The Malathion Solution

Short Film – 2017

While the intro is shot on an old Sony DVCam to create an early 90s look in camera. The rest was on super 16mm film using a total of 1200 feet of Kodak Vision3 200T (giving us a shooting ratio of 3:1.). The camera was an Arri SR-II using the Zeiss 12-120mm lens (a super16 conversion from 10-100mm.).

The film had its festival premiere at the 2017 Portland Film Festival. It is a pastiche on the old 60s spy films like James Bond and tele shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Easter eggs and meta references pepper the film throughout. How many can you find?

Lørdagsuniversitet

Video Lectures Series

UiT Norway’s Arctic University held lectures in the town centre that was open to the public. I was also hired to film these in their entirety for the university’s YouTube page, as well as incorporating the powerpoints into the final product. I managed to film a handful of these before I had to leave Norway. Here is one example. 

(NB. Language: Norwegian.)

“Go North!”

Promotional Ad for UArctic and
UiT Norway’s Arctic University

I started working with UiT Norway’s Arctic University (Tromsø, Norway) as a stills photographer for their newspaper, Utropia. From there, I started doing video work and was hired to film a student testimonial about an exchange program they have in association with UArctic, called GoNorth, as an online promotional ad for their YouTube page. This was my first paid freelance video work.

La Terminale

An homage to La Jetée (Chris Marker 1962)

A friend from film school put forward a challenge to a couple of us to see if people liked the idea of a private film festival where we would have two weeks to script, shoot, and edit a short film. For the first trial run, I threw my hat in, but due to a busy schedule, I really only had one weekend to do it all. With this in mind, I remembered Marker’s film, and was inspired by the use of still images for a “motion picture”. Thus I moved the challenge from trying to find a crew and cast with no notice, and rushing to put together a “moving picture” film, to one more cerebral, where I could put my efforts into the pre-planning. How many shots do I need to tell a story. What story can I tell when the only cast I could get at last minute was myself. By doing all that, I could efficiently and effectively reduce actual principal photography to a far more manageable time, and post took no time, because the shots were already laid out, with no waste.

But it was not all me. I still could not have pulled it off without my then-girlfriend, Annie Novoa, who among many things translated my English script to Spanish and did the voiceover. She was also the camerawoman for those shots where I had to physically be in front of the lens.

Shot on a Nikon d7000. Lens was a Tokina 28-70mm f/2.8 AT-X Pro AF.