The Filthiest Person Alive”.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch April 25th
-Glam rock and the falling of the Berlin Wall.
Here is an update on Purple Valley Film’s recent trip to New Orleans for community services and documentary filmmaking. Our 8-person team safely returned to campus last Saturday from New Orleans. We were involved in community services like house-painting and planting sunflowers to remove lead from the soil. We filmed images of destructions and desolation almost 3 years after Katrina. Moreover, we talked to people — ordinary folks, kids in the neighborhood, homeless people at Tent City, pastors that helped the communities to rebuild, inspirational figures that appeared on CNN and Newsweek (Malik Rahim who founded Common Ground Relief) (and almost got to talk to Brat Pitt!!) — and filmed the interviews, in the hope that our documentary may motivate college students like us to visit New Orleans personally and help out in the reconstruction, be it physical labor or simply doing office work. We hope to spread the message that even almost 3 years after Katrina, New Orleans is still a mess because the government is inefficient; that people there need volunteers. We plan to complete the documentary before Summer. So far we have more than 12 hours of tape to edit. Post-production will start next week.
Just talk to any of the eight members on the team and hear their exciting stories!
Project site: http://www.purplevalleyfilms.com/nola
Above: PVF at St. Bernard Parish, LA
Below: The Production Team
The 2008 Alternative Spring Break Filmmaking/Service Trip is:
Helen Cha ‘11
Steven P. Cheng ‘10
Danny Huang ‘11
Ariel Kavoussi ‘11
Stephen G. Luther ‘11
Kwan Young Paik ‘11
Thammika “Prim” Songkaeo ‘11
Fatimah J. Toure ‘08
Thank you to everyone who applied.
| Latest updates: Participation fee has been reduced to $40 per person due to greater funding. |
Purple Valley Films is organizing a one-week trip to New Orleans during the Spring Break, doing community service and documentary film-making. An information session is to be held 7-7:30pm Fri February 29 in Paresky Theater for any one interested in the trip. For more information and online application, visit http://www.purplevalleyfilms.com/neworleans. Application closes 10pm Monday March 3, 2008.
Apply online NOW!
Purple Valley Films is always looking for title suggestions so feel free to mail us with any ideas you may have.
If you’re transcribing for the PVF-RLP Project on Education and Literacy in the Berkshires, enter here.
Every Friday in February, 7:30pm in Paresky Theater, unless otherwise stated
Free Popcorn!
2/1/08 Akira
A 1988 Japanese animated film which is regarded as “the greatest animated film ever made” by RottenPotatoes.com. It tells a story of Kaneda, a bike gang leader whose close friend Tetsuo gets involved in a government secret project known as Akira. On his way to save Tetsuo, Kaneda runs into a group of anti-government activists, greedy politicians, irresponsible scientists and a powerful military leader. The confrontation sparks off Tetsuo’s supernatural power leading to bloody death, a coup attempt and the final battle in Tokyo Olympiad where Akira’s secrets were buried 30 years ago.
2/8/08 Dawn of the Dead
(NOTE: Dawn of the Dead has been moved to 11:30pm because of WCFM’s free concert that night.)
-The 1970’s original flick about commercialism and zombies.
2/15/08
Harold and Maude
-An extremely unconventional love story about the 80 year old free spirit Maude and death obsessed 17 year old, Harold. “If you want to sing out then sing out, and if you want to be free then be free.”- Cat Stevens
2/22/08 Eraserhead
(NOTE: ERASERHEAD HAS ALSO BEEN MOVED TO 11:30pm)
-Director David Lynch’s (Blue Velvet, Inland Empire) surrealistic-horror midnight classic.
-Trailer
2/29/08
El Topo
-John Lennon and Yoko Ono presents this bizarre Spanish film from director Alexandro Jodorowky. It’s “The Good, Bad, and the Ugly” on LSD.
-Trailer
Purple Valley Films is currently in the process of applying for a grant that would allow us to go to New Orleans, do community service, and make a documentary of our experience.
March 23-March 29
Please email ariel@purplevalleyfilms.com if you are interested in joining us.
The program is run by Jerry Kramer and is made for the purpose of rebuilding the Broadmoor section of New Orleans, a community wrecked by the hurricane in September 2005..
Attached is an essay from last year regarding New Orleans and Jerry.
Jerry’s website is : http://www.annunciationmission.org/2007/10/church-of-annunciation.html
also see interviews:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week933/interview.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1601857,00.html
re Broadmoor Association:
http://www.broadmoorimprovement.com/
The grant would cover most logging, travel, and program costs. Anything that the grant does not cover, the Broadmoor Association said they would take care of.
