Getting ready for Little Tokyo

I shot pickup scenes in L.A. late last week, am catching up with paying my astounding cast and crew, media management, reporting to my funders. I’m posting what I wrote as I became embroiled in preproduction:

April 26

[These final non-dialogue scenes involve teenaged Kenji’s encounter with a sakura tree, his passage through Little Tokyo on an errand from his father, and the family car’s drive to Tuna Canyon Detention Center.]

Yesterday I got myself out to shoot some more sakura trees, and I recruited my son to stand in for Kenji, the teenaged Kibei youth we follow in They Took My Father Too. It was a real psychic boost, pushing through my cloud of anxious, obsessive uncertainty about this scene. Getting a tree I like to capture onscreen was a big thing weighing on me through March. As the blossoms were falling off the cherry blossom trees in Los Angeles, I was figuring out with my producer Ken Ochiai how to shoot the tree. Fortunately here in New York we also have numerous sakura trees, and I went out a few times in my own neigborhood to look for them. I watched from the train home where there could be good ones with sky behind them.

Getting my son involved added to the creative charge of producing this mock edit, and I realized a couple of things about the feeling and composition of the shot. I realized I had to change the location among other things. But it was really the feeling that hit me in shooting and editing this rehearsal for this encounter with the young tree towering over Kenji.

May 4

I feel in a better place than I’ve felt in the previous shoots. Of course, what’s coming up this week is “only” be a pickup shoot of 1 day. But these final shots are completely visual, no dialogue, and have interwoven functions in the film.

And that was the last thing I wrote in my journal before today. It was a whirlwind, but we got it done in a pretty smooth shoot that actually finished early.

I’m excited to edit this footage into the cut. I’m targeting October for completion of the 20-minute festival short, which will be the vanguard form of this film project.