"THE MOVIES" — 2005

In the summer of 2004, I got a hold of a camera that filmed in 24p. That is, it filmed in 24 frames per second. The footage looked just like film. And so, I wanted to shoot a movie ASAP. I was feeling inspired by the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and I wanted to do something that would take place in the character's mind. So, I wrote "The Movies."

The film took me a year and a few months to make. I thought it would only take a few months—max. But, movies end up taking longer than you think. Please watch the film with the context in mind that we didn't have any money, and I personally had a lot yet to learn about filmmaking and storytelling. With that in hand, it's an interesting watch.

The production was, like all the other movies, difficult. Although, like the other ones, I enjoyed it a lot more as the shoot came to an end. I remember filmming the final scene during a summer day in 2005; I'd just turned 18 and we were all out in our high school parking lot moving through the shoot quickly. I owe a lot of thanks to Jocelyn Meehan for taking on the part of the girl. Without her, there would have been no movie.

I'm fairly pleased with how the movie turned out. There was so much more I wanted to communicate, but I either lacked the know-how or the resources—or both. For instance—I was just starting to learn about sound design and how to incorporate that into the telling of a story. But I didn't know how invasive sound design needed to be. So there are places where the movie could have benefited from that.

I was given a lot of help from a young filmmaker/engineer named Josh Miller. He inspired a great deal of my interest in lighting for the film. He had built a box that would automate the darkness and breakness, and that was pretty neat, and provided a lot of the special effects for the driving scenes.

I'm not sure how I would improve upon the story, and I have to admit I was fairly lucky to be able to do some re-writing on the material in the middle of the shoot. The one act reversal wasn't working, as I remember.

The movie premiered in January of 2006 at the high school the movie took place at, showing in front of a packed auditorium. The news even did a story on it, which was really cool. The below clip is the story they did.