FILM TESTIMONIAL - "The Runner" (September-October, 2013)

    It took another couple months before I made it all the way out of this period of total confusion (which I discuss in my piece about my short film Trapped). It was after this time, into the late fall of 2012, that I started reflecting back on that past relationship and discovered that it was one of the greatest mistakes of my life. I still look at it that way and wish I could go back and change the past. But as well all know, this cannot happen. Only a few days before the start of 2013 I made an effort to try and, if nothing else, to see if we could start again, only more slowly and see if we could find our way back to what we once were. But it didn’t happen. She was seeing somebody else and said that she was happy. I was hurt so badly by this, because I knew then I had to try and let it go. I wasn’t going to be that creepy home wrecker. We have managed to go back to being very close friends, which is incredibly rare for those who were once in relationships. We’re still close, but there has always been that longing I’ve felt to try again and see if we could make it work again. Even now I still feel this way. But back then, when my efforts fell through at the end of 2012 I spent two months in a funk. It was really hard to get out of that because I was the one that pushed for the break up so I couldn’t even blame her for not giving me a second chance when I was the one that screwed everything up.

    I remember feeling this sense that during that time our love was dead and gone, you know how we behave when we’re having to climb out of that hole of feeling rejected. I remember feeling like I would never have a chance to be with her again and so what we had was, more or less, dead. Somewhere during that time I was pondering potentially sad story lines either for a short story or possibly a film. While pondering this there was an event that had occurred locally that I think was slipping into my mind and pushed forward the idea for The Runner. On December 12, 2012 a young man walked into the Clackamas Town Center shopping mall, only about eight miles from where I live, and opened fire with a Bushmaster assault rifle. He only managed to kill two people when his gun jammed. That shooting really hit at home to me, and I’m assuming a good many people around the Portland area. Portland, Oregon has seldom ever been that city known for having a major tragedy occur. We knew about 9/11, but that happened 3,000 miles away. We saw the bombing of the Arthur Murrah Federal Building, but that was in Oklahoma City. Hurricane Katrina happened in the states along the Gulf of Mexico. So many major tragedies have occurred in America, but they often occur a good distance from the Great Northwest. Now a shooting was happening right in the middle of the Portland Metropolitan Area.

    I think this shooting started making me think about what I often think of when I hear about a large tragedies where people’s lives are taken. I started thinking about all the people who’s lives were effected in this shooting. One can say well, we should be happy that only two people died. That is easy to say when nobody you or I know gets killed, but what if one is connected to someone who is killed? It effects us in various ways. Somewhere along that line I connected that feeling of lost love with the idea of a random shooting, where someone who is loved is suddenly gone in the blink of an eye. I developed the lead character, Cal, who had experienced losing the love of his life in a mall shooting. Hence, the lost love aspect. Like what I was feeling about my past relationship, Cal realized and felt there was nothing he could do to get the love of his life back. The focus of the film then is about how this one man’s life changes as the result of this loss, and how far his sense of loss could go.
   
    From this I knew I had to give Cal something that he needs to do in order to cope with this loss (much like what I was doing in preparing this screenplay). I chose to give him a running compulsion. This allowed me to use something I actually had experience with and apply it to this character. I had started doing track and field my freshman year in high school and by my sophomore year had added cross country to my list of extra-curricular activities. After graduating high school I had maintained exercise and found myself to be as healthy as I ever had been. However, there was a negative side to that. During 2005 my uncle had moved in with my family, opening up old wounds from his childhood relationship with my mother, who was depressed and drinking. Life at home became unbearable at times and I would frequently go out on runs, one, to just get away from home, and two, it was a form of release. This same thing came up in 2008 when my parents first discussed separating from each other, leading to their ultimate divorce in 2009. I found myself unable to deal with it at times and once again did my best to get away from home as much as I could, which included going and working out everyday. I had a lot of anger and hostility that grew during this time both towards my parents and about feeling lost in my life in general. I would release that anger and frustration through going out and running. From that I developed this character Cal who after losing the love of his life began running because it was one of the only ways he can find release to deal with his sadness and loss.

    In these two regards you could say this film has more of myself in it than any other film I have produced to this time. But I wanted this film to be about more than just a man dealing with the pain of losing someone he loves. I wanted there to be something deeper about and, obviously, I needed to find a resolution to the story. I knew right away this was not going to be a film where everything could be wrapped up with a bow when all was said and done. No matter what happened this loss was always going to be with him. So what I felt would be the best resolution was that there was going to need to be a support system of some kind for this man, who upon the opening of the film has disassociated himself with practically everyone he knows. He needed some support and he needed to at least begin to make peace with what happened to his girlfriend. I wanted there to be a mystery to this film as far as what happened to Cal’s girlfriend in this mall shooting. I did not want the viewer to know how she happened because that was necessary for Cal’s character, who refused to hear any details about the shooting for fear that he would not be able to handle them. However, it was still necessary for me to decide what really did happen to his deceased girlfriend so that revelation could be made in the end of the film. On top of that, the way she died had to be something then that he could handle. That was a key issue I needed to address in structuring this film.

    In close proximity to the shooting at Clackamas Town Center and even the theatre shooting that happened in Aurora, Colorado during the summer of 2012 a robbery occurred at the theatre I worked at. I was not at work that day but again, the potential for violence had literally moved into my place of work. Right after that occurred and around the time I was first putting together The Runner I had an incredibly vivid dream wherein a man broke into the theatre where I worked with a large firearm. As the chaos was beginning I took notice of a young blond-haired girl, probably around four years of age, just standing by herself on the edge of the lobby. I looked up at the man with the gun who turned and his eyes locked on that girl. By impulse, I took off running towards this little girl and dived right in front of her, shielding her from any gunfire that might occur. Right after that occurred the dream seemed to fade off and I don’t know if any gunfire occurred or what happened from there, but I do remember the feeling that struck me as I was running towards this girl. I thought to myself, “I’m 27-years old. I’m still young and I hope to live much longer.” But then there was this small child there who hadn’t had the chance to experience what I had. This little girl hadn’t experienced getting her driver’s license, going to prom, making it to college, finding a career and so on. With that thought in mind I felt required to step in front of this girl and take whatever bullets were fired.

    In thinking about that feeling and that whole idea of taking a bullet for someone else I started to think that would be such a wonderful thing to apply to Cal’s dead girlfriend. In taking my experience and applying it to Karen (the name of Cal’s girlfriend) suddenly there’s a change in the whole mood of the film. In discovering at the films conclusion that Karen’s mysterious death was not a random chance shooting of a stranger but rather the actions of a heroic woman shielding a child from premature death there would be such a catharsis in that experience. But more than anything else, in this film where we experience Cal, a likable young man who we feel great sympathy for because of his loss, and we see him lost in pain throughout the film we discover that his greatest fear, as is often the case in real life, is not the reality of what happened.

    During this period of creative flow, a beginning, a middle and an end coming together I discovered the final piece of the puzzle. I knew I did not want this to be a one-person film even though the focus of the piece was on this one man. There had to be others there. In addition to adding the small role of a counselor, who Cal sees so that he has someone to talk to who is not emotionally involved like his family and friends would be, I added the role of a young woman named Maggie. I did not merely add her so as to stick another character in the film, but I had come up with another twist to include to the story, which would also add to the overall catharsis of the film’s conclusion. If I was to make the death of Karen come as the result of shielding a little girl from being shot, what if the mother of that little girl were to become part of the story. So in entered Maggie, a girl with a troubled, imperfect past who also took to daily runs like Cal so as to release and feel better about her life. Again, with this knowledge as to how Karen died not being revealed until the conclusion of the film we experience the connection between Cal and Maggie begin from a chance encounter and then we see it develop into a close friendship, and through all of it he has no clue of this connection he has to her and her daughter.

    The focus of the film begins on Cal and the isolated life in which he lives and then, through meeting Maggie, who is a spritely, outgoing young woman, he finds a position where he can open up to someone who doesn’t know him and is not going to force himself to talk about anything he doesn’t want to talk about. As their bond grows he opens up more and more. Having been there with her daughter when the shooting occurred and then learning that Cal’s girlfriend had died in the shooting, Maggie becomes intrigued, especially in knowing a woman was killed shielding her daughter. Researching the case she discovers that Karen and the woman who protected her daughter were one and the same. Therefore, going into the films final climactic moments not only are we driven by the emotions of Cal, but we find our focus swayed in part to Maggie. We see her become more and more emotionally overcome, knowing the truth and not knowing how to get Cal to talk about it, which he is completely unwilling to discuss the case. Then ultimately discovers a solution: have her daughter tell Cal. It’s easy to push off an adult who wants to discuss something but when a small child wants to discuss something with you, you are more apt to listen whether you want to or not.

    This requires us to meet Maggie’s daughter, Emily, at the conclusion of the film. This made for the first time ever in which I had to find a child actor for my film. Such was an interesting experience and, being novice to the whole idea, filled me with lots of concerns out of the gate. First off, I knew finding a child actor for a small independent film would obviously require me to work through the parent of that actress and I had heard so many stories about crazy parents trying to push their kids into success in show business. On top of that I knew I had to be as honest and legitimate as I could in posting an add for an independent film looking for a child actress, especially considering the fact that I was posting through Craigslist, and you never know what kind of nutcases are going to stumble onto there. But when all is said and done it was a remarkably simple process. I found a 10-year old girl named Lana to play the character of Emily and was able to work with and chat with her mother, who was very positive about the idea of her daughter being in a film but, in obviously being a moderately professional woman, was able to cary on a coherent conversation with me about how much time it would take, scheduling, when the shooting would occur and so on. Lana ended up being a joy to work with. She was full of positive energy and she performed the character even better than I expected when I first started looking for a child actress. One can see both the concern, energy and lack of understanding for what really happened in her portrayal. I was incredibly happy with the way things had turned out.

    This concluding scene was shot in just a little over an hour as scheduling was incredibly tight with my performers and after that day, which was a Sunday evening, I was going to lose the girl I had in the role of Maggie for at least three weeks, and likely more. We managed to just barely get it done while there was still enough light. It was a wild weekend in mid-September. I had first decided to actually shoot The Runner near the end of July and spend much of August organizing the film and trying to get it prepared to shoot. I had wanted my friend Jeffrey to play the lead of Cal, who had played the lead in another film I had shot several months before (in The Way We Are). However, when we met up to discuss the film, after he had expressed strong interest, he was already prepped to go to the east coast on other work for a short period of time. He was initially going to come home around the start of September, but his stay was elongated and I knew I was going to have to find another actor. Weather in Oregon often takes a quick turn once September turns over to October and Jeffrey wasn’t going to be home until the end of September. With all of the exteriors to be shot I knew I couldn’t wait and then risk having the rainy weather role in. The actor I did find, Bjorn, was actually someone I had responded to when I initially posted looking for an actor for the role, but never heard back from him. After I found that Jeffrey was not going to be available I reposted looking for an actor and Bjorn responded again. This time my response to him made it through and we met. After meeting up I found that he was friends and had studied acting with several others I knew. We spoke for almost two hours and when all was said and done I knew I’d found a good fit for the role.

    I had cast the role of Maggie over a month before, while I was still in the workings to get Jeffrey in the film. And in between I cast the roles of Emily and the role of the Counselor, which was another small but highly important role in the film. It was nearly the end of August when I finally had my casting complete and then I found another problem arose. Nicole, who was playing the role of Maggie was, again, going to have several weeks where she was not going to be available. Sunday, September 8th, was the last day she was going to be available probably until October, when again the rainy weather was likely going to begin. With September already beginning and having to work with the availabilities of my two actors as well as my child actor, who had very tight availability, we got our first day scheduled for Thursday, September 5th. The initial schedule had us getting a few scenes done that day and then having a long shooting day on Friday. Saturday was up in the air so I did not schedule anything. And then there was Sunday wherein Nicole and I would meet up early to shoot any parts of the film with just her and then meet up with Bjorn and Lana to shoot that concluding scene. It looked like we were going to cram over half the shoot into these three days but after squeezing our Thursday shoot in through a few sprinkles it began to pour, and it poured the rest of the day.

    Knowing Friday the 6th was going to be our busiest day of filming I must have woke up fifteen or twenty times in the middle of the night, every time listening for the sounds of rain hitting my window. Even waking up early the rain had been going on all night and hadn’t stopped for over fifteen hours. It was 8 a.m. and we were scheduled to start shooting at 10 a.m. Logic said we needed to postpone and I had to hope for the best on Saturday. Fortunately this worked out and we were able to reschedule for that day. What was most annoying was within five minutes after we canceled on Friday the rain stopped and it was cloudy but dry the rest of the day. Nevertheless we held off and Saturday ended up being a peasant and sunny day. We fought through an 8-hour shooting day in which we mostly shot down by Oaks Bottom before finishing off shooting a significant sequence in the film at Tryon Creek State Park in northern Lake Oswego.

    Every day magically fit within our restrictions of shooting. On Thursday we had two major scenes and a short one set to shoot in Sellwood. We had until 3 p.m. before Nicole had to leave and we finished at 2:45. On Saturday she was only available until 4 p.m. and we finished around 4:10, still leaving her time to get to her later appointments that day. And finally, on Sunday, I met up with Nicole around 1:30 knowing we had to meet again in Sellwood to shoot the Emily scene by 5 p.m. to get that done before the sun went down and conditions got too dark. Nicole and I managed to get all of her shots finished and we arrived in Sellwood at 5:15, just barely able to shoot the Emily sequence before the sun disappeared behind the west hills. Despite all of the restrictions and difficulty in scheduling, we got everything we needed to shoot with the Maggie character finished and all we had left were two more days to shoot the remaining scenes and sequences with just Cal’s character. After this busy weekend Cal and I met up on Tuesday the 10th. Despite meeting up early at 8 a.m. it was one of those hot September days where we were pushing 90 degrees before noontime. Such was fine for me, but the whole focus of the day was shooting scenes where the Cal character was running. Therefore, for over six hours that day I had Bjorn running all over Oaks Bottom and a little at Mary S. Young State Park in West Linn during that time. But he kept going and I think he enjoyed the energy and the action of the shoot.

    The following we we had a short shoot in which we shot the four scenes that included the Counselor character. That shoot was incredibly simple and fluent. It only was four pages of script or so and we shot through it in about two and a half hours. The last day of shooting, which ended up being postponed for almost a month after all these other shooting days due to scheduling conflicts, took place at the home of a co-worker of mine who was kind enough to open up his home to shoot the sequences of Cal while he was at home. This shoot was again only a few pages and was fairly fluent, being taken care of in about three hours. And with that, being late October, the shooting of The Runner had finally been completed.

    All that was really left for me to take care of was some foley audio. I had to record a collection of running sounds to fit into certain moments of the film wherein matching audio had not been captured. To my surprise, because I simply went out alone with my sound mixer and recorded what I thought would match with those moments that needed ADR audio, the audio I captured was fairly easy to cut in with the footage used. This was also the first film I shot in which I hired someone to compose a soundtrack for the film. To this point I had just been using royalty free music. But this was one of the largest film projects I had ever produced and I knew I wanted an original score for it. I was pleased to see that in the first two days after posting an add I received fifteen responses. But I quickly decided where I wanted to go, going with a composer named Trevor Smith. My greatest concern was hiring on a composer who would provide me with what I would call a “droning soundtrack”. By this description I am referencing those who produce music that is the same bland overtones over and over again without any highs or lows or any real melody. Lots of people think they’re composers but make music with no feel. When I checked Trevor’s link to his website one of the first things I noticed was that he had a mix of different types of music. He had upbeat, electric music on there, guitar tracks, piano tracks, driven percussion tracks. Just seeing that he had a diverse collection of music up there made me feel that if I posed to him the style of music I was going for he would be able to put it together and put it together in a way that would work well for me.

    When we met Trevor had already done a practice track that he allowed me to listen to and, while I ultimately did not use it in the film, it was a strong track and I could already see the vision of a man running on a trail with it. I could tell that Trevor and I were not going to have any problems communicating and understanding what type of music would work best for various sequences in the film. I provided him with a copy of the full script with notations at different moments and scenes and the types of music that I wanted for those various sequences. The communication between us was crystal clear and his music was a fantastic addition to the film. And when all is said and done it was a great feeling to watch this film and know that the music that accompanied it was not just some conglomerate of tracks that I had downloaded from various places, music that was never done specifically to go with what I had created. In this case, the tracks had been done specifically for the film and I feel that connection is clear with the way the music accompanies the emotion and the actions that took place. I have brought Trevor back on to produce the soundtrack for my upcoming film My Inspiration. This upcoming film production will be an incredibly important one for me in terms of how important and unique the story is for me and in moving forward in my film career. I have already been spending in excess of two months working on and preparing the film for beginning production around the start of May and in controlling a film of this magnitude I know that I am going to need reliable people assisting me. I already h ave that with my lead actors and knowing that I could have a rather smooth working process with my soundtrack composer I am more than happy to have Trevor on working with me again.

    Editing the film, that final piece of the piece, was a stressful journey and there are still various little things in the final cut that I have produced which, in watching over it again, I will probably make even further adjustments on. The only real issue is a few color problems. Some shots were just captured in a certain light wherein the saturation of one color was slightly too strong and thus something very difficult to adjust and make look right. But in the process of editing, cutting together the sound was stressful in some places, but getting that color to work out was the largest pain of all. Before producing a current final cut I had produced four cuts before it with the sole purpose of using them to go back through and fix every little problem I could find. I found the little edit problems and the sound problems, but color correction was the greatest pain. I would correct something just a little too far in the other direction or oversaturate one clip just a little bit. Color correction is a disciplined and time consuming practice and sometimes you just have to go back over and over to make sure it’s right. I know such with be the case for My Inspiration when I begin cutting that piece together. When all was said and done I had my longest legitimate film to date, running just a few seconds shy of forty-five minutes (qualifying it as a “feature length” film even though I still consider it to be more of a long short film).

    Working around other projects, the holidays and so on it was a long time in cutting this film together. I was into February of this year before I finally got a final cut done and was able to start sending it out to those who had helped me work on it. While I think it was successful and achieved what I was going for, I still watch it and know I can do better, which is a good sensation to have without saying that this film was a waste of time or anything like that. But I don’t think I could say it’s quite my best work. I say this because those who have seen it and gotten back in touch with me have said just the opposite. Trevor was the first to contact me and he told me the film was beautiful and he has used the film to help promote his soundtrack for it, which I think is great. Kellie, who played the Counselor in the film, also said the film was great and that she loved the beautiful way in which I chose to cut everything together. She told me it was absolutely something I should put into film festivals and I am still considering it, but for right now my focus is 100% on getting My Inspiration off the ground. Perhaps I will do more with The Runner in the near future, but for now I will let it lie for a little while until I can honestly devote the time and energy to get it more attention. It was a fun, fulfilling and uplifting experience and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. I’m glad I finally found the push to shoot it after writing it and letting it sit on a shelf for several months.      

   In one of the largest film productions I have put together, as of now, The Runner actually has a much deeper personal connection for me. I started writing the script in January, 2013 and completed it rather quickly. While many ideas just suddenly come to me in a spark and I expand from there, this piece really began as a coping mechanism, if I can put it that way. It was really a painful experience. To understand that we need to track back to the early morning hours of December 20, 2011. There was a girl who I had befriended at the work place in the spring of 2011 and we had begun talking on the phone a lot with each other in early December and it was on this night of the 20th that we both expressed that we had deep feelings for each other. What ensued were the greatest four months of my life, being madly in love with someone who appreciated me more than I could ever imagine. However, in the spring of 2012 I hit that wall where suddenly I got lost in life. I was disenchanted with my job, I wasn’t sure how serious I was about making films anymore. Everything outside of the girl I was with was coming apart and I slipped into a terrible depression for about four weeks, during which I convinced myself that these feelings were nerves about my relationship and we broke up while I was in the midst of this depression.

FILM TESTIMONIAL - "I Love You, I Love You" (July, 2013)

    Of all the works I have done I believe, at least to date, this film has the strongest impact on me, at least emotionally. In the dramatic or emotionally driven projects I have produced I feel that connection to the material, but it always feels halved to me in comparison to this one. This is the only film I’ve made that honestly has pushed me to the brink of tears. At the same time, this film almost never happened. It was a sudden thought in my mind that told me to take the concept of another piece I had done and rework it.

    Back in 2010 I believe it was, back when I was still shooting things with a $229 home movie camera that couldn’t even widescreen properly, I got a suddenly bug to shoot a film short. It ran about ten minutes and, honestly, could’ve been done in half that time. But the idea suddenly came to me about a young man who is very successful and caught up in the work that he does, so much so that he is blind to much of what has gone on around him outside of work. Not exactly a new concept, but the idea as to how what he was missing would become clear is what drove me. The idea of the film was for a girl, who goes unseen in the film, who is in love with him finally decided to tell him, but she does it subtly by writing a love poem and claiming it is for a class she is taking. Realizing how intelligent the lead character is, she claims that she gave it to him to proofread, but upon reading it several times it finally hits him that these words of love are meant for him. The poem is very simple, something anyone can understand, and the last half of the film follows the lead as he tries to understand his feelings and see if they are the same. The last shot is him opening his door when she comes knocking to “take the poem back”. The door opens, at night, and thus opens into darkness and everything cuts to black.

    The film was an interesting idea, but also was a spontaneous project. There was no preplanning or shot listing. I just set up the camera and got several angles of me engaging in whatever the lead was going through. There were a few interesting shot ideas but it was just a thrown together thing so as for me to take an idea I had and turn it into something real. But the overall concept was still rather bland. It was just a guy in his room discovering something about himself. The blandness, along with the lack of preplanning, the poor video quality and the fact that I was playing the leading (and only) role in the film obviously led to it suffering terribly. But I didn’t really care because I had simply done it for fun. It was a short while, maybe six months or so, later that I wrote another short piece, maybe ten pages, about a man who suffers a break up from the love of his life, who is leaving him for another man. An underlying theme of the film was that she would have a car accident after the other man never shows and while she is on her way to beg forgiveness for her actions. She returns home and tries to communicate with him but he cannot hear her and the whole question arises as to whether she is dead or not. We find out in the end that she is not. Once again there was an interesting idea there, but there was something too predictable about it. It had that It’s a Wonderful Life vibe to me, that has been stolen and reused by so many movies; the idea of making a mistake and then when you go to rectify things nobody sees you or knows you. Life becomes a nightmare until the end when everything goes back to the way it was in the beginning, how it should be. But as I was pondering taking up the idea for the first I Love You, I Love You again, because I just loved that idea so much, I knew I had to upgrade the whole thing and actually conceive a script and shot list the piece. So as I was considering how to expand on the original story, the idea from this other script crept in and I started pondering that mystery of not knowing whether or not a character is dead. Taking the essence of that idea, I applied it to the lead in my newer version of I Love You, I Love You and it completely revitalized the whole production. It gave it that arc and that attraction to keep you watching because of the emotional connection as much as the mystery of it.

    In producing this film, which ran a little over twelve minutes, I had shot listed 208 total shots for the film. This was my first effort into really delving into having a mix of shots. It was one of my goals to make the visual constantly change and I wanted to use the same shots as little as possible, unless it was pertinent at a particular moment. I had been so disappointed with the predictable and redundant cinematography of The Morning After and at the same time was so taken with the array of shots I had captured and used in The Starlet that I felt very compelled to do something that complimented that mixture of different shots. While I cut maybe some twenty shots while I was filming this new piece, it was an incredibly quick and effective shoot. At the same time, this was one of those practice pieces where I was testing myself in new ways I hadn’t really reached for in the past. There was no crew. It was just myself and my two actors. It was also early July and I remember that first day we jumped into filming early because even by 11 a.m. it was pushing ninety degrees outside (yes, it gets warm in Oregon too).

    The shooting of I Love You, I Love You was an interesting journey as well because in the midst of the film, and I knew I was going to cut it this way, there are lots of moments of cutting back and forth between the characters. Furthermore, the film starts in the middle of the story, gets you almost to the end and then jumps back to the beginning before leading us back to the end again. So there is a lot of motion for such a short film and I knew it would have to be shot just right, with no mistakes, for a viewer to watch it and understand what place of the story they were in. As far as a chronological description of the revamped version of this film, just like in the first, the female lead, Natalie, writes a poem to the hustling and bustling love of her life, Evan. When he is not home she attaches the poem to his door and when he arrives home from a business trip a few days later he discovers it. One of the few identical aspects of this film to the original is that I used the exact same poem in both films. Seeing Natalie’s claim that she wanted him to read it to proofread it, Evan takes some time to look the poem over, wherein he discovers that this is a poem written for him. What the viewer doesn’t know at this time is that Natalie died in a car accident (tying back to that other script I wrote) right after attaching the poem to his door. So as he reads the poem we see Natalie lingering around him and we are not quite sure what it means.

    Natalie is also seen dressed two different ways. In some scenes she is wearing a purple striped shirt, which represents moments in her life when she was still alive. In this shirt then we see her as she’s delivering the note to Evan’s place and when the car accident occurs. In other sequences we see her in her spiritual form, meaning she has already died. For these sequences I went with the classic spirit/angel concept of a white shirt. This allows one to separate which Natalie is there in various scenes. She wears the white shirt as she watches Evan reading the poem as she is dead by then and, of course, in the ending when the two come together for the last time, she is in that white shirt. After Evan realizes that he feels the same for Natalie, but that she is gone, he is overcome by the grief considering how long they had known each other and how much time they had to cultivate a relationship and he never pulled through because he was too busy to see what was right in front of him. He then goes to a gazebo, one of their favorite places to hang out and speaks to Natalie. She is in her white shirt so she is not really there, although the viewer is not able to put the pieces together of that yet. Then, after speaking briefly, Evan tells her that he wishes he could look into her eyes and say he loves her too, but he can’t because she’s not there. Then a reveal shot from the side and behind exposes that he is there alone.

    From this moment he sits and begins comprising his own “I Love You, I Love You” poem for Natalie. As he writes and becomes more emotionally broken down we experience the events that surrounding Natalie’s car accident and his discovering of the poem on his door afterward. He snaps, breaks down and chucks his poem into the ground, feeling it’s pointless because Natalie isn’t there to read it. But as he sits there crying and the poem sits there mangled up, the spirit of Natalie returns, approaching Evan and picks up the wrinkled poem and reading it over. She sees the words and knows that his feelings are the same. She then steps up to Evan, revealing herself, and in the midst of his efforts to apologize to her she shushes him and, as she holds his written work up to him, simply says, “We know everything we need to know.” The purpose of this statement is fairly clear; that despite the fact that in the realm of our world they are no longer together they both know that they have true love for each other and that is something that will never be taken away. Natalie then walks away and, after giving Evan one last look, vanishes down a long pathway, leaving Evan there alone looking out after her.

    I watch this film and, in particular at the end, I always get emotionally choked up by in, which makes me happy because it’s always a positive when you can be that effected by your own work. I feel we live in a world now a days where we’re so expected to be humble about our efforts that we overdo it and many creative minds refuse to accept the quality of the work they do. But part of the creative venture and our ability to continue at it and get better as we go along is to appreciate the work we’ve done. Don’t take the mistakes we made and use them as an excuse to tear ourselves down, as though we are perfect beings in the first place, but to use them as a remembrance for things not to do in the future. In every film project I produce there are mistakes made and things I find that I know I will address differently in later works. Because of this, the number of mistakes I make in the films I have produced have become less and less.

    In shooting this piece, I managed to break it out over two days and we got the whole thing shot in about ten hours, we were moving that effectively. In one day we shot pretty much everything that happened at the gazebo which, when you watch the film doesn’t seem like much but you see that throughout the piece keeps returning there so there was actually quite a bit to shoot. The second day was everything else, which included the scene where Evan reads the poem and a few sequences that take place outside Evan’s house, which include Natalie placing the poem there and his discovery of it. So shooting was relatively easy. Editing the piece was a whole other story all together. I believe it was almost two months after before I finally got the whole thing finished. And part of that was becoming involved in other projects. I had been hired on as a DP for another short independent film and was even out of town in Seattle for a week as the best man in my friend’s wedding. So there were scheduling conflicts, but outside of that, when I took down a listing of all the shots I had captured it was over ten pages of college ruled paper because I had made up so many shots. Taking that large collection of shots I then had to separate them out based on what moments in the film they were going to be used. This was important seeing as the film goes back and forth so much. If I had just edited based on the initial order in which I downloaded clips I would have been bobbing back and forth in my list of clips while editing it probably would’ve taken an extra month to get it all do. So a key time saver for you editors out there: If you have a lot of shots, break them down and categorize there! You’ve save time and, perhaps, a little bit of your sanity.

    This film was a great test for me in another way. When I had first launched into films, namely the film Second Chances I worked on in 2009, the film was a “talker”. It was almost all just people standing around talking about things. I was still somewhat of a novice editor and the sequences in that film just dragged on. I was one of those early filmmakers who wanted to keep everything in there. If someone needed to think about an answer to something I gave them eight or ten seconds of silence to do that, and these scenes just droned on. Even in The Way We Are, which I shot three years later, I cut about three and a half minutes out because the only real critique I got was that it dragged a little early on. And while I left many of the elongated shots from early in the film in, I did cut things down and it was still clear that I needed to continue in working on my ability for timing and to keep shots and sequences from becoming overly long. However, when one engages in practices such as this it is always easy to overcompensate and begin cutting scenes too closely. This is a critical error as well because it can make things look like they’re happening too quickly. When high schools and kids just screwing around making little films for fun they tend to make this mistake. When cutting between shots and people talking, the moment one finishes they cut the film and start the clip for the next person right when they start talking. This, of course, makes it look like people are constantly talking right on top of each other, which is not how people naturally converse. Even if we are engaged in a stirring commentary and really bouncing back and forth with each other, we still at least need that split second to ponder before we leap in and react to the words of someone else.

    I Love You, I Love You provided a perfect chance to work my skills on this issue of timing with how much the film goes back and forth. And at certain moments the pace with which the film goes back and forth between Evan and Natalie increases and then decreases. There is also a good deal of background music in the film and the cutting of the film connects with that music so in some places the editing had to been in connection with that as well. The soundtrack of the film is actually one audio track, a royalty free track, that ran some twenty-one minutes. The song was essentially a mix of tracks run together, so it was like five or six tracks that were run together to make one. It was predominantly a piano track and it just had such a simple melancholic nature to it that I thought it would work. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked out as well as it did.

    After cutting the film together I was fairly happy with it, but at the same time I felt somewhat disappointed. I had that ‘It’s good, but it could’ve been better’ attitude about it, which is an attitude lots of us have about our work, especially initially. When I spoke to the girl who played Natalie, who I worked with on another short project about a month later, I think she was surprised to see how emotionally charged it was. Her response was, “It was really good, I just wasn’t expecting it to end up like that.” I think she felt it was going to be a more linear storyline and that the ending wasn’t going to be as sad. My friend Carl, who played the lead of Evan, and who also played the lead in The Morning After, liked the film enough that right after he reworked his personal website, when he moved down to Los Angeles to continue his acting/modeling career down there, he included the link for the film on there as a piece of work he had been in. He had been in lots of plays, films and commercials up in Portland and there were only a few pieces that he had linked there. So obviously he liked the piece as well. And over time, after watching it a few more times my appeal towards the film has grown and grown over time and it’s now one of my favorites as far as the short films I have produced.

    This would be the last dramatic film I produced before shooting a longer film titled The Runner, which I had jumped into work on within days of finishing shooting I Love You, I Love You. Because it was longer, it took much longer to organize and I was hoping to cast my friend Jeffrey in the lead role but he ended up working on the east coast for several months and I had to go with someone else. I definitely think I Love You, I Love You was the first film that solidified in my mind that as far as my favorite genre to work in would be the drama genre. It helped push me forward in wanting to make The Runner, which was a script I wrote and really liked, but never knew when I would actually want to shoot it. And now I am working on what will hopefully be my masterpiece, at least to this point, a feature length film titled My Inspiration. I have been preparing for production on that film since almost the beginning of the year and am planning on beginning production on at the beginning of May this year. As with The Runner, I had previously been planning on shooting My Inspiration a while back and had shelved it, not knowing when I would bring it about again. But just as well, I have found myself pulling that script back up and realizing that I need to shoot this film and create another powerful piece of dramatic work.

FILM TESTIMONIAL - "The Starlet" (June, 2013)

    If I was to say I have a “fan favorite” film it would probably be this one. This is one of those films that people have talked to me about of whom I didn’t even realize they knew this film existed. I shot this piece as a final project for a revolutionary film class I took in the spring of 2013. I had taken many classes in the past with this same professor and I knew we would always have a creative final project at the end of the term. This was the third term in a row I had taken a class with her and in the fall term the video I made was annoying to put it lightly. The next term I had just recently purchased my own DSLR camera and I shot a parody on the characters Brutus and Cassius from The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. That video was a full little piece of work but at the same time it was just a simple project and mostly done for fun so there wasn’t very much appeal to it as far as I was concerned. After these two outputs I really wanted to create something strong for this final class.

    During the early months of 2011 I went on a bit of a silent film-making binge, shooting about twelve or so short silent films, mostly of the slapstick comedic nature. But I did make one foray into a serious silent work. It was this film I called The Starlet. The idea follows a young, idealistic singing superstar who is loved the world over and is a household name in most cases, but in her personal life she is isolated and miserable. The film begins on her writing a break up letter to her boyfriend, another soul whose appeal for her is more because of what she is rather than who she is. She then takes off not knowing where to go, but finds herself stumbling onto an old church. Unknown to her, there is a worker inside who is also dealing with heartache after the love of his life left him a similar break up letter. Upon entering the church curiously she finds herself up in the sanctuary where she sees a small line of microphones and music stands, there for the churches choir. She steps to the head and grabs one of the mics. Standing there alone she feels more appreciation than she ever did in front of those crowds of hundreds of thousands of fans. Feeling this, she breaks down crying, capturing the attention of the worker there. The two meet and discover that despite her celebrity and his simple life, the fact that their worlds could not be anymore different, they find this connection in their loss.

    The only real deviation in my new version from the first one is that the lead starlet, named Victoria, finds the strength to begin singing once she steps up to a mic and it is after her performance that the worker, named Shawn in the first version and Eric in the later one, makes his appearance and the two discover that they have a connection together. In this newer version I wanted it to become more clear as to the heartache and disconnect that Victoria feels. Therefore, in the new version she steps up to the mic and is so disheartened that she cannot sing a word. In her time of duress Eric makes his arrival and the two find their connection together. At the conclusion of the piece Eric asks Victoria if she will sing for him. She is dismissive at first but remembers that she is a singer at heart, no matter how many fans she is. In the final moments we see a more lively Victoria step up to the mic in front of her audience of one and prepares to belt out a performance when things cut to black. 

    The only solid requirement for this class project was it had to be connected in some way to one of the films we watched in class. During the first two weeks we discussed the origin of film as well as the period of silent film. During that second week we watched the 1927 classic Metropolis and more near the middle of the term we watched the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal. I combined the silent style of Metropolis along with a discussion we had in class about The Seventh Seal and the notion that every shot in the film seemed to be meticulously structured and structured a short silent film wherein every shot I listed was specifically structured in a dynamic way. To no surprise it quickly became one of my favorites after it was shot primarily because of the cinematic structure of the whole thing.

    After shooting this film once back in 2011 I had already been dabbling with remaking the film. The idea had always been interesting to me and I definitely felt shooting it with an inferior camera did not do it justice. This film class provided a great opportunity to pursue that chance. Using my DSLR I was able to shoot a much more clear production which I chose to alter into a black and white film, obviously, but I did not want to try and age the film. I felt it would create an element of superficiality to the film since special effects in computer editing programs as far as trying to make a film look aged and older often only look somewhat realistic but more often than not come away looking marginally fake. I thus kept the quality of the film strong and let the soundtrack I used and the lack of natural sound to push its silent stature.

    As mentioned above, I wanted to create a very meticulous shot list wherein every shot had significance and thus I would seldom use the same shot more than once but rather specific shots were created to capture very specific moments in the film. There were no coverage shots in this film, but rather every shot I captured was intended to cover one specific moment or period in the film. Rarely did I have a shot that exceeded twenty seconds or so. This shot structure made for a much more realistic and professional looking production from a strictly cinematic approach. If one watched a high grade Hollywood film they will notice seldom is the same shot used more than once unless the setting is a stagnant one, such as a collection of people sitting at a table talking. Over the shoulder, frontal and two-shot type scenarios, just to name a few, will probably be used multiple times in cutting together a scene where all the action is in one location and the characters are not moving around.

    Coming to this understanding, the structure of the shot list in this film was a great departure for me and forever changed the way I viewed producing a shot list and creating the vision for a film in one’s mind. I feel when people first get into film and shooting production they think far too systematically. I’ve even worked with people who have been involved in film much longer than I am they are still so focused on the standard concept of getting wide shots, medium shots and close up shots and also making sure to get lots of coverage. This makes for rather bland productions wherein various different scenes we are subjected to a mix of only three or four different shots. Then cutaways are captured often to prevent a scene from becoming too stalemated from what is already known to me a small collection of primary shots. Therefore these cutaways are often captured with the purpose of preventing stagnation instead of being conceived as being just as important as these primary shots. Often then, in particular when one watches independent or student productions when a cutaway is interjected it looks forced in there or it has a jarring effect on the viewer that just looks artificial.

    It’s convenient to look at film as just a mix of wide, medium and close up shots with lots of coverage. You get different distances and you get enough film to know that when editing comes to pass you will have enough to cut together each individual scene. It also consumes time filming this way, but if you really want a quality production that stands out over others you have to be willing to put in that extra time. Cutaways need to be conceived with every bit as much attention as any major shot. Not only that, but you need to know exactly when it is going to be inserted so as to recognize how that cutaway should be captured in terms of being a close shot or long shot, from above, below, side-to-side and so on. Each shot you edit needs to be able to flow fluently from one into the next and such just doesn’t happen that often with the old three-distance shot set-up. It’s a good route to use when you’re first beginning but your work is just going to look like every novice effort of every novice artist if you always continue in that direction without deviating and finding your own style. This was the first film that really forged that change in me in that for such a project I completely abandoned that traditional set up. And when all was said and done The Starlet had a more polished and professional look than anything I had done before it, and when I first watched it I couldn’t figure out exactly what it was about this film that made it look so different.

    I was also very lucky in terms of the talent I managed to bring in for a project that I had roughly two weeks to throw together. For the lead role of Victoria I managed to get an actress named Cari who had just returned from college on the east coast after graduating with a major focus in the area of theatre acting. I had no idea how good she would be, and I didn’t have the time to audition and be picky (especially since I was already working endlessly on another major term project during that time as well) but seeing she had just finished school majoring in theatre I was prepared and comfortable taking the chance. From the first shot I knew I had found the right fit for the role. Cari had a great look for black and white film, having very light white-colored skin and dark hair which she curled slightly for the shoot. She also wore a black dress which, along with her hair, helped contrast well with her skin tone. Every single shot of her turned out fantastic, there was literally not a single bad shot. She was a vision on camera.

    There was even a short sequence wherein, while walking from her home to the church where she met Eric she stumbled onto a fan who did exactly as expected, running up to her and begging for an autograph. Fortunately on the second day of shooting Cari brought along her sister who was able to step in briefly and take on the role for that.

    And finally my future buddy Josh came in to play the role of Eric. I knew right away that we would get along well and even with the shortness of the shoot we became friends rather quickly. Josh was a perfect fit for the saddened Eric, performing as a counterbalance to Victoria. I would later go on to work as a DP on a piece Josh wrote later and now I have him in line to play the lead in my upcoming film My Inspiration. So we’ve managed to go on and do much more together.

    Whereas the other major project I was working on for that term was one nightmare after another, shooting and cutting together The Starlet was a piece of cake. And even with the piece only halfway edited I found myself going back and watching through what I had edited so far because there was such an aura of beautiful about it. It almost psyched me out when the time came to shoot the second half of the film on the second day, but I kept it together and the second day of shooting was just as good as the first. The film cut together perfectly and even the five different audio tracks I used for music blended together well and fit in with the overall length of the film. Everything just came together. I don’t think I’ve ever had a film that flowed together so well and was also so simple and such a joy to cut together. And I got an A on it when I finally presented it to the class so obviously everyone in there liked it as well.

    In the aftermath, with how popular it was among people I had worked on it with, I have often used The Starlet as a link to share with new talent I wish to work with who want to see examples of my prior work. Even while trying to get a professional actress from Los Angeles to take on a small role in a later film project I was shooting, which sadly didn’t work out due to scheduling problems, she was impressed by the project and was willing to leap into my other project. Still I often present this film when people want to see examples of my previous work because I think it’s a fantastic example as to my capabilities in the realm of cinematography, an area that I am only trying to become better and better at. The film certainly had an effect on my as far as what I was able to do and made my prospects for the summer and beyond incredibly high. While I had a few ideas that went south and it took me a while to get some projects rolling my next completed film, I Love You, I Love You, was structured in a style that was inspired by the way I shot listed and structured The Starlet, in which I wanted to use a wide variety of different shots and avoid a simplistic wide, medium, close up structure for the sake of a much more visually moving and pleasing piece of work. I have continued to try and structure my work more in this way ever since as well so you could say this film had a remarkable effect on my talent as a film maker and on the productions I have put together since then.

Film can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYCxkxk-jpU

FILM TESTIMONIAL - "The Morning After" (April-June, 2013)

One of the most stressful film experiences of my freaking life! And that said, it was a great experience. I had just purchased my own sound and video equipment so I was finally in a position to do high quality productions and I signed up for a DMC 265 course, advanced digital filmmaking. Much like the course I produced The Way We Are in, the objective of the class was to break up into crews within the class and produce our own films. It was a bizarre first day. First off, I had no idea that we needed a script ready to go on that first day (because I had taken the 264 class in the summer, not in the winter only a couple weeks before when it was offered again, and obviously everyone in that class got the memo - have script ready!). When we split up a bunch of people had obviously decided what crews to be in and I got jammed in with the four or five other people that had no idea who to group up with. We lost someone, gained someone, one of our crew members went to jail the night before we started shooting (and we never saw him again), it was an interesting experience.

    So there we were, complete strangers, and we were throwing around ideas and I suddenly knew I had to come up with something. I had to have something in my arsenal. Out of nowhere a short comedic piece I had written about three years before popped into my head, a short piece I had tried to shot a few times but could never really get anything going on it. The film, once tilted The Day After Last Night, was called The Morning After. Initially others presumed the film revolved around a morning after pill type concept. But the script itself follows a young, uptight character named Max who finds his world turned upside down when he wakes up after a drunken party and finds that he brought a girl home with whom he may or may not have had sex with. The main problem: he’s already in a relationship.

    Now I had been looking forward to this 265 course for a while, but did not know what that course necessarily entailed. I didn’t know if we were working as crews in the class or if we were all striking it out on our own. And when all is said and done I really did wish I had a stronger script at that time to throw at everyone. I had a script for a piece titled The Runner, which I had been working on during the winter and hoped to shoot at the 265 project, but I knew it would be too much to do in a course such as that. The script had its funny moments to be sure, but it had its shortcomings as well and even now it still annoys me that this film was one of the first things that I was involved in that was shown to a large audience because it did not remotely represent my best work. The script all takes place in one place, so it functions more like a one-act play than a film, thus it was a little stagnant. The fact that the dialogue got a little redundant did not help matters there. To put it bluntly, the script was old and thus represented a much more minor dialogical effort on my part.

    But all of that said, what started out as a collection of people thrown together, forced to produce a film together, blossomed into a strong friendship. Being one of the fastest crews to get started on our production in the whole class we were also the group that was having the most fun, going out to dinners and bowling together in addition to filmmaking. So it was a fun experience overall, but as far as getting to work I found myself taking practically the whole project under my shoulders. It wasn’t that my fellow crew members weren’t doing their job or didn’t know how and it wasn’t that I was a possessive jerk, but it was just that at that time I had stronger experience in so many of the key areas we were working in. I had more directing, cinematography, sound and editing experience. For those three months in that course I put about as much work into this film as anyone could. After shooting the whole piece I found that our sound guy hadn’t quite been up to par and in this film with one leading lady and one leading man, the male’s voice came out much stronger and we found it was obvious that his voice was overpowering hers. This forced us to completely ADR all of her dialogue to bring her up to his level because if we had just brought up her audio levels the background hiss difference would have been obvious. However, after engaging in a four-hour ADR session with her we had a new problem: now her dialogue was more crisp than our leading man. His audio had become inferior. I ended up doing a three and a half hour ADR session with him. And to round everything out, I had to also do an hour and a half ADR session with the girl who played the lead’s girlfriend, who appears late in the film.

    That was just one of the many headaches I took on because I knew I would get the job done the way it needed to be. By the time all was said and done about 99% of all the sound in the film was ADR’ed and it sadly shows. Even though practically all the voiceovers matched with the character’s mouths it is clear that something is not quite right with their voices. They sound like they’re reading off the script, as they were, but they are obviously not seeing doing so on camera.

    The editing process was ongoing. I practically cut the whole film together and found myself running through the piece several times as there was a slight yellow tint created throughout the house we shot in from the lighting. But when all was said and done we had a viable piece of work, which included me pulling an all-nighter to get a rough cut done for previewing by the class. It was a sold 20+ hours of work and by the time I made it into school at noon the following day for class I was literally shaking and was planning on just turning in the rough cut and going home. But Mr. Professor stopped me right there, telling me I needed to be there to take notes when the class viewed the film. On the verge of passing out all I could think at the time was, “You dick!” But I later realized that he had noticed how much of the grunt work I was doing and I think he was concerned that no one else in my group would have taken down notes so I needed to be there to do that. Now I know my fellow group members would have taken down notes, but at least our teacher’s reasoning for keeping me there was a good one. We viewed it and one of my crew members gave my corpse a ride home.

    It was the Monday before the grand unveiling of our projects at our college’s film festival, which was scheduled for two days later. Monday was “turn the final project in”. I had spent all weekend getting everything finalized and copied off a final as an H.264 file, which we were required to save the final as. Then, Monday morning, I realized suddenly some of the film’s dialogue was a frame off from the film, a small and yet clearly noticeable problem. We had three hours in class on that Monday and I had made all the fixes right before class. The H.264 file I had published the night before only took fifteen minutes to publish. I had never had any problems with publishing in that format. But then, of course, in class publishing in this format once more to turn the absolute final version of the film in the software decided to lag. Every one percent of the film that was published it added another ten minutes to the publishing time. I ended up having to try and download it as an MP4, knowing that format is often crap at best. But it was recommended by Mr. Professor, so I went with it. I then found out later that the MP4 downloaded didn’t work. The audio was completely off.

    Fortunately, we were given an extension. We had to have an H.264 copy to the teacher before 6 p.m. Wednesday night, the time that the film festival began. It was so frustrating because everyone in the class took till the last minute to turn their films in and that’s a regular thing, but I don’t want to be that “regular thing”. If I am going to have to mix in with a crowd being late with a final is not the way in which I want to be blending in. So I had two days. It should’ve been easy. I just started publishing again as an H.264 and let it take it’s several hours to finish and I would have been fine. But, upon arriving at home, I found that midway through this publishing would lock up. Not only as an H.264 file but also trying to download it as an NTSC file, and then a PAL file. This film had just decided to be a total curse. That Tuesday and Wednesday was one of the most stressful times of my life. After all this work, if we didn’t have a viable project to show at the festival we were going to likely fail the class. I then looked back at how much I had taken on and knew inside that this was not going to happen. I literally tried over twenty different ways to try and download the film and all encountered a problem. I literally, out of desperation, dumped the whole project onto my old PC and tried to burn a copy through Microsoft Movie Maker and DVD maker, but in being files from a Mac nothing matched.

    The greatest problem was we were required to turn in the final on a DVD, and I couldn’t because my Mac was nearly brand new and I had just assumed there was DVD burning software on there since I had a DVD drive on it. To that point I hadn’t had a reason to check. So once I finally got my Mac to cooperate and publish an H.264 file this new problem simply negated that old one. It got to be 4 p.m., two hours before the festival, and I had no way to get this thing to burn. I thought we were screwed when I suddenly got through to my buddy Josh, who was going to the festival with me, and he just happened to have purchased a refurbished Mac himself. Because it was refurbished it was an older model from back in the day when they put DVD burner software on there. Like a bat out of hell I made him rush over to pick me up, we booked it to his place and I burned a copy, freaking out every second that the film was burning, just presuming something was going to go wrong here too. But it went through and burned a copy, I checked it and everything was working. I nearly collapsed just from the transition of two days of stress to a suddenly moment of relief and relaxation.

    My friend dropped me off at 5 p.m., we got the disc to our professor and somehow, someway the film got done was shown at the festival. It’s somewhat annoying that I put so much effort into a film that I just really did not care for that much. Just in general, it was one of my weaker efforts both in terms of being a writer and also in the way it was shot. But at the same time it was one of those projects where everything that could go wrong did. And I was astounded that, of the five films that were made in that class ours was easily the second best one. One of the best parts was that our film was packed with sexual innuendo and commentary, as would make sense, and there were so many extremely conservative-looking elderly folks there (I presume to be grandparents of some of the students there). We got laughs where I expected and everything went over pretty well. I’ve found others like the film a lot more than me so maybe I’m just being a jerk to myself. When the festival was over, and each group had the chance to go up on stage and take questions from the audience, we got the most... I presume because of all the sexual content. If nothing more, which the film is not one of my favorites, it proved, at least for me, that I could stick it out a work myself to the core to get the project done when it was due. And any critiques I have about it only helped me on future projects. After having so much ambivalence about the cinematography of The Morning After, I found my next collection of works were much improved and much more back on track. Lessons always learned.

Can be seen on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXy_OuuuCN0

FILM TESTIMONIAL - "The Way We Are" (October-November, 2012)

After the success of my short film “Trapped” I jumped into the next year of school weeks before it even started. I had signed up for the DMC 192 course, which was a portfolio project class wherein I had a full term to produce a piece of work on my own having utilized all that I had learned in the film program. Right away I wanted to revamp a great idea and a mediocre script titled “My Inspiration” (interestingly enough, the major project I am currently working on right now). After adjusting the script and turning it into something much stronger than it had been before. But still I had a long ways to go in terms of making a really solid film production. I had the education, I had the equipment there to check out, but I was still learning how to put it all together into a serious piece of work. There I was, still mediocre experience as far as even working with a crew and I had a 50-page script that I needed to shoot and have edited in less than ten weeks.

    The project was flawless in getting set up but from there it was a nightmare. With the length of the script I knew we had to hop onto filming fast. Furthermore, over half the film were exteriors. I was happy with my male lead, but not so much with my female. I was just going with who worked right away because shooting needed to begin. Not at all aware of what an overwhelming project this would be the first day’s shoot was disaster. I was edgy, still learning some of the trick of the camera and I honestly just wasn’t ready. I was making little mistakes and it took nearly two hours to set up and shoot a 10-shot, 2/8 of a page long scene. We were only going to shoot 2 1/2 pages and had to stop at half a page because we ran out of sunlight. The next day my lead actress bailed because her “schedule got to busy”. I knew what she meant. I had slipped back into my old habits and once again looked like I had no idea of what I was doing. Already a week into the term and I had only my lead cast and what little we shot on day one was going to have to be reshot. I took the initiative and accepted the fact that this project was going to be a disaster at this rate. I pulled the plug.

    However, I was still left there now with about eight weeks to start from scratch and shoot a whole piece. From nothing I pulled out a rather horrible script I had written, trying to be deep that didn’t go anywhere. In essence, it was a woman who had once been a victim of rape and it showed how her life was in experiencing that. She then is visited by an ex of hers and they discuss the experience and she is uplifted from the experience. Again... really no story. But the notion of seeing the afterward of a rape victim was something that grabbed me. It’s what so few of us ever see and it’s incredibly traumatic at the same time. I took that idea and used it as a starting place, but I needed to go somewhere with the story. I figured what better way to get the story going than to get the lead out of her house, out there in the world where anything could happen.

    I dabbled with the idea of her needing to go on a long drive, a drive that put her out in a rural locale where she would be completely isolated. For a brief time my second draft had her picking up a stranded motorist and exploring the awkwardness that would form between the two of them. But still the story was coming off stale. I knew there was something more lingering there. And then it hit me to have this other stranded driver be one of the men who had assaulted her in the past, but it was so many years later and they had both tried so hard to block out the memories of that night that they wouldn’t recognize each other at first. Suddenly the characterization of these two leads came full circle. It was in that time that my mind opened up to extensive possibilities and suddenly I found myself expanding the significance and symbolism as to what occurred in the film. For instance, the female lead becomes stranded when her car breaks down and when her former attacker shows up, working as a mechanic, he is able to fix her car up, in exchange for giving him a ride into town to get help in fixing his own car. There is the interesting dichotomy then that the man who attacked and broke her, upon being introduced in the film, shows up and comes to her rescue.

    This was the first time I had ever completely stopped work on one project for the sake of starting another and it was one of the greatest decisions I ever made. Much like when I produced Trapped, I found myself incredibly cramped for time. My lead actress had a relatively easy schedule to work with and I was able to cast her first. And even then our meeting was somewhat awkward, primarily from my part. I found myself in desperate need to cast this film, having taken an extra week to completely start a new project. But we discussed it and went over the script and I thought she might work well. She ended up working better than I could have imagined. After shooting the first couple of pages of script, showing what her life was like at home, I still needed to cast my lead. As I was scrambling around to take care of that the car that my actress had borrowed, a Honda Accord with a chunk of it’s bumper cover missing (perfect vehicle for a struggling and lost young woman) broke down. Unfortunately her real car was practically brand new and would have stood out as a continuity quandary seeing as she was supposed to be a struggling woman just barely getting by and, in the script directly, her car is supposed to have some mechanical problems. This created further delays as I finally cast the male lead in the film.

    There we were, the month of November had already started (and the final project was due the first week of December) and I had just completed casting. But I only had my lead actor for about ten days during November between projects for him and the Honda was still broke down. Magically they got it running again and around November 10th we crammed four different shoots into five days, in which we shot the bulk of the film. I had the film equipment out much longer than was often allowed and I practically had to beg to keep it a few days longer. We started this long shift of shooting on a Friday. Needing to turn the equipment in by Tuesday afternoon, we shot over the weekend and literally the last shooting was done Tuesday morning, giving me just enough time to go home, dump the audio and video before turning the equipment. I had also contracted a bad cold and a temperature lingering around 100 degrees. But we still fought through, shooting on a very cold Sunday night and then, of course, Tuesday morning. The Tuesday shoot was the worst, being rushed and I was even sicker. I remember wearing three layers of clothing to keep warm and ultimately becoming so overheated that I nearly passed out.

There we were, the month of November had already started (and the final project was due the first week of December) and I had just completed casting. But I only had my lead actor for about ten days during November between projects for him and the Honda was still broke down. Magically they got it running again and around November 10th we crammed four different shoots into five days, in which we shot the bulk of the film. I had the film equipment out much longer than was often allowed and I practically had to beg to keep it a few days longer. We started this long shift of shooting on a Friday. Needing to turn the equipment in by Tuesday afternoon, we shot over the weekend and literally the last shooting was done Tuesday morning, giving me just enough time to go home, dump the audio and video before turning the equipment. I had also contracted a bad cold and a temperature lingering around 100 degrees. But we still fought through, shooting on a very cold Sunday night and then, of course, Tuesday morning. The Tuesday shoot was the worst, being rushed and I was even sicker. I remember wearing three layers of clothing to keep warm and ultimately becoming so overheated that I nearly passed out.

    I had less than three weeks to edit once we finished shooting, which was cut down even more after I was bed-ridden for a few days after shooting was done. Over the course of about fifteen days I cut, re-cut, and re-cut the film several times over again making endless adjustments. And while most students in the program shot 15-30 minute long films, mine ended up running 42 minutes. I would later make a director’s cut version that ran more in the 37 minute range. As with Trapped I worked and I worked until the last second. It was two o’clock in the morning the night before the final was due when I finally finished the piece. When I turned it in I had burnt myself out so much on slamming the film together that when I wandered in with a daze I had no clue what I had made anymore. But still I turned it in and aced the course.

    In the more than a year and a half since this project I have grown to appreciate The Way We Are more and more. The acting performances were strong and I felt it was a strong combination of staunch realism mixed with cinematic exploration. And once more, this was still a very early piece of work. I consider it my first real film. It was short but in running over forty minutes it was still a substantial piece of work. I have little to no regrets, setbacks or moments when I feel like, “Oh! If only I had changed that.”  And once again I proved to myself I had the chops to make a quality piece of work. I showed I could do it more than once and that the first time wasn’t just a fling.    

Can be found on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9I2Ezuga6c

Film Testimonial - "Trapped" (August, 2012)

The year 2012 marked a staggering change in my life. In the fall of 2011 I returned to school and got to attend with one of my closest friends who was several years younger than I. Going into serious study into film for the first time it was incredibly daunting. Every time someone else in class knew the answer to a question I didn’t I would go into a mini freakout thinking I was out of my element. Someone would mention an XLR cable and in my head I’d scream, “What the hell is that?!” Of course, what my feeble little mind was playing ignorant about was the fact that such was my purpose in going into studies into film production, so I would learn all this stuff. Now those things I was panicky about are second nature.

    At the start of 2012 I was succeeding in school, rocking that 4.0, and had fallen head over heels in love; a love that I regrettably let go of. Still to this day do I regret that. Little did I know when I fell that I was going to fall into something else: a life crisis. I found myself becoming completely lost and overwhelmed. I began questioning whether I still wanted to do the whole film thing, and if I didn’t, what else was I going to do? I had been going to college off and on for years and it was wearing me out. I really didn’t want to start fresh again. I was becoming restless with my job. I wish I would have noticed at the time that the only thing I felt good about was my relationship. And of course, ironically, that’s the one thing I screwed up. As a turnaround, now I feel so much stronger and confident in those things I was so unsure about then. Now the only empty space I have is that desire to have that special someone to share it with. By April 2012 I was in a staggering depression that had my in frantic tears everyday. I was snapping at everyone. I honestly thought I was going to have a complete breakdown. It took a long time to get out of that.

    As springtime rolled into summer I gave myself an ultimatum. There was a DMC 264 class, which was a digital filmmaking class where we would learn more of the grassroots work into working as a crew and putting a production together. I told myself if I still didn’t feel that drive for filmmaking when that class was over I was going to start fresh with something else. I remember exactly when I first felt things turning in the right direction again. I was at a family gathering where I saw my father for the first time in over three years and I overheard a conversation between some people in another room. There was a guy there who was going to college in Washington and attracting all sorts of attention in the NFL. A career, large paycheck and security seemed to be a lock if he took that route, but I heard him say he didn’t want that. He was studying child psychology and wanted to go into work in that field. Just seeing that, someone who had a chance to go for the money but instead was letting it go for something he really wanted. I had honestly been considering going into nursing for a couple weeks and I realized I was doing the opposite. I was chasing a career with almost guaranteed work and good pay instead of going after what I really loved.

    That day kicked my butt back into gear. I enrolled in the class and found I quickly learned the ropes and, beyond all else, had my first experience using a DSLR camera. I was like a kid in a candy store. Within months I would own my own DSLR and in a life where practically everything I own ends up collecting dust or ending up broken somewhere, that DSLR is as shiny and spotless as the day I pulled it out of the box. But my greatest challenge was yet to come. In the final three weeks of the term we were given our final project, which was to create a 5-minute long film using the skills we had learned and the equipment we had there at our disposal. I was the only person in the class who decided not to work as a crew with others in the class. I thought I had help with some friends but that ended up not working out. I ultimately found myself with a script that I had whittled down to five pages from fourteen and had suddenly less than three weeks to try and cast it and get the thing done all by myself.

    Casting was incredibly tense. It took me almost a week along just to cast and get two different shooting days set. I literally had about an hour to fool with the DSLR and sound equipment I had checked out, none of which was I particular proficient in. I figured it was going to be a total amateur job. I was just flying by the seat of my pants. I figured if I could pull a movie out of my ass with the odds so stacked against me I was destined for this type of work.

    The script, that I ultimately titled “Trapped” when a more creative title just wouldn’t come, was based on a longer script about a crazed man who marries well-to-do women and then kills them off so as to collect their money. He is also an inventor of sorts who hides his weapons and tools in the form of common household items so as to not attract suspicion. He keeps all of these in a house out in the middle of nowhere where the visions of a suburban world seem out the houses windows are merely projections. The house is really like a prison where the man can keep his victims. His newest wife, Arianna, catches on to the fact that the house is just a ruse and in her efforts to escape she ends up trapped in the basement when her husband arrives. The focus then is to see if she will escape or even survive the encounter.

    I, again, had little idea of what I was doing but the two actors I worked with were incredibly easy to work with and were cool with the fact that I was just propping the boom mic somewhere while I operated the DSLR the best I could. I used every possible second to work on that film. After completing the shoot I was in the lab at school editing for every single moment that the lab was open. The crappy lab hours and having to bus there practically every day were reason enough for me to finally purchase my first Mac only about a month and a half later. During this time I was having to reintroduce myself to working with Final Cut, which again later became no problem. It was an incredibly stressful and yet invigorating experience. I literally completed the film with twenty minutes to spare on the last day I had to work on it before it was due.

    Upon presenting the films on the last day of class mine got shoved right into the middle. As far as all the projects went mine was definitely the one with the odds stacked most against it, named because I had no crew. We showed the five or six films made in the class and when all was said and done I knew I was into this film thing for the long haul. I was completely shocked. My film obliterated the work of everyone else in the class, and that’s not me saying that but those in the class. One girl walked up to me when it was over and said, “That was so good! It was like... a real movie!” I know what she was driving at and it was an incredibly sweet thing to say. Not to sound egomaniacal about it, but that was the first moment that I realized how strong my talents really were. To have my back against the wall and come out miles ahead of everyone else in the race? More than anything else I saw that I truly had the raw talent to make it in film. For years before I had watched so many films and wondered how they got the cinematography to look like that. How did they make it work? With a little study, some handle tools and, of course, a higher grade camera, I was beginning to figure it out. I found myself shooting for the stars from this moment on and I’m eternally glad that I haven’t looked back.

Can be found on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXS369iJE2o

FILM TESTIMONIAL - "Second Chances" (2009)

 What follows is the first in what will be a collection of what I'll just simply call "Film Testimonials". More or less, they are just forays into the past film work I have done up to this point. I will be posting these off and on and in chronological order. While I won't be doing one on every single piece of film work I've done, I'll be doing them on most. It's a way to show out there my transition from doing film for fun into becoming who I am now. Even in only a few years I've faced many strenuous situations and adversity trying to become a successful filmmaker. It comes with the territory in work like this so if you're interested in this field and facing troubles or doubts about it don't tuck your head between your legs and run away. My first entry here is for a film I worked on almost five years ago and I was an inept wreck as far as my legitimacy working on film. The hardest part is the beginning... and thus, such is where I will start.

My love of film spans back to 1997 when my father borrowed an old VHS camera from a friend. It was back when VHS was still somewhat common and my father filmed me briefly, maybe for thirty seconds, but after sitting down, watching and seeing myself on the television I became hooked. There was just something amazing about it all to me, that I could also be on television with all those famous celebrities. But my first legitimate foray into make a legitimate film would not happen until over a decade later. In this period between 1997 and 2009 I had my share of cheap VHS, Hi-8 and cheap digital cameras and continued to make little movies, but they were always just projects for fun that I shot alone or shot with friends. They was never much pre-preparation but I always enjoyed it. In that regard I never educated myself much into the field of film. Everything done was just for fun so it was never taken that serious.

    It was during this time that I started writing some screenplays, transitioning from story writing into script writing. I hardly even knew the structure of screenwriting at the time, but nevertheless during May, June and July of 2006 I put together a 95-page script that came as a result of some deep self-reflection. On Easter of that year I started attending church after my mother had made efforts to get me to come. Amidst her efforts she made mention of a girl that had started attending there whom I might find an interest in. I met her on Easter, not speaking with her much, but she asked me to her prom a few days later. I should have seen the red flags but I had been single for some three years and was a little desperate for companionship. I later found out why she asked me, someone she didn’t go to school with, to her prom. It’s because nobody who went to school with her wanted to go with her. It was an off-and-on connection we had ending with a prom that went about as horribly as one could go.

    After that prom experience I did my best to disassociate from that girl, but in being single for so long as well as being rather naive, I kept being bothered with a lack of understanding as to how someone could be so hurtful to someone she hardly knew who had done nothing but stand by her side. As I was pondering her disrespectful and reactively insecure nature, I began to channel that into a male character that sparked this screenplay. Originally I titled it Life and Women, as a way of using a common titling concept of the time in which two seemingly different things would be connected by an ‘and’. That interest faded and around the time I started shooting on it I altered the title to Second Chances.

    The film followed a young man named Mike Rinearson, who was the envy of every guy he knew. He had the distinction of dating lots of women without having one of them break up with him. The film thus opens with his current girlfriend, Rachel, breaking up with him. The focus was to take this self-centered young guy and put him through an unfelt experience that would force him to break down before he could build himself up. The first half of the film thus follows his self-destructive efforts to deal with the break up. In the middle he meets a girl named Leah who is the prototype of a perfect woman; beautiful, intelligent, expressive, funny, and so on. At a time in his life where he is feeling as vulnerable as he ever has, discovering he is not God’s gift to women, Mike finds himself honestly falling for Leah but being overcome by a sense that he was never good enough for her. He thus had to experience what he made so many other girls before him experience who felt like they weren’t good enough when he hooked up with them and then dropped them. As would become a common theme in my work, the ending is not all neatly wrapped up with a bow. Mike finally expresses himself to Leah, honestly letting his feelings out and there is sense of belief that the two will end up together, although it is not set in stone.

    I learned more about film doing this project than any other piece of work I have ever done (sensible considering it was my first serious film). Now this was written during 2006 and I had decided to play the lead, because why not? I shot the few scenes I had scripted that only required Mike’s character and then I just stopped. I had no idea how to put a real film together and, to be honest, I was kind of a chicken about reaching out and asking for others to act in the piece. The script was just stored away, assumed to never be done. Then I was accepted to the University of Portland’s English program at the start of 2009 and with the presumption that my future would ultimately become all work and no play I pondered what to do with those final months of freedom before school started in the fall. I decided to make a movie. I pulled out and dusted off the script and learned a bunch of lessons.

    My first meeting with a possible talent was a complete disaster. I was still coming out of my shell and there I was sitting in beautiful surroundings with an actress who was too gorgeous for my mind to handle. And since this film was still being done more or less for fun I wasn’t taking the technical aspects too seriously I was totally unprepared for the questions she asked. After the meeting she said she’d love to be in the film and then later that evening I received an email in which she kindly passed because, in a nice way of putting it, she felt the project would be too much of an undertaking for me to work out well. It was a courteous way of telling me I didn’t look like I knew what the hell I was doing, and I didn’t. This was an ongoing thing. My communications skills just weren’t there for these one-on-one encounters and I didn’t grasp the fact that these were skilled actors, used to these kinds of meetings and knowing what was what. So practically every meeting I had with these people was subpar. It became unnerving after a while. I would find myself there early asking myself, “Well how are you gonna screw this one up?” And after many of them I would reiterate to myself what a train wreck it had been.

    Even the people that agreed to hop on it didn’t work out so great with because I didn’t know how to make a serious film or anything beyond just fooling around with my friends. So the shoots for some small roles I casted were often awkward as I could tell the talent I was working with was suspicious as to my real talent. And there I was playing the lead role, directing and shooting with no crew! Again, it was just for fun. It was just so I could tell everyone I made a legitimate movie. At the time I thought I would leave for college and leave film behind. Obviously I had no clue who I was at the time. So it was one awkward shoot after another with me just picking acceptable angles for the camera, propping it on a tripod and letting it run. And I was using those old MiniDV cameras. For one shoot I had my own MinIDV camera and two cameras belonging to my friends that I just set up at random angled. I even had to set one up on a wide guardrail because I only had two tripods. But it worked... somehow.

    It got to be early July, college was less than two months away and I hadn’t got a whole lot done. Meetings came and went with little success as far as the larger roles were concerned. I’d bring someone on and then lose them. By this time I was at a make or break point and I gave it one more shot when I talked over the Leah role with a young actress whom I’d never met and had no clue of her talent level. When I told her it would only be a couple days of shooting she agreed to do it and was totally cool with the setup (or the fact that I had no crew). So the project was saved at the final hour, in a way (considering the fact that I never finished the film). The actress I worked with as Leah’s character was an actress who, as far as I know, still works in the Portland area named Alicia Rose. And she still, to this day, in my humble opinion, is the greatest acting talent I have ever had the fortune to work with. And to think, it was on my first film when I had no clue what I was doing. Working with her was fortunately very fluent and almost carefree in a way and, despite the films many shortcomings, we got through our scenes together.

    Still in all, when the time for school came up I only had the film about 80% of the way done. I figured I’d still finish it but doing a full-time college schedule at a private University 20 miles from your home while working a steady job 30-35 hours a week made this effort next to impossible. Trying to cast the role of Rachel was a nightmare as I went through, I believe, some twelve actresses, losing them all for some reason or another. That and just the transition of life, along with the fact that this was never intended to be a serious project in the first place, led to it never being completed. I left University of Portland when I realized it wasn’t worth the $32,000+ a year in tuition (but at the same time I wouldn’t trade that year there for anything) and settled into half-baked plans on whether to go into work in film or, honestly, work in the field of criminology. But again, being naive I did not think you had to put in years of study and work in law enforcement to make it in the field of criminology (yes, I was that clueless once upon a time). Once I found that out I said audios to that dream. I can still remember, it was the start of spring 2011 and I was sitting at my laptop less than an hour away from classes opening for the fall. Even then I was still pondering what I wanted to do and literally in those last ten minutes I flipped a coin in my mind and went with going into the digital media/communications program at my old college. Literally it was in those final minutes that I made that choice. And now I couldn’t be happier with the decision I made. Now I’m finally going somewhere in my film career and it’s interesting to note that my first legitimate film production is one that never got finished.