I am not sure what I want to do next but us at over at Lunatic Films have been thinking of different things we could do over the summer. We had been thinking of making a post-apocalyptic movie but that idea is most likely tabled for the future. The most promising project is our idea to make a mocumentary  about a couple of techno musicians that absolutely suck at making music. They are very pretentious and it will follow them getting ready for their new album.

As high school ends, so does the begging faze of my filmmaking career.I am excited to be getting ready to go to DePaul University this fall and I am anxious to finally start going to film classes at a college. I am sure I will make lots of connections and continue to improve my skills there.

For the past few months, I have been working on editing my ISM short film, Facinum. It has taken many hours of syncing audio, cutting clips, and color correcting but it is almost finished. I still need to score the film with Alek Bundonis and finish up tweaking the audio. I am proud of my work so far and it looks very good. The film looks like its going to run about 15 min. I will have to work hard this last week before the films are due. They will be shown on April 18 at the Ladue Film Festival.

The first trailer for Facinum is up and can be viewed on the trailers page, YouTube, and School Tube.

This past week we filmed a erie nightmare scene for Facinum. I used a special lens whacking technique to make all the shots look like a dream. I used a red backdrop in the schools theatre to to make everything look sinister. This scene will definitely turn out very creepy.
On Saturday Sam and Eva acted through one of the final scenes of the film. I had help from Jameson Carr to help me photograph a living room at night. We used two lights and put blue gels over them to make it look like moonlight. On the camera monitor it appeared bright enough but I am a little scared that when I'm editing it the brightness will affect the quality. We have a few more scenes to film and its getting down to the deadline of production. I'm sure I'll get it done but as of right now its a bit stressful.

I finally completed editing the short film Thirty-Eight/Forty-Five. I was able to submit it to the ITS short film competition in time and its ready to add to my USC college application. I have made two cuts of the film. One is the directors cut, which runs about 7 and a half minutes, and the other is the cut I submitted to the competitions, this had to be no more than 5 min. I say all and all I am very content with how the film turned out. It is probably the best film I have made to date. I hope it goes far.

Last week we took a trip to the St. Louis Zoo to shoot a scene for Facinum. Everything went great despite not being able to control most of the elements. I brought only the camera, mic, and a shoulder rig to get some nice hand-held looking shots. The animals looked great and I think the dark area and cloudy day will add to the creepiness of the film. We managed to complete the scene in about an hour and half.

This past weekend we began to film my short film for college applications and the ITS short film contest. With the assistants of Jameson Carr we had a 7 hour shoot on Friday night that went until about 3 o'clock. The actors did a phenomenal job of brining the characters to life with emotion. Many times we had to stop to charge batteries but no one complained about the whole shoot because we knew it was going great. I began to edit during the week and, for the most part, everything looks good. This next weekend we will reshoot some shots and finish up the film. My deadline is Nov. 22nd

Production has picked up quite a bit this past couple of weeks. For the first time, the three main characters had a scene together in their house. Lighting is quite the challenge with interior shots because the kit we have is pretty much made up of two spotlights. This forces me to be creative with how I light the actors. We also were able to film a quick scene at a cemetery. The day was very cloudy and cold which added a lot to the dramatic element of the scene.
We will not be able to film this upcoming weekend because one of the actors forgot to mention a schedule conflict.
I created the monkey paw and it looks very gross and really cool.