The Filmmaker Guide to the Oscar-Winning Daniels

Which won Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture at last night’s Oscars All at once, anywhereDaniels – Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – have appeared on our page many times over the years, in various articles and interviews, from music video stars to famous feature film directors iconoclastic creators. provides a historical timeline of the migration of

The two first appeared on the list of 25 newcomers in 2015, but during the production of their first feature, swiss army manBut I was already blown away by music videos from DJ Snake, Lil Jon, and others.The most impressive thing for us was their short film funny ballI call this “annoying, variable speed cross red balloon and magnolia” and “Confounding Stories [using] A mysterious bouncing ball that causes personal and social apocalypse across different groups of Angelenos.

An interesting ball from DANIELS on Vimeo.

swiss army man premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, but in retrospect, it’s safe to say it didn’t quite pan out. (Variety headlined, “Daniel Radcliffe’s Farting Corpse Movie Inspires Walkout.”) And Variety’s Peter DeBruge reduced the film to a logline.cast away meet weekend at barneys”

we filmmaker was more positive.Directed by Jane Schoenbrunn Let’s all go to the World Expositionwrote from the festival:

Considering how homogenized America’s filmmaking environment has become, a corpse farting into a Sundance competition line-up isn’t something we can’t get our hands on. That’s what we should celebrate. Independent films are not safe or easily defined. It is supposed to provoke, to challenge. It’s a counterculture tool, and it’s supposed to offer stories, ideas, and visions that mainstream cinema doesn’t want to produce. It should be a place where movies that zigzag as aggressively as possible are accepted.

Alicia Van Couvering interviewed Daniels. swiss army man At the beginning of the Spring 2016 issue, she tackled flatulence head-on, writing: We know ourselves, shyness, bear attacks, the sublime pleasures of junk food, the meaning of masturbation, and more.

Kwan said in an interview:

…The reason we make movies is because we are very self-conscious about actually exposing ourselves to the world. Ultimately, you end up making something even more personal than if you were making a movie about real life. ”

And Scheinath said:

People use the word “surreal,” but I like to think about the absurd. [which is] meaningless and utterly confusing, philosophical absurdity, [which is] Trying to find meaning in a meaningless life. Many of our films tackle both of these things. They use images that probably don’t make sense, they use images that probably shouldn’t have any meaning, and they apply meaning to those images to create something interesting and confuse the brain.

Matt Mulcahey interviews cinematographer Larkin Seiple about his work on the film, delving into farts, frame rates, raccoons, and RED Epics rigged on a homemade Doggy Cam.

first function and All at once, anywhereDaniels has directed other videos and shortspots, including one from late 2016, possibility, hmmm, “an interactive short film set in the multiverse,” they explained. Starring Alex Karpovsky and Zoe German as a couple on the verge of breaking up, viewers decide which of 16 possible conclusions to watch. We interviewed Mr. Kwan.

Most “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories are really frustrating and unsatisfying. With that, I wanted to see what happens when two people try to create something frustrating and unsatisfying, like a cyclical relationship where two people probably shouldn’t be together and need each other at the same time. That’s where the core idea comes from – combining mediums and ways to make us feel, trying to find parallels in our real lives.

Finally, there is a time jump to last year, All at once, anywhere, we have four works on our site. Daniel Egan interviews two of his directors, plus his one in his column, where Aaron Hunt interviews junior artists after seeing the film they worked on. Costume designer Shirley Kurata spoke with Kwan’s mother about her study of Chinatown fashion. Blog and Comme de Garçon. Larkin Seiple again he spoke with Matt Mulcahey about how movie references became memory references.

The funny thing about building all the universes is that we took a lot of different movies as references, but realized they didn’t look like the real movies the way we wanted to see them. It was a movie memory. “Wong Kar-wai Verse” is much more saturated than, say, In the Mood for Love. There are colorful moments in that movie, and that’s what our brains are connected to. Even if that movie was more naturally exposed in a kind of clean light. In the case of Bagel Poetry, there were personal references, like Beyond the Black Rainbow and The Neverending Story II, which includes this strange crystalline palace.

And finally, Aaron Hunt revealed the subtleties of the film’s effects work and his set-up in an interview with Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere editor Paul Rodgers. In my living room,” he said—a far cry from the fancier setups of most studio productions.

To stay connected, Rogers and the director cut Adobe Premiere Productions using Resilio Sync, which syncs hard drives using BitTorrent rather than the cloud. He also used Frame.io, a centralized hub for media sharing and feedback tracking. “Something he would upload to Frame.io, they would leave a note there,” the editor recalled. “Occasionally I would see them working things out in the back and forth of comments. was.”

For action and drama cuts:

Just as Rogers cut a dramatic scene between Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) and her husband Waymond (Ke Hui Kuan) and daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), the Universe I cut the battle scene in between. Cut to close-ups only at decisive moments. If he holds the actor’s reaction one second longer at the beginning of the film, it can make or break the audience’s connection with the emotional beat that occurs near the end. To ensure that punches and kicks were chained together, Rogers and his crew used intensive time-his remapping, slowing down and speeding up shots via keyframes. [time remapping] this much before. If you just want to cut straight, you’ll have to cut 4-5 shots in a row. Alternatively, you can do a wide shot time remapping and split the screen so that one is going fast and the other is not. [all the while maintaining] real-time fantasy. Anticipating a lengthy remapping, Daniels and his DP Larkin Seiple shot the majority of the film overcranked (high frame rate). This required Rogers’ assistant his editor, Zekun Mao, to do enough work to get the audio in sync. Mao and his fellow assistant his editor Aashish D’Mello prepped the edit so that Rogers wouldn’t mind the minutiae of dense workflow composition.

Finally, from Egan’s interview, Daniels discusses their work with two Oscar winners, Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Filmmaker: I have a lot of questions for Michelle Yeoh here. how did she answer

Seem: she was really depressed. I think we were lucky. In her Hong Kong-style film production, which she started, she would just show up on set in the morning and tell her, “This is what you’re doing today.”

Seki: The script was mostly an outline, and people made it up as they went along, with varying degrees of success.

Seem: She still has a bit of that “can do” attitude. It’s hard to phase her.

Seki: The importance of Jamie Lee Curtis’ appearance cannot be overemphasized. I felt that if we were together, we could do anything. They respected each other and were ready to go with us.

Seem: Jamie Lee gave Michelle a lot of confidence.

I don’t know if you know that Ke Hoi Kuan, who played Michelle’s husband Waymond, was an assistant director. 2046He kept telling us what it was like to shoot with Wong Kar-wai, taking six hours for one shoot. He was like, “Oh my god, you guys shoot so fast.” His two main references to people he worked with were Wong Ka Wei and Steven Spielberg.