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NextFrame Nippon

16 Jul 2005 Category: Events & Exhibitions, Features, Japan

NextFrame Nippon

What Grown Ups Know- visual, courtesy of Jonathan Wald, UCLA

NextFrame Nippon is an annual student’s film festival directed for the second time by Karl Neubert from tekipaki studio and organized by his students of the Temple University, Japan Campus.

Written by Uleshka

NFX students explaining the schedule- in English and Japanese

Karl Neubert at the festival

“We want to support students in Japan, because they have such little chance to show their films to the public.” Karl Neubert said. “Therefore we came up with the idea of a film festival as an opportunity for students and also as a reality-check, for them to see, what the film business is like: they have to do everything from calling companies for our PR, designing the flyers to making the Japanese subtitles for foreign student films. We also hope, that with this film festival, Japanese people will get interested in short and experimental film and open up towards supporting such a wonderful medium again.”

NFX was screened from July 15th to 20th at the Azabu Citizen Hall in Roppongi and the newly re- opened Uplink Factory in Shibuya. Although still held at a small scale, the screened movies were very well selected, the audience was really into it and all the volunteer students were just overloaded with passion and ambition for their self-made-festival. It was great!

Aki- visual, courtesy of Frieda Van Raevels, RITS

Surprisingly, Frieda Van Raevels from RITS, Belgium made a really sweet movie called “AKI” - meaning autumn - set in ancient Japan about a fisherman falling in love. My personal favorite was “Red Things” by Max Porter from the RISD: a 10 minute animation about all things red like hats, cats, and even rainbows missing due to an unknown source of mayhem. Nice one!

Red Things- visual, courtesyof Max Porter, RISD

Red Things- visual, courtesy of Max Porter, RISD

After the short films, the audience was invited to join an open discussion with “film people”- in my case I had the luck to join the talk with Kunihiko Ukai who has been a film editor for over 30 years now. Working for Nikkatsu, when he was young, he is most famous for his independent and action movie editing (like “Rubber’s Lover” by Shozin Fukui, just to name one). Kunihiko Ukai knew plenty of stories about all those famous movies he edited. I found some of his information really eye opening, since the work of an editor is often overlooked. Most of the time only the director’s name is mentioned and yet without a skilled editor, no good movie would ever exist.

Open discussion with Kunihiko Ukai

“When I was young, I wanted to become a director, too, but now I really enjoy and appreciate the work of an editor. While the directors and actors all work very hard to produce their material, I have the freedom to sit back and throw away, what they have just been working for.” says Mr. Ukai with a smile.

Obviously, the work of an editor is not that relaxing and easy at all, especially in Japan, where the actual time for editing a movie is extremely short due to low budgets.

“Foreigners are always very surprised, when I tell them, that I only have one month time to edit a movie and when I’m lucky- 3 months to show off my skills for an action movie. There is a lot of work in Japan, but unfortunately a very tight schedule.”

Usually, there is about 3 times as much material as the movie. However, with action movies, that may differ completely. Since there are so many stunts involved, you cannot take the same scene twice, so usually everything is shot with 3 cameras from different angles- angles - at the same time. “When they were shooting for Score, they didn’t have enough money to afford 3 same cameras, so for the editing, I did not only have loads more material to choose from, but also different quality of film to balance out on every little snippet I used from a different camera. That was actually more of a student’s job what I had to do there, but I managed it somehow. The mean thing was, too, that most of those scenes were recorded without sound, since that will be done in the post production - so I had to edit imagining the sound!”

Another challenge is the movie Kunihiko Ukai was currently working on: “The Winds of God” (director: Masayuki Imai), which will be in the cinemas next January. “This movie is actually a Japanese movie, but aimed at the foreign market, it is all in English so I actually don’t understand a word. Having to edit this, I simply guessed. Luckily they brought in an English teacher to check it later and he said, it was fine.” The short selection of films Kunihiko Ukai brought included mainly action films, even though he edits a whole range of movies. “The reason why I selected those for today is, because action movies are, where an editor can really show his skill: so many short cuts and movies getting faster and faster nowadays- that is the real challenge of an editor.”

Kunihiko Ukai

When the discussion moved to digital film material, Mr. Ukai looked a little disappointed. “Of course I do non-linear editing from time to time, but it is just not the same. There is no relation to the film, if you edit digitally. I believe that the feeling of the film is important, too. If I was given the same material in analog and digital, my result would be completely different. It is important to edit with a big screen and always compare the small film with the big, in order to do it right.”

When asked about the difference between editing for film and TV, he said, that in the case of TV dramas, the editing is not taken seriously at all and often done by the director himself, where as the editing for documentaries is a whole different story. Since the material for documentaries is often 50 times as much as the final length of the movie, the editor becomes a story-finder, too, having to create a story out of this mountain of images. This is where editing for television becomes very important.

Besides Mr. Ukai’s usual work he founded the Yokohama Film Festival. “I love independent films and I want to support young directors, whose works are being neglected by main cinemas. I often edit their material without being paid, also because I find it so challenging to work with young directors. There are so many recognizable patterns in the mainstream cinema! Young directors have many fresh, experimental ideas, so that is much more interesting for me to work with, besides helping them to build up their careers.”

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