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.
“First of all, the greenhouse is just really pretty,” she said. “So I think everyone was just really excited to get cool shots.” The botanical gardens’ second floor allowed for an arial shot. The scene opens looking into a pool of water, where Leo is reflected, an homage to the parallel universes. Anna comes in, and Leo says, “I just didn’t know if you’d show up.” Anna answers, “I needed a break, and I love the greenhouse.”
During production, the cast and crew totaled 25 students. On a given day, 10 or so were on set. Now, as the film nears the end of post-production, Kim meets with one or two collaborators at a time. The morning before our interview, she met with Spaw, who recorded sound on set, to finish editing Melani’s audio and make it less “echoey.” Kim is doing most of the other editing herself. She wrote the film’s final scene that morning. They had shot it, but Kim hadn’t finished Anna’s voiceover at the time of shooting. She’d gotten Spaw to record the voiceover before our interview.
Music, Theatre & Dance senior Ryo Kamibayashi is composing the film’s score. The classical, beginning theme and title sequence music is finished, and when Kim showed me a scene in which Anna sketches and walks to the museum, gentle piano notes made me wish I, too, were on a calm walk through the city on the way to a gallery.
“I really love the music,” Kim said. She sat back in her chair and seemed to listen closely, though she must have heard the music many times before. I wondered if she was taking in her project, nearly complete.
Making a film as a student with a crew of other students, and following it through to completion, is not easy. Doing so at the University of Michigan is made more difficult by the school’s lack of support for independent projects like this. Kim found a way around the gatekept equipment, but there was no loophole to make up for the holes in the FTVM program itself. As others have criticized, Kim noted how few editing courses the University offers. As she and Thompson try to color grade — one of the final steps in their post-production — it frustrates her that she was never taught how to do this. The computers in the Duderstadt multimedia rooms have access to DaVinci Resolve, the standard color grading software, but there is no course that teaches students to use the program. Consequently, Kim and Thompson are “experimenting” with the program.
“It’s such a waste,” Kim said, for the school to give access to this software without access to the knowledge of how to use it.
As she figures out the rest of the film, Kim balances school work with editing. She started a masters of marketing program in June at the Ross School of Business. Creativity has been part of her life since she was a kid, inventing complicated zombie card games for her friends to play. She wanted to be a lawyer when she started college at Boston University, but when she stumbled upon a film production course, she said she loved the “creativity of it and the freedom I had with storytelling.” When she transferred to the University of Michigan, her mind was made up to pursue film, but as much as she loved production courses, her opinion changed by graduation.
“In the real industry, it’s harder to get the role that you actually want, and most likely you would have to start out as a (production assistant),” she said. “Not to say that a PA is a bad job, but I didn’t want to get coffee for other people, move traffic cones, yell at pedestrians.”
Kim wanted another way into the industry, and while debating what to do post-graduation, she received letters and emails from the Business School about the Masters program. She thought, “Why not?” When the program accepted her, she decided to enroll. Marketing seemed to combine creativity with her passion for film.
Now, Kim plans to go into marketing in the film and television industry. Her one-year program ends this April, and she hopes to move to either Los Angeles or New York. LA seems more probable because she already lives in San Jose.
“And (because of) the weather,” she said. “And LA’s the place to be if you’re in film.”
After the premiere, Kim will submit “Oeuvre, Unfinished” to festivals. In an email after our interview, she informed me she has already begun this process. She has applied to a few grants for the film and finished an almost year-long process applying for the omptiMize Social Innovation Project, for which she gave her final pitch the week before our interview.
“(It is rare for) an Asian American woman to direct, write and produce a film,” Kim said. This was one of her main points in her pitch. She discussed the diverse crew she worked with and her commitment to encouraging diversity in projects she leads. In the pitch, which she shared with the Daily in a later email, she wrote that the film was not just a film but “an advocacy of diversity and inclusion, and it is a promise to other women of color that their art deserves to be created, be seen, and be heard.” In her email, she told me she received $7,000 from optiMize, most of which she used to hire a colorist from Company3.
U-M alum Christine Park, Kim’s co-production designer, is making posters for the film, which they release on Instagram each week leading up to the premiere. Kim plans to print and hang more posters around campus. These posters feature the paintings and photos of the actors from a Victorian-themed photoshoot by Music, Theatre & Dance senior Korrin Dering.
When audiences watch this film, Kim wants them to see something that reminds them to be in touch with other humans. In her email, she reflected that, similar to the film’s message, her cast and crew were, she said, “able to build a strong team because everyone just connected with one another.” For Kim, what could have been small connections in production classes became friendships, collaboration and the creation of something meaningful with a public premiere.
“I want this film to be a message,” Kim said, “for how important it is to not take any small encounter for granted.”
Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.