Sean-Michael Argo's Blog, page 7

The Day After and the Days To Come

Wikipedia defines the word “career” as a person’s journey through learning, work, and other aspects of life, while the Oxford Dictionary defines it similarly as the course or progress through life (or a distinct portion of life).

I find that especially encouraging today, the idea that a career isn’t just your work, its also your life, the learning process… a journey unto the whole person. Taken from that perspective, I can say with resounding happiness that my Career as a Storyteller is going rather well. I have worked for many years to gain the experience, comrades, battle scars, and perspective that I enjoy today. The film Ember Days was released on DVD yesterday, and has been met with a strong positive response. The journey of that film is far from over, though I feel that yesterday was a powerful start. People believe in this movie, with all of its flaws and all of its awesomeness, the whole epic melodrama. I am moved by this, to see my tribe and my community support the film and the people who worked to make it happen. Success is about so much more than money, though for the first time in my career as a storyteller, there is money present in the mix. Though I take much personal fulfillment in the simple acts of working as an artisan storyteller, be it as an author or filmmaker, there is a tangible measure of progress in the packing & shipping of DVDs to people who cared enough about the project to pay for a copy. It emboldens me to dare to dream of the next community funded & created film project, a transformative journey story we are presently calling ‘Werewood’, and I find myself filled with confidence and renewed determination to keep carrying the fire that filled us all during the Ember Days.

Confessions from the Writer/Director

This is a re-post of a “filmmaker’s confessional” that is available on the Ember Days film site. I wanted to post it here for your reading pleasure. 

 

Ember Days: A “Pagan Epic” On The Cheap

In the summer of 2010, I was riding through the misty mountains of the Olympic Peninsula with SJ Tucker. We were on our way to explore the driftwood beaches of La Push. I was already overwhelmed with the beauty of the landscape, and then the song “Come Down”, by Ginger Doss, started playing through the speakers. I found myself daydreaming-in-cinema about a group of faeries called The Wild Hunt chasing a lone warrior through these primordial forests. Then as the song continued, I started to wonder why they would chase one of their own, and it came to me that he was possessed by the spirit of a fallen angel. The song finished and our adventure continued, but the daydream images stayed in my mind. The seeds of a story had been planted, and over the next several months I articulated the story as the shooting script for the film ‘Ember Days’. I then was fortunate enough to be offered $30,000 of private financing to create the film.

For most people, $30,000 is a significant amount of money. You can do lots of things with 30K, but you might be surprised to learn how dramatically the power of that money changes when it is translated into a film production budget. (For example, 30K is basically the “toilet paper budget” of most Hollywood movies you’ve seen. Or, to think of it differently, the salary of a single crew member.) If I had made the attempt to shoot a small commercial, a music video, or perhaps a short film, employing only working professionals for the cast & crew, then the $30,000 would have been an appropriate budget. However, I wanted to make a feature film, and I wanted to make it without creative compromises (even if that meant that I’d have to make a great many technical & financial compromises). If I were to take the script to Hollywood and attempt to arrange financing through distribution & production companies, they would have rejected the project due to its complex story, presentation of a multi-layered reality, and the blending of myths from a variety of cultures. Hollywood wants “point A to point B” sorts of films, that are easy to understand in any language, and that are easy to sell through the use of buzz words, celebrity actors, and parroting existing film trends. If grindhouse action movies and teen sex comedies are IN this year, then don’t bother bringing anything that doesn’t fit perfectly into one of those two genres.

There are positive elements and negative ones when you strike out on your own to make a micro-budget film. I don’t mean “indie film” or “low budget”, since low budget films (according to the Screen Actors Guild) still have budgets ranging from $1,000,000 to $5,000,000. Most people who even attempt feature films with budgets under $250,000 (what Hollywood calls micro-budget) do not typically attempt to create myth-blending fantasy/action films like Ember Days, much less with only $30,000. They stay within the comfort zone of things like spoofs, or comedy, or single-location-thrillers. As such, I get that it was crazy for me to think that I could pull off this kind of movie on such a tremendously, laughably, abyssmally micro-budget. The truth of it is that I am a storyteller, and this was the story I needed to tell at that time, so I would have attempted to make this movie with two dollars, a flashlight, and a cellphone camera if that’s all that was available. Crazy or not, this movie was going to happen.

Enter Sherry Kirk. She was a retired non-commissioned officer (first sergeant) who had created an intentional community space called ‘Sidhehaven’ in the small town of Yelm, Washington. I had stayed there over the summer and fallen in love with the place, and we had talked at length about my filmmaking plans for Ember Days. Sherry was intrigued and offered the use of the property for the film. Let me just say it was the key reason we ever completed the shoot. The house is a 3bd/2ba building, with a cozy front porch, hot-tub, woodshop (we converted it into sleeping quarters w/cots for the more hardy cast & crew), and a canvas & wood dome dwelling called a yome. There are forests, train tracks, and even Mt. Rainier all within easy driving distance. It was perfect. Did I mention that it was called Sidhehaven? For those of you who don’t know the word ‘sidhe’ is another word for faerie, which is a big part of the Ember Days story, so I was feeling the touch of fate I think.

Because we did not have a professional grade budget for shooting a feature film, we had to do things very differently than most professional films, in fact we had to throw the “professional film” book out the window and invent our own filmmaking process. That’s what happens when you don’t have enough money to pay for a cool movie, you have to get creative and find other ways to get the story created. This film was made possible by the Washington community, primarily artists, pagans, and performers. The majority of our cast were non-professional actors who put their hearts & souls into the movie, and the few professional actors on the cast brought just as much heart to the project, as they certainly weren’t being paid professional wages. We had help from not only the local pagan & arts community, but also the Seattle Film Commission, the Thurston County Film Commission, and the City of Olympia for our locations (lots of love for the WA film commissions, who despite our tiny budget, treated us with enthusiasm and respect), and believe me we had some cool locations that we never could have afforded to just ‘rent’ on our own. This epic-on-the-cheap tells a story that spans from pristine forests to swanky condos to immaculate offices to gritty urban decay. By the gods, it even snowed on the exact shooting day in which the scene would have been made all the better for it.

Overall the experience on set was different than most ‘professional’ shoots, in that people were working on Ember Days for the love of the story and the love of making art. We crammed dozens of people into the house, the woodshop, into travel trailers, the yome, and some even stayed home and commuted to our set every day. Most people were unpaid volunteers on the project (I certainly was), and those few who were paid only received a pittance. On a professional set, everyone shows up for the paycheck. Even if they love their jobs, they’d walk off the project the first time a check bounced. On our film, people were there because they wanted to help create the story, to share in the glory of its telling, and see something truly unique enter the world.

Even though this film suffered some blows in technical quality due to its micro-micro budget (primarily audio), it is still extremely cool to know that we, as a community of people who just didn’t give a damn about the limitations, made it happen. Every single time you make a movie, you learn a tremendous amount of new stuff. And employing all I learned from the making this movie, my pagan epic on the cheap, I would totally, impossibly, do it again.

Supernatural Activity

Supernatural Activity….. a ‘found footage’ movie that WINS.

Being an independent filmmaker, a horror movie fanboy, and having worked for a low-budget horror distribution company, I have seen (or seen parts of) dozens of “found footage” movies.

Generally I am not a fan of that sort of style, given that much of my personal enjoyment of watching movies is the cinematography, and in a “found footage” movie I would hesitate to call the camera work (however immaculately shot & lit) to be ‘Cinematography’ as much as it is ‘Camera Operating’.

I don’t mean this as a sleight against the no-doubt talented cinematographers who work hard on (some) of these films, I’m just saying that the vast majority of films in this style (be it action, horror, sci-fi, whatever) are intentionally shot to look like a home movie and as a paying viewer that’s just not my thing.

To give credit where credit is due on the low-budget side there are a few honorable mentions like The Great American Snuff Film or Death of a Ghost Hunter (solid indie films you should also check out), while the vast majority of the low-budget found footage movies really SUCK and honestly are rather devoid of talent and originality. When you throw in larger budget films like Troll Hunter or Cloverfield then you start to win me back as an audience member, since the world they are taking their ‘found footage’ characters through is fabricated and pretty incredible.

At any rate, what I like about Supernatural Activity is that it faithfully parodies the ‘found footage’ movies, most notably Paranormal Activity, which had a brilliantly executed marketing campaign. Supernatural Activity also parodies the glut of paranormal or ghost hunter reality TV shows…. which is not expressly classified as ‘found footage’ though it is certainly shot in the same way, and has just as much of a contrived storyline as any feature film.

So for me sitting down to watch Supernatural Activity was a happy journey of jokes at the expense of both the found footage films and paranormal reality shows. Faithfully executed from the cast, the shooting style, the editing & presentation, and sheer silliness of the whole fad. Not to mention some heavy laughs brought on at the expense of Chris Angel.

If you love found footage movies and/or paranormal reality shows, or if you hate them, or if you love/hate them, or hate-love them, you’ll find plenty to enjoy in Supernatural Activity.

Check it out here.  

Sticks & Stones

I played with sticks when I was a kid, and I’ll even admit to playing with sticks when I was a teenager, and yes I’ll go you one further and say I still like to play with sticks. Growing up in rural Arkansas meant that I was surrounded by woods, and though my brother and I had plenty of the usual kinds of “boy’s toys” like GI Joe action figures, Star Wars, and those wooden musket cap guns, we loved to make our own toys with sticks. We’d head out into the forest and find a handful of awesome sticks of various sizes and weights, though we’d always be sure to get sturdy ones. Then we’d take them back home, get out the duct tape, and start crafting some seriously wicked stuff. When we’d visit New Mexico my grandfather would take us into the woodshop and help us build extra-sturdy wooden swords, axes, and whatever other bizzare weapons our imaginations could come up with.

As I got older this fascination with “sticks” was tempered by the desire to create things that had a more real-life functionality to them. This was right about the time I met Ryan Loyd, a fellow stick lover and maker-of-things. Nothing like a full workshop and the desire to create legitimate weapons to give rise to some of the more wicked ‘murder sticks’ that I think have ever been hefted by folks in the modern world.

This leads me to my current fascination with the video game “Dead Island”… now I know that its a game that has been around for awhile. I’m usually late to the party when it comes to video games, having grown up without them (beyond Aztec Challenge on the Commodore 64) and going straight into Playstation 3 ownership. I know its an older game, but I’m loving it. Not only is Dead Island a ‘zombie survival’ video game, which means is perfect for my tastes in media, but the use of firearms in the game is extremely limited.

The characters are on the island of Banoi in Papa New Guinea, so there just aren’t guns readily available for average people, so the game focuses on hand-to-hand and melee combat. Since we (sadly) do not live in a world where people carrying swords is a normal thing, the characters have to scrounge for whatever they can find and make their own weapons. Characters can find lead pipes, pool sticks, boat paddles, baseball bats, diving knives, hammers, wrenches, machetes, and yes (since its a video game) the occasional mace (but at least they make them look like the cheap versions you can buy at BudK). Then there are ‘workbenches’ where you can customize your weapons.

That’s my favorite part. You can start with a baseball bat, then drive nails through it, then wrap it in barbed wire, then dip it in gasoline… and now you’ve got a flaming bat of DOOM. Or you can take a machete, a large battery, some wires, and duct tape it all together to create a ‘shock machete’. Considering that I’ve been customizing ‘found weapons’ since I was a kid… this game is perfectly tailored to suit my particular tastes.

I am positive that both playing as a child, tinkering as a young man, and now gaming as an adult (all with this custom murder stick enjoyment) has something to do with a deeply buried instinct. When you look at ancient Polynesian cultures (I’m singling them out for having the most awesome customized murder sticks) they did pretty much the same thing that I’ve been doing in play (and in the game) by taking objects in their environment and working them into deadly combinations (turtle shell stabbing gauntlets? yep, they’ve got em). So maybe I’m just staying in touch with a more primitive side of my human self, nothing wrong with that.

Besides, its fun, and I’ll never get caught in the middle of a zombie apocalypse without some kind of way to defend myself.

Cult Watch: Casa Grande

A little slice of life from my time living in Arizona.

Cult Watch: Casa Grande
Based on true events. 
 October 9th, 2009

I was happily editing on the computer when my flatmate Jeffrey walked into the room and asked if I had plans that night. Being a workaholic with very little time for personal relationships or nights on the town, I said that I was busy editing and would remain so for most of the weekend. Several hours later I unplugged for a much needed break, and took a quick walk around the apartment complex. When I got back Jeffrey was getting ready to head out, and I asked him what he was up to. He told me that he and my old boss from Brain Damage Films, Darrin Ramage, were going on a “ghost hunt” in CasaGrande. Beyond that he didn’t have many details, and neither did Darrin, who had apparently hooked up with one of the ghost hunters at a Phoenix Multiple Sclerosis meet & greet. I decided that the editing could wait for a few hours, and tagged along. On the hour long drive out into the desert we discussed what it might be like to go on a real ghost hunt, and decided that this was a fun, if random, way to spend an evening.

We arrived in Casa Grande, and were instructed down several side roads until we were well into the desert. We parked near the only house in the area, a run down 3 building farming compound surrounded by desert, canals, and a dried up cotton field. A man came out of the darkness and identified himself as Lamar, and led us into the house. As we reached the light I noticed that he was wearing a large hunting knife on his belt, and had several clip knives in his pockets. Then as I walked into the porch area we met the man that had invited us, a scrawny kid named John. On the bench inside the porch area was a large chopping sword and a bag of duct tape wrapped wooden clubs. It was at this point that I went into danger mode and began counting bodies and taking note of exits. John had a computer system set up on the porch, and on the display we could see that they had rigged several rooms in the house with infa-red cameras that could monitor and record the house once all the lights were turned out. Once we arrived and had been oriented on the cameras, we met Eddie, a skinny & tattooed shifty character, Carlos, a tubby looking innocent, and Deborah, the perpetually silent and sullen girlfriend of at least one or more of the boys.

The ghost hunt began with a quick tour of the compound, complete with stories about all the spirits that lived there, the murders that had happened there, and how Lamar had grown up in the trailer on the property. We were also told that Lamar was a “pusher” who could banish spirits and move energy. Eddie was a “mover” and could pull spirits into the bodies of other people, and pull those people out of their bodies. Carlos was their “open book” who could easily be possessed by spirits, and have spirits moved in and out of him very easily by Eddie or Lamar. We are being told this as Darrin, Jeff, and myself are being shown by flashlight the entire property, which is revealed to be a very run down farming complex made up of a large house, a double wide trailer, and a horse stock building. Lamar is regailing us with past tales of battles and experiences with the spirits, and how there’s a body buried in the cotton field. Because of the presence of blades and blunt weapons I am already heavily on edge, my tension compounded by the fact that I can smell the booze wafting from Lamar. I keep everything to myself, not wanting to embarass Darrin in front of his new friend John, and to be honest Darrin is really getting into it, though as the night progresses he gets more and more skeptical. Jeff and I share a few concerned looks, but once we both know that we are on guard I relax slightly at the thought of having an extra set of eyes and pair of hands on the situation.

After the tour the ghost hunt began in earnest. Myself, Jeff, Carlos, Eddie, and Deborah went in first, while Darrin, John, and Lamar stayed behind to monitor the cameras. We go in carrying video cameras, still cameras, and EPK monitors to pick up on sounds. We go to the back room first, and Andy starts doing automatic writing and asking very typical questions like “who is here”. I start ignoring him as my initial unease at the situation begins to shift into annoyance, then I feel a big opening of energy in the bathroom area. I stand in the threshold of the door, knowing that thresholds break up energy patterns, and I didn’t want to be in the room with the wannabe sorcerer Eddie, but also had no interest in being in the bathroom where some serious energy was starting to boil out into the area. When Eddie asks the spirit to make a noise so we know its there Jeff hears a crash in the bathroom, and we both start hearing the buzzing of flies in the bathroom area. Nobody else seems to notice or care. Eddie and Carlos start talking themselves through the room, as if giving each other cues and lines of dialogue, fully giving into the power of mutual suggestion. I’ve got these guys pegged as poseurs and wannabes when they fail to notice the bathroom and claim that there’s nothing in the room, so start going with the flow as we move from room to room, taking pictures, while Eddie and Carlos pretend to be sensing ghosts and spirits. I even sit in their “haunted” chair while they freak out about all the spirits that are roaming around the room. Being a practitioner of the craft, I silently reach out, and get a firm sense that I’m not the only being in the house that thinks this is kind of lame.

Eventually we move back to the computer monitor room, and Lamar, Carlos, and Darrin all take turns sitting in the chair while everyone else gathers around the monitors and freak out about all the dust specs and how they are “spirit orbs”. Darrin, Carlos, and Lamar follow a cold spot around as I take photos, then while Lamar is talking about how the spirit is in one part of the room, I back up into a truly cold spot, and nearly lose my cool. I keep it together, silently excuse myself to whatever it is, and keep taking snapshots. Everyone stops for a smoke break and Jeff and I decide to take the still camera and go back into the house alone. We discuss our thoughts so far of the hunt, and both decide that the back room is the place where the action of the evening is going down. Jeff and I walk down the dark hallway and get into the back room. Immediatley we are both buffeted with waves of energy. I’m getting all kinds of vibes from the bathroom, and we take some pictures in their as I search around for anything interesting, finding nothing, but still immersed in a near suffocating wash of energy. Jeff is getting the vibe from the closet, which we never opened the last time we were in the room. We approach the closet, and pull open one of the doors. The energy that bleeds out is full of rot, decay, and malice. We decide that this place is none of our business, and back out of the room nice and easy.

Then we move to the trailer. Everyone goes in, all subconsciously prepared with suggestions about the history of the place, and how the spirits in the trailer are quite violent, depsite the fact that earlier in the evening we had traipsed through the trailer without opposition. Now that I’m back in proximity to Lamar, still armed and stinking of alchohol, I back myself into a corner so nothing can come up behind me, and keep snapping pictures. Carlos gets possessed by a spirit, which annoyingly doesn’t say anything, and Lamar sends Jeff out of the room to take Carlos outside. Jeff later tells me that Carlos talks about how “things almost got bad in there” and if they had “told you about me”. Jeff is set further on edge by the comments, and becomes keenly aware that he has been separated from Darrin and myself, and his guard comes back up. Meanwhile, Lamar has Darrin standing next to him holding his hands out to “feel the cold” of the room. I am taking snaps of the scene, and honestly do capture some orbs in a few of the shots. Then Lamar has me put my hand in the cold spot, which of course isn’t cold at all. I didn’t like standing so close to him, and was all too aware of the fact that his hand was near his knife, so began mentally preparing myself. Thankfully the cold spot, apparently, moved away, and we left the trailer. I did get a snapshot of the window from the outside, and there was a strange facelike shape in the window, not sure what it was.

Once back in the monitor room everyone took a smoke break and we looked at the pictures. Lamar had been trying to provoke the spirit, and had in general, along with Eddie, been talking some major trash about the spirits (mostly Jake and Mark), and continued to congradulate themselves on how flippant they were in such a haunted place. Jeff and I share some more skeptical looks and keep to ourselves and the “ghost hunters” talk to us about a TV show they want to do, their skills in video editing, and congregate around Darrin, making it really obvious that they are enamored of our status as filmmakers and “movie guys”. Jeff and I share a few quick jokes about how the three horror movie guys are now in a position where we could quickly become the victims of a homegrown horror movie, and its right about then that Lamar announces that I am going to be possessed by a spirit so that everyone can talk to some of the entities that haunt the area.

Being a practitioner myself, I have a serious problem with the idea of being possessed, and know that I won’t let it happen voluntarily. However, I must admit that I was annoyed enough with these people that I didn’t want to rob them of the opprotunity to fail at pulling my spirit out of my body. I confided in Jeff that I was going to fake the possession, and he agreed, as by that time we’d decided that despite the fact that these people were on the lame side of the social spectrum that most of them were armed and at least a few of them had been drinking. So to avoid an outbreak of violence in the middle of nowhere, we decided to just go with the flow.

I walk into the room where the possession is to take place, and am instructed by Eddie to put my hands over a mason jar of water that rests on a small table in the center of the room. He begins stroking my shoulders and arms, claiming to “cleanse my energy”. Then he starts pouring energy into me. This is where it gets interesting. The kid does in fact have some power, and I do feel him pulling on my spirit, though as I’d made the decision not to be possessed, it was like pulling against a tree with deep roots. He starts asking me questions about my name, so I mutter something about how I can’t pronounce my name. Then he keeps pushing, so I say my name is “Seth”, which is the pen-name that I write my own occult books under. Darrin catches the reference but keeps it to himself, starting to pick up on my ruse. I continue to attempt to fake a possession, but I am losing my ability to keep from laughing and/or hitting the arrogant asshole standing behind me, so I eventually resign myself to some false embarassment just to get myself out of the situation. So I make up a story about how I can’t seem to let go and how I’m afraid, and I walk to the other side of the room. Folks seem disappointed, and I can see in their eyes that they are beginning to doubt their own beliefs and powers. However, like any good cult membership and cult leadership the group pulls itself together and decide that Carlos should be possessed, so that they can show us how its done by people unafraid to let go.

Carlos stands over the table, and very quickly Eddie begins his ritual. Carlos can’t raise his hands from the mason jar, and when Eddie asks Carlos his name the poor Carlos, who is overweight and effete and completely faking his possession, says “you know who it is”. Then like a badly rehearsed theatrical performance of an exorcism stage play the unfortunate Carlos starts growling and trying to attack a smirking Eddie, though cannot lift his hands from the mason jar. Eddie says something along the lines of “we have faced each other before, you know what I am” in his most badass sorcerer voice and I nearly lose my composure. Jeff later tells me that he had to work very hard to keep his laughter in at that point, and was completely taken aback by the fact that these people had chosen to cross the line from hapless poseurs to full blown deluded cultists. Lamar, who has been stoic and standing aside up to this point, saunters up to the now possessed Carlos, and they begin to speak about kicking each other’s asses and that they keep playing the same old game. Lamar, in his most arrogant tone of the evening, says “you know what happened last time” and turns to walk away, the entire exchange having the rhythm and blocking of a well rehearsed scene from a B-movie. Lamar picks up another jar of water and a plate, then puts it on Carlo’s head and start smacking it with the palm of his hand while Eddie recites the Lord’s Prayer, a sure-fire staple of B-movie exorcists the world over. Carlos fights it, each strike of the jar looking as if it hurts him badly, then finally collapses dramatically. Eddie steps back and Lamar help Carlos to a chair, the whole time Carlos is saying things like “its so cold”. When Carlos looks around dramatically and says “what happened?” Jeff nearly bursts out laughing, instead just buries his face in his hands.

Darrin and I are talking to Lamar about the possession and about how I have very weak energy because I can’t be possessed when Eddie screams from outside in the parking lot. Lamar, like a combat ninja, runs to the parking lot to save the day. Jeff, Darrin, and myself casually stroll out to the lot after John rushes inside and yells that Lamar is beating Carlos. When we get outside Lamar has reverse mounted Carlos in the dust of the parking lot, and trust me it looks really gay. Eddie is reciting the Lord’s Prayer again, and Carlos is struggling, though in time gives up. It is explained to us that Eddie wasn’t able to “close” Carlos soon enough, and something else got inside the guy and attacked them. Darrin goes back inside with the group as they attempt to put a spirit into John, while Jeff and I stand outside.

At this point Jeff and I are done with the evening. Nothing happens to John, and Lamar comes to get me. We stand with his hands over mine as he attempts to pull my spirit out again. I lie about seeing myself over his shoulder just to get it over with. Lamar’s eyes are like a shark, and I can tell that the man is completely insane and fully believes in all of this stuff. I suspected before that moment that he was a true believer, but in that moment I knew. This man was very dangerous. I could feel his power, though thankfully it was untrained, and yet combined with the hidden mental problems, the booze, the knives, and his charismatic power over the group of ghost hunters, I knew in that moment that this was an early stage charismatic cult. Charles Manson and Tom Jones level stuff. This guy was going to lead people into dark places.

Jeff and I kept to ourselves after that, and eventually were able to extricate ourselves from the situation. Eddie, Lamar, and John were talking to Darrin about how they were powerful and the “real deal” when Jeff and I came out of the house. We all shook hands and made to leave, and in the pause between the goodbye and the walk away Lamar’s last remark was “ha ha, one of these day’s we’ll have to kill Carlos”. At that moment, knife fight or not, I walked away. Thankfully Jeff and Darrin had the same idea, and we managed to escape into the night.

At the end of it all, it was clear that powerful beings and strange energy confluences riddle that little patch of desert. Our experiences in the house had shown Jeff and I that there was certainly something powerul in that place, and that it wasn’t good. These strange people had no clue about what they were doing, and believed so hard that they would make fools of themselves just to confirm their own beliefs. The two of them with actual powers, Lamar and Eddie, were unfocused and untrained and completely delusional about the potency of their abilities. My conclusion is that the property itself was a dark place, rife with energies, and this freshly minted cult of “ghost hunters” were just delusional and sensitive enough to be sucked into the vortex of this place. Bad things are going to happen there.

It was terrifying, it was entertaining, and a completely reckless & wonderful way to spend a Friday night out with good friends.

In Dreams

When you have a collegiate education in theology and go to sleep while listening to a melodic metal station on pandora internet radio… what do you get? Myth soup.

I am of the opinion that there are dreams and what my compadres and I call “dream not dreams”. The mind and spiritworld both pull from our deeper subconscious (and beyond) to provide us with skins, images, themes, and characters to help us cope with and understand (or at the least interact with) our dreams. Sometimes a dream is just a dream, and we simply sleep, experiencing an interesting collage of images/impressions as our mind de-fragments while our body repairs itself. Sometimes a dream is not a dream, and instead of going inwards, we go outside (or deeper inside) ourselves into worlds and realms beyond.

When you are me, or someone like me, the dividing line between “just a dream” and “dream not dream” is a rather gray area, and admittedly I love it that way. So much of my creative work, from film to literature to poetry to music, and the way I live my life, is the result of existing in this gray. My dreams, more often than not, are like epic poems mixed with summer hollywood blockbusters, or campfire folklore mixed with high concept music videos.

I dream almost every night, I have dream recall in tremendously minute detail, and much of the time I am lucid dreaming, so it is small wonder that I strive for such in my waking life, and happily so.

Back in the Saddle

Met a girl in St. Louis and fell in love. Her name is Bekah Kelso. With lots of help from Sherry Kirk and SJ Tucker I directed the feature film Ember Days in Washington followed by Sineaters in Arkansas. Worked a few military jobs doing art department for culture/combat immersion training. Wrote a book called As Above So Below which is full of old & new film scripts and tales of failure & glory in the movie business, finished several others (though I’m already planning some re-writes). Moved to Tacoma, WA. Worked as a craft service grunt for the web-series Journey Quest. Moved out of Tacoma and back to Arkansas upon finding out that Bekah was pregnant. She is back in Texas with family and I’m shipping out to another military job on monday in Washington. Oh, and post-production for Cthulhu Blues Productions and sales/marketing for Dark Roast Releasing never stopped for a second. August 2010 through May 2012 has been one wild time.