Photo by Wenting Xu
Weibo Feng finds himself very busy these days. Though born in China, he is in demand as an editor in productions across the planet. He finds himself tasked with sports content for a mobile app one day and cutting for a feature film with the production’s director the next. Possessing a style and a voice that often looks at a story from a unique and different perspective has always been an asset for Feng and it proves to be true vocationally for him as well.
Award-winning Indies, online productions with multi-million views, or feature films are all a part of Feng’s career that can be all consuming but immensely fulfilling creatively for this lauded filmmaker. An editor is a director’s closest confidant and Weibo has given many of the industry’s most intriguing directors good reason to seek him out.
Directed by Alan Brooks and edited by Weibo Feng, Wounded is a film about the five Lawton brothers who reunite at the funeral of their recently deceased Uncle Joe. During this reunion they reflect on their childhood and the social challenges of the African-American community at that time.
Starring some very noticeable actors including Thomas Miakal Ford (Image Award nominee known for Boulevard West and A Bronx Tale), D.James Jones (Marvel Studios Venom, Rampage, multiple award-winning Twentieth Century Fox film The Hate You Give, and recurring role in Marvel’s “The Gifted” series), Wounded was an Official Selection of the South Carolina Underground Film Festival and recognized with the Audience Choice Award.
Photo by Yunkai
The film’s very serious topics include molestation, incest, grave illness, as well as the guilt and shame that accompany them. Director Alan Brooks had been attracted to the qualities of Weibo’s editing in the film Neon and reached out to him as his ideal editor to cultivate the serious tone of Wounded.
The climactic scene of the film takes place when four of the brothers reveal a huge secret to their father. The director gave individual coverage to each of the five actors on screen and then tasked Feng with simultaneously communicating the plot, each actor’s performance, and the emotion while also watching over the space relationship and the eye sights.
Weiming Tang’s Boy and Bottle is a much different childhood tale but still relates the pain a young person can feel. A somber tale of solace and inner emotional pain, the twelve-year-old main character ditches school to meander on the beach, picking up drift bottles. Upon returning home, his father tells him that he is going to leave the family. The quiet desperation and sense of loss is immediately transferred in the shots chosen by Weibo of the wispy and implicit emotion moments of an inner world of this problem child who must face the truth that his family is falling apart.
An official selection of the Meters International Film Festival and New Filmmakers Screening as well as Bronze Award-winner at the International Independent Film Awards, Boy and Bottle required an adept editor of exceptional ability who could convey the main character’s deep feeling simply using calm and objective camera shots.
The feature film West of Nowhere Directed by Tian Xie utilized two different editors, one of which was Weibo Feng. Xie specifically contracted Feng due to his renown in crafting and polishing dialogue scenes. The non-linear nature of the story is an extremely attractive component of this film which can most accurately be described as falling within the Western/Crime genre.
Weibo reinforces that working on these less obvious types of productions is what keeps him interested and working at his highest level. Recalling an experience while working on Wounded, the editor notes, “Alan Brooks hummed the composed music demo for me to check the opening scene.
He had been working with the composer using the rough cut and also working with me to try to lock the picture. While the composer hasn’t finished the demo, Alan wanted to see whether the cut and the music matched well, so he asked me to play the sequence as he was humming the music along with the picture. I was surprised he remembered the music by heart so quickly. That’s the thing about working in this industry; someone will always bring something new to keep you interested and I really like that.”