Daniel Philip Robinson

So work on my graduate film "Laowai" has more or less stopped for a while. I do have mixed feelings about it in many respects. It is also very aggravating to me on a personal level that I allowed myself to take on a project and not finish it, or that I did not plan it in such a way that it could be finished.

Anyway, one must look to the future and not the past, but while I am trying to claw out a future for myself, I may as well keep posting SOMETHING to this blog.

What follows is a piece of writing I submitted along with the submission of the film to the college, which was deemed a critical self-analysis. It is presented as-written when it was produced at the culmination of production on the film. This of course means it was written in a severely sleep deprived state. I apologize for any incoherence contained within, however it does represent my thoughts on the film as they were at the time of its completion. A little later I will try to write something on how I feel about it looking back, and what I will do looking forward.

Story Context and Background

The genesis of this film was the concept of "Numbers Stations." Numbers Stations are shortwave radio broadcasts that occur around the world in various forms and have been observed for many decades. They typically consist of a tone or musical phrase at the opening and conclusion of each broadcast with the main body of the transmission being a recitation of a seemingly random string of numbers, letters or phrases.

Aesthetically, these broadcasts are arresting. Through the curtain of phase and static, one hears (often only faintly), human or near-human voices saying things that we as outside listeners cannot even begin to understand or identify with. It is unsurprising to me that some of the outlandish theories as to their origin involve extra-terrestrials, the disconnection from personal humanity that these recordings reflect is frequently unsettling. Some broadcasts in particular are particularly disturbing to hear, such as "The Swedish Rhapsody" transmissions that originate from Cologne, Germany. This station uses the re-sampled voice of a young girl to deliver the numbers, preceded by a terse "Achtüng!" Her voice's pitch shifting and warping in the atmospheric distortion adds to the effect.

Even when the stations do venture away from purely abstract numbers and letters, they are still beyond understanding. One recording from a station in China features a female voice that repeats in Mandarin Chinese "My name is Zhu Wei, my name is Zhu Wei, my name is Zhu Wei... Goodbye."

Beyond their impressively creepy aesthetic, what brought this from an interesting collection of audio to an idea for a film was the realization that for each of those mysterious broadcasts, there was a person somewhere that understood them. The gulf of emotion and information that exists between these recordings and ourselves makes the person who understands these messages even more interesting. When considering using these recordings as the foundation for a film, I was drawn to the idea of what kind of a person the receiver of a signal would be, what sort of life they would have.

In all likelihood these transmissions are targeted at espionage agents operating in foreign countries under deep cover. These would be people whose job involved blending in to another society so as to be beyond suspicion, and their only tie to their true loyalty lies in what they listen to with their radio when no one else is around. Living in an era far removed from Alger Hiss, the Berlin Wall, and the Iron Curtain it can be easy to dismiss the idea of widespread espionage as a relic of the Cold War and Hollywood fiction. The continued existence of these radio communications over our very heads serves as natural proof to the contrary.

The reality of it is that no matter how real and widespread governmental espionage may be, the vast majority of it would, by its very nature, be invisible to the public. Despite this, a look through recent news items shows a tremendous amount of activity from this world that surfaces into the public eye.

• Last year Valerie Plaime, the wife of former US Ambassador to Niger Joe Wilson, was scandalously revealed as a CIA undercover operative through a newspaper leak by Bush administration strategist Karl Rove. This was done in retribution for Wilson rebuking falsified evidence used as justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

• According to a list compiled by the Russian-based group, the Committe to Protest Journalists, 60 journalists have been murdered since Vladimir Putin assumed control of the Russian Federation. Many of these murders are described as bearing the marks of contract killings, and most of the journalists killed were known to be reporting on the Chechen War, influential local politicians, and the Putin government itself.

• In 2006 former Russian KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in London in an elaborate hit which poisoned him with the rare radionuclide Polonium 210, a rare substance that is only produced at a rate of 100mg per year, all of it in Russian nuclear reactors. Photographs later emerged of a Russian special forces unit using pictures of Litvinenko as a shooting target. He had become an outspoken critic of the Russian Federation during his time in Europe, and made accusations that former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi was a friend of the KGB. On the day that medical experts determined the lethal dose of polonium was administered, Livinenko had met with a former KGB spy Andrei Lugovoi. The UK's attempts to extradite Lugovoi for the murder and Russia's refusal to extradite him are still the source of a major diplomatic rift between the two countries.

With these previous examples, it would seem to be a reasonable choice to set the film in the US or in Russia, however I felt that in the genre of spy fiction these two locales, the latter especially, are very much overrepresented. In the case of modern Russia, the context of its recent espionage history are quite complicated and would be difficult to convey as the central subject matter for a short.

China, on the other hand, is perhaps the fastest rising power in the world today, alongside India. It has a turbulent recent past, surging economic growth, a vast standing military, and a political system that represents and odd marriage of Maoist communism and capitalism. Its relationship with the other world powers has seen radical shifts and is today somewhat nebulous and difficult to characterize. And as for espionage, in February 2008 a Boeing engineer named Dongfan Chung was brought up on charges of giving state secrets regarding the space shuttle and military aircraft to China from as early as 1979.

I feel that China is an ideal setting for this genre of fiction, and as China's world profile seems destined to only get larger it will likely become the setting for even more works in this genre.
Another reason I chose China as a setting is due to a trip I recently took to Japan. In all honesty, the city in my film probably reflects my impressions of Tokyo more than it does Shanghai, a place I have not yet been to myself. I did endeavor to reflect the architecture in Shanghai as I saw it through my research, but other elements I deliberately emphasized, such as the ubiquitous and overwhelming array of power lines above the streets, are things I observed in Japan. The main plot device of being stranded in the city due to a typhoon shutting down public transport is based upon my own experiences in Tokyo, and is not an uncommon occurrence in most East Asian cities.

Issues of Representation

In terms of issues of representation, there are many areas where this film could be seen as somewhat problematic when looked at in summary: A foreign, possibly Caucasian male overpowers and murders a duplicitous Chinese female. In summary like this issues such as sexism and racism are immediately brought to mind. Within the context of the film, however, I made many attempts to try to counter this. Firstly, and in my view most importantly, the main character is not a hero. At no point is he redeemed through his actions. This was my intent from the onset. A traditional Hollywood story model of the antihero slowly coming to regret his lifestyle or actions through love is somewhat contradicted by what I feel is the reality of this corner of humanity. People such as this who engage in undercover governmental killings are unlikely to allow personal feelings to endanger their own position or duties. Those that would are unlikely to find themselves trusted with that job in the first place.

Another element of this effort was to emphasize the sounds of the radio transmissions during the scenes in the apartment. Associating this character's private moments with the unsettling noises of the numbers stations is intended to suggest a psychosis in the character. After all, this is a person who hears random numbers over a mysterious radio frequency and then commits acts of violence based on what that radio tells him. Without the presumed extra context of a spy career one could call that a description of an insane person.

Also, when it came to the character design, I attempted to make his facial characteristics and skin tone difficult to pinpoint racially. He is, in my view, somewhere between European and Asian characteristics.

As for the female character, the background I decided for her, which is not necessarily what is completely conveyed on screen but was used for my own story purposes, was that she is also a spy. She is what the KGB referred to as a "Swallow," an asset that is primarily used to exploit targets by seduction. (Male seduction assets were called "Ravens.") What leads to her downfall, however, is that she simply is not as experienced at it as her opponent. The male asset has been forewarned of her identity and methods and is prepared for her. It is due to this reason, not due to gender or race, that she is overpowered and killed.

Production Methodology

I decided very early on that this film would be made using traditional hand drawn animation. As I did not wish to work in 3D, the choices were down to using an entirely Flash based approach, a Single Level approach, or a traditional Hand Drawn approach. I feel that Hand Drawn animation offers much more freedom for manipulating the character designs I had chosen. Additionally, hand drawn animation is, I feel, underrepresented in modern animation. However, despite this principle, it was mainly a decision based on achieving my aesthetic goals.

All of the animation was done on paper first, with backgrounds inked using a Japanese shodo calligraphy brush pen. The backgrounds were then finished in Corel Painter and multiplane backgrounds were assembled in Photoshop. The animation's post production used Toon Boom Studio. I feel that this program is far easier to use than its nearest alternative, Animo, and has the additional advantage of being able to run on a Macintosh, so I was able to work from home using this method. Perhaps the only drawback is that when the program imports drawings, it processes them as black vector lines. Given the style of backgrounds in this film which make a lot of use of deep blacks, I do not think this particular quirk is a major issue, but it is something I will keep in mind for future projects that use different color schemes. Additionally at two points brief segments of live action footage is used. This is altered footage I took from the window of a Shinkansen bullet train in Japan going at 300km/h.

As for technical difficulties, the only one worth mentioning is an issue inherent with hand drawn animation; it is very time consuming and labor intensive. Thus some elements are as of this writing are still being processed and a few elements are still on the drawing board.

As for any social or political aspects of this work, a lot of thought along those lines did enter into its conception. Barriers to communication and language were themes at the core of both of the film ideas I pitched at the start of this year, and issues of language in the cinema of China was one of the key topics of my Thesis this year. The central character's feigned ignorance of the Chinese language is explained by his description that languages are not secret codes. This is contrasted by the actual secret codes he himself consumes at home. This is intended as an illustration of one of the subtle aspects of language differences, the assumption that others are ignorant of a language.

My mother once mentioned how whenever she was on vacation with other people from Ireland, they used the Irish language as a kind of code to mock people around them without the targets of their ridicule realizing it. Similarly, the Navajo language was used as a radio code in the Pacific theater of World War II, a code that was never broken by the Japanese. Both of these instances refer to relatively obscure languages (on the global scale) and in the case of the latter, a language with grammar and sentence structure unlike any other. However, the more widespread and prominent a language becomes, the greater the chance one takes that those around you do not understand it. Thus one of the few advantages that a language barrier can produce, an opportunity for relatively secret communication, is actually a very fragile advantage at best.

The Chinese dialogue in this film was translated by an acquaintance of mine studying Chinese in New York, and the lines of dialogue were performed by a friend who is studying Chinese here in Dublin. As she spends most of her time in Dublin her accent when speaking English is very noticeably affected by a Dublin accent. This is quite interesting when contrasted with the performance in Chinese (which I am told has a slight Cantonese accent). With Dublin's rapidly changing demographic, this is linguistic territory that will no doubt become more and more familiar to Dubliners within the next twenty years.

As for the recording of the male character's voice, I provided it myself, though I do intend to change this. It would seem slightly narcissistic to have included my own voice in every single one of the films I have made for the 4 years of this course. Also, there was an unexpected technical difficulty when recording my voice: The microphone on which I was recording picked up a ticking sound. This is the ticking of the artificial aortic valve in my heart. So at least it is an unusual technical difficulty. It is unlikely one can hear the ticking in the final mix though.

The word "Laowai" that gives the film its title is a word for "foreigner" that has an odd status as being endearing to some people and offensive to others. It literally means "Old Foreigner" and originally had connotations friendly respect. Now it is seen by some as a brusque and insensitive way to refer to a Caucasian or foreign Asian-American person. A very close word, Gwei-lo (meaning "White Demon") is used when the female character insults her opponent under her breath. It is this word that he verbally objects to.

As for the film's political significance, beyond the very broadest terms it was not designed to have specific political messages. The only indication of who the main character is working for comes if you pay very close attention to the top margin of the dossiers he flips through, and I was reluctant to even specify that much. There is no indication given as to who the female character is working for. Stripped of the specifics of national affiliations, spies like these become engaging simply through the game of espionage itself.

Aside from the very broad implication that state sanctioned murder is bad and can be associated with insanity, there is no political message that one can readily extract from this film. Even that broad statement neglects the many factors that complicate the ethics of state sanctioned murder that make it quite different from a lone individual committing murder. We, the audience, do not know what the female character has done to warrant her death. We do not know what information she was hoping to get from the male spy. For all we know she could have a trail of corpses in her wake. Without greater context than a short can provide, any political messages would be blunt and inelegant.

Thus, this film can ultimately be seen as being about a sociopath and his favorite radio station.