Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Wednesday, April 19, 2023 — 5
puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com
“ ’
”
SUDOKU
WHISPER
“thinking
about…
breakfast”
“When it’s obvious
that the goals
cannot be reached,
don’t adjust the
goals, adjust the
action.”
WHISPER
Madeline Sun Woo Kim on paintings,
vintage dresses and her first film premiere
On April 19, the Michigan
Theater’s
largest
auditorium
will show a film mixing magical
realism and romance, starring two
University of Michigan students
in a multi-universal story of small
connections that wind up meaning
everything.
The
film,
titled
“Oeuvre,
Unfinished,” is the product of years
of work from Business graduate
student Madeline Sun Woo Kim,
who graduated the University in
December 2021 with a bachelor’s
degree in Film, Television and
Media.
In fall 2020, the University sent
students home from Thanksgiving
through the end of the semester
to finish classes on Zoom. Kim
returned to her family’s home
in San Jose, Calif. She planned
a trip to Korea for Winter Break
and, per pandemic guidelines,
had to quarantine for two weeks
before traveling. During those
two weeks of bored isolation, Kim
brainstormed scripts she could
write.
“That’s
where
everything
started,” Kim said in an interview
with The Michigan Daily. “At the
time, I was thinking about the
importance of human connection
and how much people take for
granted — at least I’ve taken for
granted — before COVID. Like
these small encounters and small
conversations that can happen
between two strangers anywhere,
like in a museum or in a coffee
shop.”
“Oeuvre, Unfinished” features
scenes in both these locations.
The title refers to a painting of a
field of flowers which art student
Anna (Music, Theatre & Dance
senior Alyssa Melani) and chef
Leo (Music, Theatre & Dance
senior Atticus Olivet) are both
inexplicably drawn to. Anna visits
the painting every day in its art
museum. The two meet during one
of these visits — in this universe,
anyway.
Kim started writing a screenplay
and fantasized about shooting
the film in Seoul, where she was
quarantining, or New York City,
a place with many potential art
museums. But it wasn’t until
January 2022, after she graduated,
that Kim sat down to finish the
script. She wrote through January
and February and showed the script
to her friends, who encouraged her
to produce it.
“That motivated me too,” Kim
said in an interview with The
Michigan Daily. She had never
made an independent film, though
she worked as an assistant director,
editor and supervising editor for
three different upper-level U-M
production
classes,
in
which
students form a team to shoot and
produce a student-written TV pilot
or feature film. While in these
classes, Kim had little time for her
own projects.
In her final semester, she
was part of a production class
for a pilot called “Weaksiders.”
This is where she met U-M
alum Sydney Spaw, one of the
directors, and Music, Theatre &
Dance senior Timmy Thompson,
a
producer.
Thompson
asked
Kim, who had been supervising
editor for “Weaksiders,” to edit
a web series he was making. The
two became close working on
these projects, and when finding
people to help her with “Oeuvre,
Unfinished,” Kim asked both Spaw
to co-produce and Thompson to be
an associate producer. She reached
out to the “Weaksiders” directors
of photography, U-M alum Nick
Ferraina Nick Ferraina (LSA class
of 2022) and LSA senior Kevin
Lazzaro and recruited people via
email through the Film, Television,
and Media Department.
Kim sent out a casting call for
actors as well, and spoke about
her thoughts at the time. She said,
“(I thought) no one would really
audition since it’s not for a class
credit or anything … it’s just an
independent film.”
She said she was surprised by the
number of auditions, a number she
couldn’t remember exactly, but was
somewhere in the range of 15-19.
Kim held auditions anywhere
she could, from a collection of
classrooms in North Quad and the
Modern Languages Building, to
the study area in her apartment.
The actors read from the sides Kim
prepared — the moment Anna asks
Leo if he thinks there’s a reason
they met and similar transitional
scenes where the dynamic between
the actors was most important. Kim
read Leo’s lines for the potential
Annas and Anna’s for prospective
Leos. She looked for people she
could imagine together — these
characters needed to believably fall
in love in six different universes.
She also sought an Anna who she
says, “I saw at least a little bit of
myself in.”
On the first day of auditions,
Melani and Olivet auditioned. Kim
usually asked actors to read just one
of the prepared scenes, but “both of
them were just so good. I wanted to
hear more, so I asked them to do all
the sides,” Kim said. After the week
of auditions, Olivet and Melani still
stuck in her head.
Kim still needed the painting
that would bring them together.
From the beginning, she had
wanted
to
write
“something
with paintings.” Anna loves the
painting, but she senses that it is
missing something. In the first
alternative universe, we find out
the missing piece was her — this
universe is set in the 1800s, where
Leo is an artist painting a version
of the canvas from the art gallery
with Anna in it. An impressive
painting was essential to the film.
While writing the script, moving
between Ann Arbor and San Jose,
Kim considered who she could ask
to paint it.
“I thought about asking (Art
and Design) students,” she said,
“but … this would be a really long
process.” She wanted a 28” by 22”
oil painting, and “(oil paint) like,
never dries,” Kim laughed. “You
have to repaint, repaint.”
Instead, she looked for artists in
her neighborhood in San Jose and
found HooSSo Art Studio, a prep
school for high school students
considering studying art in college.
The studio owner and teacher was
a man named Jong Min Lim.
Kim asked if Lim could do three
paintings for her: the original
painting from the art gallery,
titled “Oeuvre, Unfinished”; a
similar painting to hang in Leo’s
restaurant, which he shows Anna
because it reminds him of the first
painting and a painting of a ring,
which Leo brings as a gift for Anna
only to find that she already wears
an identical ring.
“(Lim) told me that he’d never
gotten that kind of request before
because
he
usually
teaches
students, and he doesn’t really do
any freelance painting,” Kim said.
During our interview — which
took place, per Kim’s suggestion,
in a multimedia room in the
Duderstadt
Center
on
North
Campus — Kim turned to one of
the desktop computers and pulled
up pictures of the paintings. The
painting of the field, now in a thick
gold frame, drew my eye down a
path through soft, impressionistic
yellow flowers. The second painting
featured an expanse of similar,
purple flowers. The ring painting
was more realistic, the lines of the
dark green gem at the front cleanly
cut. Little rainbows seem to reflect
from the surrounding crystals.
“I had to ask him to paint the
girl separately,” Kim said. When
they shot the scene in the universe
where Leo finished the painting,
they carefully taped the painting of
Anna to the canvas with artist tape.
The other expensive, unsure-
where-to-find-it prop was the
Victorian dress Anna was meant
to wear in the second universe.
Where could Kim find a dress
suitable for the 1800s setting? She
planned a day to scour the thrift
stores of San Francisco in search
of old dresses in a dark green to
match the ring. She left early in the
morning — if a 19th century dress
had been put out on a thrift store
floor, she would get to it before
someone else. Several thrift stores
in, she found a deep green dress
with puffed shoulders, tapered
sleeves and ruffles sidelining the
buttons down the front.
It was perfect, but, Kim said,
“It took up a lot of our production
budget.”
So did the hard drive she left
the room to retrieve in order to
show me scenes from the film.
Kim described it as “reliable.” I
would have said formidable. The
hard drive was the size of a brick.
The University doesn’t technically
allow students to borrow their
film equipment for non-University
projects,
but
Kim
convinced
someone
within
the
FTVM
department to lend lights and, for
a week, two Black Magic cameras.
Thompson had a camera they used
for most of the other scenes.
The most important shooting
location was the art museum. The
University of Michigan Museum of
Art was Kim’s first choice.
“For
obvious
reasons,
they
wouldn’t let me take down their
painting and hang up mine,” Kim
said. She shot B-roll around the
museum, but then had to find an
alternative — a place that looked
enough like an UMMA exhibition
room.
“I think I visited almost ten
locations within campus to find
a place that could look like a
museum,” Kim said. It had to have
white walls and no “weird floors;
it couldn’t be carpet or anything.”
The gallery in the Duderstadt
didn’t meet these standards — not
to mention that the walls were
the wrong material. She thought
she could find a classroom with
plain white walls and looked in the
Walgreen Drama Center and the
Taubman College of Architecture
and Urban Planning, as well as an
art studio a 15-minute drive away,
but each location had its pitfall.
Her perfect gallery, with no
fabric walls or carpeted floors, was
WSG Gallery in downtown Ann
Arbor. The owners let Kim’s crew
take down, rearrange and hang up
their own paintings.
With one painting housed, Kim
had to find the restaurant where
the second would hang and where
Leo worked at the film’s start. The
crew found the Chop House, a high-
end steakhouse down Main Street
already decorated with paintings.
Kim’s would fit in perfectly, but
she expected they wouldn’t let
the crew shoot there or would at
least demand a high fee. She was
pleasantly surprised when they
were told they could be there for
free if they came before business
hours. Kim just had to get in touch
with the manager to confirm the
shoot days.
“And he was never there,” Kim
said. She got an email from the
other employees, but the manager
was unresponsive. She started
going to the steakhouse every day,
trying to catch the manager in
person. She asked if he was there,
and the employees told her, “No,
but he’ll be back tomorrow.”
She returned the next day, and
they told her, “He’s out right now,
but he’ll be back tomorrow.”
Her
persistence
paid
off
eventually, and Kim confirmed the
crew’s permission to shoot at the
restaurant with the “very very nice,
just very busy” manager.
The art gallery and restaurant
are part of only the first of the film’s
six universes. Kim showed me the
scene in which Anna and Leo meet
before the camera zooms into the
painting, emerging in an art studio
in the 1800s. The transition from
one universe to the next and then
up to Anna in her Victorian gown
was one of the most difficult to
shoot. In the end, Kim had them
shoot the scene backward and
reversed it in post-production.
“I
told
(Olivet)
to
paint
backward,” Kim said. “That part
doesn’t have any dialogue, thank
God.”
Kim’s
background
as
an
editor influenced her directorial
decisions on set and helped her in
Zoom meetings with the directors
of photography to make shot
lists. In the third universe, a high
school Anna and Leo meet in the
greenhouse. They filmed this scene
— one of the crew’s favorites — in
the Matthaei Botanical Gardens.
This was one of the most fun scenes
to shoot, Kim said as she found it in
the timeline on Premiere Pro.
ERIN EVANS
Senior Arts Editor
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Courtesy of Madeline Sun Woo Kim