CHERMIN the movie: Day of the Dead

Farid Kamal(Yusuf) and Natasha Hudson(Nasrin) as a couple in Chermin. Camera rigs being mounted on the Kembara before the driving scene. Scenes of happy moments before its impending doom, yeah I'm sure every smartass would have tried to guess. Pic courtesy of Wei Onn of Addaudio who took loads of pics during the production. Me and Jay requested all sort of footages when we started the pre-production of title-decko and website, we knew the L.S.D peeps would have production shots, Wei Onn, our LSD 'connection' whom everyone knows is the friendliest and warmest dude we knew. Also known as the dude who possesed 'deep-voice' naturally and all-around good guy. So we pounced on him to surrender all his pics to us and coaxed him to sign a copyright-free agreement to allow us to use ALL his shots!(Kd)

Zarina would be in a better position to talk about the making of 'Chermin the movie' on her blog. The actual reason i posted this pic is simply because Natasha Hudson is the only person who're aware of their pic being shot by another camera besides the main movie cam. She's pretty, ain't she?

Peaceful, eh? Scroll down to see the 'residents'. Best real-estate in town, No Complaints.

The day of the dead or Hungry Ghost Festival(Traditional Chinese: 中元節 or 盂蘭節; pinyin: zhōng yuán jié, and sometimes called 盂蘭盆; pinyin: yulanpen). According to Wiki, it's a period of time "in which ghosts and spirits come out from the lower world to visit earth." I remember you only have the main day as the day to:
'offer food and burn hell-money to please the visiting ghosts and spirits'.

Now, you have the luxury of the entire Month! No kidding, ask any 'Lam-Mor-Lou'(Taoist monks) or 'San-Kuan'(God's Stick or conmen of God, lolx)and they will reaffirm it. Ignore it at your own peril. hmmm... he might slap a chant(yellow-paper with inscriptions written in blood) on your back and have a ancient chinese zombie follow you all the way back home...

Another ancient Chinese belief, when loved-ones kick-the-bucket/kaput and they happen to be out-of-town in the land of big-big China, families requests these 'Lam-Mor-Lous'(Taoist shamans/wizards/warlocks/witch-doctors/etc) to bring back their bodies for proper burial at home. "How they do it? Please tell us" Innocent little Jimmy asks. "Glad that you asked, sonny" These shaman-dudes would perform rituals and place a 'Fu' or that yellow-paper thingy on the corpse's fore-head and 'Viola!', you have a mindless and still very-dead zombie at your bidding! The only flaw is, they only hop. So it's norm back in ancient times, you might encounter a troupe of these hopping-corpses following a Lam-Mor-lou at night for 'homecomings'. Just imagine it's DHL of the dead and sign the damn papers when it's delivered on your doorsteps!

My grandparents were all buried at cemeteries, for the chinese nowadays, the most economical is by cremation. It's guaranteed to save spaces, fast, clean and available for 'visits' anytime of the year. You could even have the 'remains' inside an urn and be bought back to your living room! Fret no more about getting up at 5am in the morning ONCE annually to labour for Hungry Ghost festival, bringing the whole family to mosquitos-infested cemeteries armed with shovels and 'parangs' to clear walls of prickly grass.

For the Elites, you can even 'reserve' plots of land as your own pre-death graveyard, with trees planted in your name, statues and water-fountains to add grandeur to celebrate your demise. Like the ones at Nirvana, Semenyih or Nilai Memorial, where packages varies depending on your budget, but again if you do have financial difficulties, they can recommend the Ah Longs from Bkt. Beruntung to relieve you of your troubles... or make sure you savour the best in modern-day burial should you failed to service your loan. =P

Death comes to us, all. The only difference is, How do you wanne be remembered?

For me, I just wanne leave this world without owing people anything. It's always the simplest of reasons but the hardest to achieve.

Parting gems:
"Shoot straight you bastards and don't make a mess of it!"
Executed by firing squad.
~~ Harry Harbord "Breaker" Morant, Australian poet & national hero, d. 1902

Chermin the movie: Screaming Head Painting

[Listening to: Unknown DVD - Unknown - (00:00)]

After the launch of CHERMIN website, Zarina (the director/writer) and Ummi (producer/financier) of the movie were caught by yours truly out on my favourite smoking bench(I've wrote about this 'bench' outsite of Addaudio eons ago but sadly it was lost amongst my older blog). I've finally ask THE question, What influenced you to make this Chermin movie?

One of the big influence was the painting above. I ran back into the office and grab my hp cam and took a not-so-decent pic of it. She has this nice big 'scrapbook' which neatly details all her imagination and visual candies. NICE. Wait til she see my montage collection of Natasha Hudson! (kd, never knew her til some buds reminded me she IS the model in almost all CELCOM ads. huh? come again)



The Munch.
Anyway, she has forgotten the painter's name, mumble he's a German(Acthung!) and probably unknown. The painting reminds me of the infamous Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch's 'Scrik' or Scream. As I have checked WIRED's latest issue detail Norway having the perfect goverment with high standard od living(they must be really happy fishermen), the emotion known as 'Angst' is perfectly alien to Norwegians,(remember A-HA? all smiles and friendship-bands!) hence the Munch was having that in 1893, it was 'Hip' and he was smart enough to dabble it all on a painting. That's my theory anyway. My first encounter with Munch's painting was at LUCT(formarly known as LICT), with our lovely Ms. Carol showing it on our Art History classes. She's a lovely lass with great flair in debutting anything old to us and make our jaws drop. For the firs time we found anything historical interesting because she taught us how to look for clues, hints and what really makes the 'masters' as you say.. thick. She has since left to pursue her masters degree and take on an offer to be an assistant to the Musuem Curator of Hawaii... damn you , Hawaiii... we lost one of our finest and most beautiful lecturer to you... *sob. K, back to Munch, the painting was part of Ed's little episode angst( Gubra in Malay, how appropriate... get me a GF and a ticket, please) with his own words,

"I was walking along a path with two friends the sun was setting suddenly the sky turned blood red I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

A real nutcase I would have told him if I was one of his 'two friends'. It seems Ed has made a trip(not THAT trip!) to Paris and visited a exhibition of mummies. You know with all them kings and queens all cuddled up looking pathetic. If you've known they gonne wrap you up that long after death, charge 1p for ticket entrance and being showcased as 'wonders' of the world, you would be sreaming all the way to Tg. Rambutan (I heard the lastest state-of-the-art mental wards are now at JB, please confirm). For Ed, this was the final straw after a lifetime of watching dad choking and boning fish. Plus he was walking on a jetty and probably a whimf of good ol foul-smelling fjord got the better of him. 'Scrik!' he goes.

Note. the painting cause a furore because interpol was kept guessing as who-dunnit when the painting was stolen. It probably smells as bad as the painting when it was 'disposed', hey, in Norway, paints are made of the only resource they have aplenty. I don't want to explain all the arty details about the painting but the painting looks as everyone says,... Insane.




The Cheesy Contemporary
When we were commisioned to do the visuals for CHERMIN poster, Seth, Jay and me would be coming out 3 visuals of very different perspective. We knew Seth will have the best chances to score with his work, he chose a emotional version with a thinge of haunting in his poster.(will get his work up ASAP)
and Jay gets to do the 60's version of film noir style. Me, I do the cheesy version. As in ala 80's, or how it would look when Chuck Norris was still kickin' it way before settling for Texas Ranger. The weirdest thing is, zarina and ummi chosed my suicide version over the other two great designs. ???

'Til I saw 'The Screaming Head' german painting from her scrapbook on the day the website launched. I've no inclination it was a big part of her influence when I was working on it. Spooky.