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Watched your great short film "The Awful Kind". Was that your first film? What's the back story behind the completion of it?

It was a very well done film for your first, which has me thinking you got some experience prior. Either that, or you are naturally gifted and going places.
 
onebaldman said:
Watched your great short film "The Awful Kind". Was that your first film? What's the back story behind the completion of it?

It was a very well done film for your first, which has me thinking you got some experience prior. Either that, or you are naturally gifted and going places.
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Hey! Thank you! Im happy you liked it! Backstory? Well, my experience prior was ripping tickets at a movie theater and working at Blockbuster, so I watched everything! But, that was when my interests were entirely on acting. I studied acting for years and then after not booking any auditions I decided to do my own thing. I directed a short in 2016 "SCHISM" with a 3K budget. I wrote/directed/acted in it. It took me a year to sort that film out in post production and THAT essentially became my film school. We even tried shooting a oner on that and failed miserably. We got into a festival and I took that as a bit of a sign to keep moving forward.

As I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, I shot a series of shorts on GTA Online using people playing around the world as actors and the editing software built in-game. One of our videos was a runner up in a competition. I can't honestly tell you how much I learned about directing from Grand Theft Auto.
(BATMAN VILLAINS IN GTA)

The Awful Kind was interesting because it sort-of kept reinventing itself. There was no outline. I didn't know how I wanted it to unfold. After a couple drafts it was suggested that I try shooting the whole thing in one take. During that time, #metoo and Time's Up unfolded and that got me thinking about how EASY it is for me as a white male, to write a movie about a bunch of white men in a room solving a problem. I became obsessed with exploring life in 19th century America from different cultural backgrounds, or what it was like to be a woman in those days. I researched everything I could to bring all of those colors into the same melting pot. I wrote out each characters autobiography, I even wrote the train robbery and a brief history for the abandoned trading post they were in.

When it came to shooting, to me it was just a play and the camera was a character. It was no different than what we all did in acting class together twice a week. I felt more comfortable shooting a oner than I did setting up the perfect frame. From what I saw in westerns, I knew how I wanted it to look and feel, for example: The film begins and ends like "The Searchers (1956)" through the silhouette of a door frame, the title credits in the beginning are inspired by "Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)". All of these little nuances help establish a familiar feeling the western genre ALREADY created years and years ago. This mixed with trusting my love for movies carried me through this process and now, well, here we are.
 
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