6:40min, Red code
Herndon, VA
May 15th, 2009

Production Notes: Shot on Red One build 16 ˆ la maison de John Oh. Originally made for DVXuser LostFest 2009, however, due to the complications of Red work flow and color grading, we missed the deadline. It premiered in the 2009 DC APA Film Festival.

6:40min, miniDV
College Park, MD
May 9th, 2007

Production Notes: Made as part of the 48 Hour Film Project 2007. This was my 2nd time taking on this contest.

Genre: Buddy Film
Required Character: Roosevelt or Rosie Adam, president of anything
Required Prop: Bracelet
Required dialogue: "That's what I'm talking about."

This year, I decided to write the script after taking an amazing screenwriting course with Yale professor Marc Lapadula, and reading several screenwriting books. With help and ideas from the rest of the crew, I was able to finish the gist of the story on schedule around 11pm Friday night. Our choices for female actors didn't pan out, but luckily Kyla (the original AD and SS) gladly accepted the role.

We shot all day at University of Maryland, College Park campus and the nearby Asian Grill Cafe. The owners were super gracious and allowed us to basically do whatever we needed--like destroying the place. Overall, the production went very smoothly. Cast and crew were great.

About the only major problems we encounter was during editing, when it seemed like our film had been cursed, and no matter what we tried we couldn't get it to export to DV, or DVD, or suitable MOV file formats. Fortunately for us, my roommate saved the day and successfully burned it to a DVD. There were some issues with the clarity of the story while watching the rough cut, so certain elements of it had to be changed and switched around. This was a great learning opportunity on script writing and how it's re-written 3 times from the screenplay to production and finally during editing.

2:54min, miniDV
Silver Spring, MD
Feb 11th, 2007

Production Notes: This film was an exercise in cinematography, lighting, and composition, but eventually turned into a learning film on all levels. I knew I was going to be swamped busy during the winter of 2006, when this was shot, so I decided to do this as a one man production. It would give me the opportunity to learn all sides to filmmaking, including on the camera. I have never acted before, so this was quite a different experience.

I also wanted to try music scoring for the first time. Given my years of playing guitar, song recording, and all the beat mixing software I had, I decided this would be a great chance to put it all to use. This was way harder than I initially imagined. I could hear the sounds in my head, but I could not reproduce them with the limited sound effects in my library, and guitar strings weren't quite the tone of the film.

This was also my first time applying color correction. I edited on Avid Xpress Pro, using Magic Bullet color suite. Some of the shots didn't light the way I had in mind; something to keep in mind for the future.

Being that this was going to be a one-man production, I wanted to keep everything as simple as I could and tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. I knew I wouldn't have the time to go to different locations, so I figured what better place to make a film than just my own spacious apartment.