For posterity, this is my 2010 Demo Reel. A good chunk of this is from my "student" work while at Oklahoma City University. I say "student" work because I went back to school after working professionally a number of years to get my degree. There is also some professional work mixed in as well as some contest commercials.
Projects making an appearance in this video are:
Unsolved - Feature Length Film
Hefner Road Pet Resort
I did this spot for Batter Blaster's commercial contest. Batter Blaster is a cool product and they gave us a lot of room in the creative. I thought a tongue-in-cheek '60s style comic book mashup would stand out.
Thankfully, my mom's next door neighbor is in real estate and had a house with a pink vintage kitchen on the market. My friend Heather jumped at the opportunity to dress and did a fabulous job helping me out on this one. Sadly, there appeared to be a high degree of voter fraud in the contest's polls (people used bots to rack in thousands of votes in a matter of minutes), and we didn't win. Still, I love this little piece.
The Hero!
The Villains!
Pow! Boom!
This is the second short film I did while I was at Oklahoma City University. I wanted to explore the idea of what happens when some poor schmuck screws up the classic 'I love you' moment and the people around him chime in to tell him how they would have done it. What was great was that I was able to build on the lessons I learned from the first short I did that just a few months prior. It was also my first time to shoot any green screen footage so it was very helpful to learn how to do that while still in school.
In the summer of 2007 while I was a film student at Oklahoma City University, the Moving Image Arts program headed by Fritz Kiersch decided to make a feature length film. The film was helmed by graduate student Lance McDaniel and was written by McDaniel and Oklahoma filmmaker Sean Lynch.
Undergraduates were allowed to sign up for the film as a six hour summer course to fulfill class requirements such as camera, lighting, etc. Because the program was less than two years old, no students had advanced far enough to get to the editing courses. However, I was a transfer student having previously been a student in the Oklahoma City Community College film program, also under Fritz, and had several years of editing experience. I was asked to edit and took the project to fulfill my advanced editing coursework which wouldn't have been available for several more semesters.
Unsolved was my first feature and a daunting project for me because unlike other feature editors, I had not worked my way up as an assistant on other films first. Needless to say, I had no idea what to expect. I encountered P2 workflow for the first time as the film was shot on a HVX-200 with a 35mm lens adapter. We had hoped to have a computer to work on from the start of the production so I could log and ingest each day's footage as we went, but a true workstation did not arrive until fall semester began and we had to rely on an array of temporary solutions to get any editing done.
While the edit spilled into the fall semester and time became precious for me, I enjoyed almost every minute of the experience and I cannot wait for another chance to edit a feature length movie.
This is the first short film I did while I was at Oklahoma City University. It also happens to be my last SD project ever. The idea was more of an exercise in filmmaking; I hadn't made anything in several years and I wanted to get my feet wet again before trying something more ambitious (see: Three Little Words).
Art in a Bottle is my capstone film in the Moving Image Arts Program at Oklahoma City University. As with most capstones, I was tasked with taking on the majority of the essential roles of film production: writing, producing, directing, editing. I had the privilege of being the first to attempt a capstone in the program.
Other students helped fill in the crew and I used my long-time friend Russell Macway to light the film. The shoot happened over the course of a weekend with a couple quick pick up shoot a few weeks later. Being crunched on time, post-production occurred in the space of three weeks to meet the deadline for graduation. While the film was accepted with high marks, I later went back and had the sound reworked with Red Chair Productions in Oklahoma City.