I first became interested in the process of filmmaking in high
school, when a group of friends and I embarked on the
production of a couple of videos for history class. The first
one was called "Time Travelin' Teddy" and I played a
Libyan terrorist named Lou, and I got to have a kung-fu battle
with my Libyan terrorist partner Bud, aka
Shawn, at the end of the film. The film also involved Teddy
Roosevelt.
It was the most fun I had in high school. For our next class,
we decided to make a sequel to "Teddy" called
"Time Travelin' Table", in which three below-average
physics students manage to take a lab table back into time and
steal a library book from Spanish insurgents.
During this time I knew of guys who were into making 'serious'
videos about things like Ancient Rome, but I couldn't get
myself interested in that kind of thing at that age. Also,
those guys' parents were rich enough to buy them film cameras,
whereas I had to borrow the school's video camera and explain
to my teachers where I came up with words like
"whereas".
In college I continued making silly videos about spies and
computers. After I graduated I got a chance to work on couple
of
feature films
with such directors as Edward Yang and Hayashi Kaizo. But
pulling cables for directors who weren't into divulging the
secrets of their craft didn't do much for me, so when I
happened upon a scholarship to the New York Film Academy, I
jumped at it. There I made four short films. The first one was
rather silly, and I 'lost' it, somehow. Probably left it on
the subway or something. The other three, though, I kept, and
they used to be available for viewing on IFILM, which has
"lost" them. One of them, The End, even got accepted
to the
International Festival of Cinema and Technology 2002,
held in Toronto in 2002 and is viewable on the Triggerstreet
Film
website.
In late 2002 I went into considerable debt to purchase a
Panasonic 24p AG-DVX100. In any case, I'm making more projects these days, and
digital video makes it a great deal easier, even if quality is
harder to achieve. One project,
Clay Soldiers, involved the
Lady X Film series. It
was the most ambitious project I'd done so far, more
complicated even than Coolishness, but it turned out
well. It won the Best Episode, Best Writing, and Best
Depiction of Location awards in the Lady X competition, as
well as the jury prize for Best Film at the
Urban Nomad III Film Festival
in Taipei in March, 2004.
Now I'm working on the sequel to Clay Soldiers. (The name of
the production company comes from my
fake news page). This is, as
always, the biggest thing I've done to date. Click on the link
below for details on production, trailers, and other
interesting stuff.
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