moving pictures

HD Video

Awards:

• Special Jury Prize - Worldfest Houston

• Opening Night Film - Annapolis Film Festival

• Official Selection - Port Townsend Film Festival

• Official Selection - Vail International Film Festival

• Official Selection - Bahamas International Film Fastival

• Official Selection - Indiefest Chicago

• Official Selection - Indie 2006 Mostra De Cinema Mudial

• Official Selection - Palm Beach International Film Fastival

• Official Selection - Santa Fe Film Fastival

• Official Selection - Zion International Film Fastival

• Official Selection - Ellensburg Film Fastival

• Official Selection - St. Louis International Film Fastival

I was determined to make a Feature film and so finally, I did. That isn't the full film above. That's just a sort of Director's Reel I put together. It's only footage from the movie because I realized very little of my old movies from the 90s looked good enough to include and they stood out as very old film scans. I've entertained just posting it all online for free, and I may do that one day. I still have an HD version of it that I keep thinking about trying to get on some streaming service, but I don't want to incur the additional costs for something we lost money on and never will actually make a dime. So for now, there's a good sampling of what it was.

The Naked Ape is a coming-of-age, road film, dramedy very very loosely based on my teen years, some of my teenage friends, and a road trip I took. The story of a kid secretly running away and the girls they meet in Taos are all contrived, as is the route and pretty much every scene. Still, one from the personal files.

My reasoning behind the choice to make this was that a road movie would provide high production value for nominal additional costs to shooting locally and it worked as far as that goes. We shot for five weeks, two in Los Angeles and three on the road across ten or so states. We shot at Muley Point in Monument Valley, the Bonneville Salt Flats, the St. Louis Arch, and the highways from California to Missouri and back again. But I heard somewhere that you should make a movie you would go see if you saw the poster, and well, I don't know if I was honest enough with myself to pass that test. See all those "Official Selection"s? It got play on the film circuit but it didn't really win all that much.

We were approached by a handful of distributors but most wanted us to pay them. We ended up going with Anthem DVD which was owned by Zalman King, known only for Red Shoe Diaries, and we were library padding for them. They didn't like my box art but didn't offer anything remotely good so I put together a compromise I could live with even though I didn't like it. We swapped out all the music only licensed for festivals with more reasonable stuff and I made as much DVD material as I could. We didn't have to pay them up front, but we never saw a dime from them. For a time it was available for sale on Amazon on DVD and you could get the disk through Netflix. Then the quarterly reports stopped and once our contract was up I tried to get any material they had back only to discover they had disappeared from the earth without a trace.

Some fun notes:

• It was originally titled Big Things, a title I'm still fond of, but once I got permission to use the excerpts from the book and found out titles aren't copy-writable, I chose to go with The Naked Ape. This is even though there already was a The Naked Ape movie from the 70s released by Playboy.

• Getting permission from Desmond Morris to use excerpts from his book were also interesting. I was told it was too long a shot. I contacted the publisher and they directed me to his representative who directed me back to the publisher. Once neither really wanted to claim control the representative just went and asked him and he said sure.

• The voiceover was done by Micheal Jackson... the Talk Radio personality. He is one of very few people in SAG (the Actor's Union) to have the same name as someone else. He was first, but the other Michael Jackson refused to take an alternative name for obvious reasons. When I asked him how I should credit him he said, "Michael Jackson". What are you going to do?

• It was shot on the Sony f900. I really wanted to shoot on film but I wouldn't have been able to afford a high enough shooting ratio (footage shot to footage used in the final cut). HD had just gotten good enough and the cameras cheap enough that it was an option. It was totally worth it. Shooting on 50 minute tapes at a dollar a minute meant I didn't need to cut and interrupt the actors to try an alternative read or to get a line right. All the benefits that everyone nowadays takes for granted I was just discovering.

• After shooting I was working at Rhythm and Hues. I edited in the hotel room in New Zealand while working on The Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe. They gave me permission to use their film printer to make a projectable film copy which I did for several thousand dollars worth of film stock and lab costs. It has never been projected and the negative and answer print are in film storage eating up even more money for no good reason other than it gave me a great experience.

• There are plenty of stories from this shoot, from me being on the phone for 5 minutes with neither of us speaking when I insisted the camera rental company pay for shipping out a replacement when one camera began ruining footage, to the mormons letting us shoot at an amusement park/park as long as there was no kissing, to so many other strange and funny events and encounters. But there are only so many bits on the web...

16mm FIlm

Awards:

• Best in Show - CSU Summer Arts Festival

• Best in Show - San Jose State Film Festival

• Grand Prize – Cinquest Film Festival

• Gold Cindy - The Cindy Competition

• Honorable Mention – Film Front Festival

• Accepted for Cliff House Prod Video

• Screened at the DGA in Hollywood

La Femme Pickle was my first real success. After coming off the disaster that was Frequency I had "brilliant" idea that if I was going to make a bad film, I should just make it on purpose: I decided to make an intentionally bad movie. A classmate, Alex Perez, liked the idea and wanted to make a psuedo-documentry of me making the bad movie and we thought the idea of a joint project was great. Then he got a job on Star Trek The Next Generation and couldn't make his movie. I decided his idea was better than mine and he agreed to let me have it.

I put as many film references as I could from. Apocalypse Now, Battleship Potempkin, The Seventh Seal, Day For Night, Lethal Weapon... Several of the stories were ones I heard from others. Even the title was a riff on La Femme Nikita which was out at the time. We had a ton of fun making it and it was very well received even winning a ton of awards at festivals.

Then almost immediately after I finished it Living In Oblivion came out with the "mocumentary of a movie being made" idea and I wasn't original anymore. That's Hollywood. Fun side note: Before I met my wife she happened to walk past us making the stairs sequence and saw the "director" and thought what an ass. It wasn't until she saw the film later that she realized what was going on.

1 • The first film had no title and was merely an exercise in shooting something two different ways to show how it can feel different based on shooting choices. The rules were no sound, one roll of film, all editing in camera (edit with starts and stops). I chose to shoot the exact same sequence of a female friend walking to her car and driving away in both day and night rather than different angles. This was relatively successful even though it was a bit lazy. It's worth noting that we weren't aloud to edit after the fact.

My early shorts are a very mixed bag leaning towards the "not so good" side of the spectrum. My first three films were shot on Super-8 film without sync sound for beginning film at CSULB (which I took over summer to catch up with some friends in the film program a year ahead of me).

2 • Coming To Terms is a terrible movie and a perfect example of a typical film-student film: self indulgent, emotional, melodramatic, relationship based, and completely unwatchable. I was trying to do some sort of metaphor with stringing up a guitar to having a relationship, but it's bad, so that's enough about that. Side note: The guy is Kieth Hutcheson who was lead guitar for Ragnarok, the band we formed in college (I was rhythm guitar). The band wasn't very good either.

3 • The Cellar is my first actually good film. While it is a suicide film, another staple of bad student films because we're desperately trying communicate emotions in a short amount of time, I actually based it on the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I set these in a basement in an unspecified time and place though through the props, set and audio meant if to be during a bombing in England during World War 2. I also took the extra step of using a 4-track mixer to attempt to mix sound live during my screening for class.

4 • For Intermediate film we graduated to 16mm, though still black and white non-sync sound. At this point I'd learned enough to use The Twilight Zone as a guide for what works in the short formate and stuck with something that had a twist ending. This movie was liked and isn't bad but there are definite holes in my skill set showing here. The "music", such that it is, starts off with my and my friend Duane whistling the Andy Griffith theme and any other music cues I did with a synthesizer that I didn't actually know how play. Set design was equally "whatever I could find in my apartment". Even the title, In-A-Sense, is a cheap double entendre. The only stand-outish element here is the live "matte painting" of happy then sad city when he looks out the door and the stop-motion newspapers overwhelming him done when we just basically ran out of shoot time.

5 • Frequency was made for Advanced Film. Finally we could shoot in 16mm color with sync sound. It was an outright failure. The story was supposed to be a sci fi future with a lawyer in a floating chair who works from home with a jacked in brain implant in the back of his head. An activist sabotages his system to gain access to him to try and force him to throw a case. He's suppose to somehow get lucky and kill his attacker who is smashing all the nodes to control his house but too late to stop the last from being destroyed and winding up trapped inside his own home. (Again, kind of Twilight Zone inspired.) We shot in an empty store in a mall over two weekends and it went so badly the first weekend that my main actor bailed on me the second weekend and I just wrote him out of a two character script, having him killed by the activist rather than rendered unconscious. It doesn't work. Again, my set design and props are terrible because I wasn't good at that and the sci fi aspects don't work. To top it all off, my grandfather passed away during the filming and my parents told me to stay and finish it. The only positive things I can say are that it was ambitious and it killed Ragnarok because with me too busy to schedule and be at rehearsals they just didn't happen. Also, my classmates love it to this day because it's so wretchedly, chees-ball bad.

Like many in Hollywood, "what I really want to do is direct..." Seriously. Hope never dies, but it can wind up in a coma it never recovers from. Still, I gave it a half decent shot.

I started making movies as early as the age of about 10 when my parents got me an 8mm film camera and I made some stop motion films of my Transformers toys. I even hand drew lasers on the acetate and used bug spray and a lighter to make a flamethrower effect. Nearly burned down my house too when that flamethrower caused the styrofoam set pieces to ignite with an invisible flame. (The smoke detector went off and we found the table and the carpet in flames. Good times.) I may still have that film in a drawer but I don't recall where.

In high school I also nabbed the school video camera and made a number of incomplete videos. These are also lost in time. But here are most of the movies I made once I entered the film program at California State University Long Beach. I present them, both good and bad, without shame or remorse.

16mm Film

Awards:

• Best in Show - The Marin County Fair

• Silver Award - Worldfest Houston

• Silver Award - Worldfest Charleston

• Award of Excellence - The Joey Awards

• Screened at the DGA in Hollywood

Though arguably not quite as successful as La Femme Pickle, The Lost Mariner was my best film from that era.  It had a much bigger budget of around $20,000 verses $5000 for Pickle and I made it almost entirely without the school's equipment resources.

The story was based on one of the short case studies of the same name in Oliver Sachs book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.  It's about an old man who has no long term memory beyond the distant past who forgets everything that happenes to him within a few minutes. I contrived a sort of treatment that would turn out to be worse than if you just left him alone in a pure expression of "ignorance is bliss".

There is a child in the movie that was supposed to be a physical manifestation of the doctor's own young self that he was betraying by treating the old man, but it didn't really work. Luckily, the rest of the film basically does work.

It was shot at the State Mental Hospital on Orange County that was mostly unoccupied and we shot on a film stock that was new for Kodak that gave us an interesting warm look.  Kodak abandoned the stock soon after, likely due to high grain.  For post I rented a flatbed and had it in our apartment livingroom for six months to cut the picture.  I ended up purchasing a Media 100 Non-linear editing system and did all my sound on the computer, something not common at the time.

So like I said, dreams don't die easy. A friend wanted to do the 48 Hour Film Project and so... we did. It was a ton of fun and surprisingly freeing to have to do it all in two days with whatever you have on hand.

Sleeping Dogs is a noir sort of Twilight Zone (see, I learned) piece about a woman hunting down her father that abused her as a child... except, it wasn't her! She hunts down abusive fathers of others to enact revenge for them! Not a bad idea actually.

This turned out better than it should have but, tragically, rendered too slow for us to submit it in time to compete. This version has slightly better VFX and SFX than the one we would have submitted.

We had so much fun doing the 48 Hour Film Project that we did it the next year as well.

Once again, The Twilight Zone is a good model. This was the theme of "hell is other people". It's four people on an RV with the two in front insufferable loonies and the two in back suffering them.  Turns out the two in back are in actual hell making this literally their hell is other people.

Not as successful a film as Sleeping Dogs but at least we finished in time. We were voted the best of our group but didn't win past that.

I always intended to do this again in later years but life marches on.  Maybe one day...