Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Wednesday, April 19, 2023 — 5

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“ ’

”

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