Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1075515
CHINA b y M a r k U l a n o C A S In 2002, I had the incredible good fortune to be brought onto Quentin Tarantino's project, Kill Bill. It became 10 glorious months spent loving the making of movies, filmed in four countries. That journey began in earnest with five months in Beijing, China. Beijing was a place of fascinating contrasts in those days: from hours of long lines in Tiananmen Square to view Mao's mummified remains, to the protest songs by the Chinese Bob Dylan, Cui Jian. In retrospect, the privilege of making that film exponentially expanded my worldview of the international filmmaking experience. Although profoundly different in the day-to-day nuts and bolts of process and hierarchy, the larger commonality of filmmaking culture, the love of making movies was in evidence daily. Things were a bit primitive back then. The Beijing Film Studio had been built in 1949 and remained essentially unchanged from that time. Power was two-wire 220V and I had to hammer 10-foot copper rods into the earth to achieve electrical ground for our gear! These days, Beijing offers one of the newest and most modern production facilities in the world. There are many anecdotes from Kill Bill that still vibrate in me today, but they are tales for another time. What is relevant here is the exponential growth of home-produced content for the domestic Chinese market and the subsequent growth of local production and hunger for education. During Kill Bill, I was very lucky to meet and work with my friend, Li Xueli. Xueli was our 2nd boom operator/utility sound technician. He has since become one of the premier production sound mixers in China. He was our link to the Chinese film crew, interpreter, protector, guide and ultimately, friend. We had many discussions about creative and technical approach, and he came to understand just how passionate I was about evangelizing the essential contribution to filmmaking that the sound arts provide. I had begun teaching workshops a few years prior to this time and Xueli was a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) and maintained close contacts with his former classmates and mentors. He proposed that I give a talk on film sound at his alma mater, and so the connection began. He also arranged for me to visit his mentor, Tao Jing CAS, who was pre-dubbing the film Hero (an amazing piece of sound craft). Through the years, Xueli and I have maintained our connection and he has helped me on my other trips to China, such as my keynote talk in 2015 at the CSMPTE sound conference in Chengdu, also Tao Jing spoke there and joined CAS soon afterward. An Adventure in Education I was called in at the last minute to fill in for my friend and mentor, Chris Newman CAS, who was stuck in a New York snow blizzard, preventing travel. I was asked to give a talk at a seminal three-day event, which brought university film educators from 25 nations together with senior professionals from the working cinema sound community. We were there to share, discuss, and consider the way forward in improving the sound curriculum in film education everywhere. What a concept! Thank you, Michael Kowalski, head of this program. At this conference, I was lucky enough to meet several amazing filmmaking educators, building connection for furthering the teaching of the sound arts. I was scheduled to give a class in Amsterdam at the Netherlands Film Academy (another great experience) soon after, and got to meet my Dutch host, Ben Zijlstra, head of Sound Design at NFA. Also attending my talk on the art of production sound was Dr. Wen-Shing Ho (Sc.D), Director, Masters of Cinema program at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in association with USC-SJTU Institute of Cultural and Creative Industry.