ATM Premiere at the LA Comedy Festival

ATM is about to be shown for the first time in public at the 15th LA Comedy Festival, Saturday the 18 of may. My short will be shown along with more works from filmmakers from all around the world, stand up shows and more. Looking forward to hear some feedback from the screening, head there if you can! 

 Here is the trailer for the fest. Very glad to see my movie featured right after one featuring Ron Jeremy. 

ATM

ATM is a short movie about a young man who unwillingly becomes a internet sensation, and about his struggles to make sense of his newfound fame.

Developed with the lead actors Jim High and Caryn Stringer, and shot by Cedric Larvoire, this short movie is 22 minutes of comedy and drama and my first "proper" short movie.

The mighty Gunther D has put together a nice press kit to chronicle the making of the short, which is currently in the process of being sent to festivals worldwide. 

A full list of credits for the movie can be found in this page. 

And here is the trailer for the movie.

The Road to ATM

ATM is a project I've been working on for a year now, a short movie conceived with actors Jim High and Caryn Stringer, and focused on fame and the weirdness of the internet. The project is closed to be finished and sent to various festival around the world. I will dedicate a page to this project soon, to link to promotional material and some behind the scenes looks.

Click to read more ...

Brainstorming vs Introversion

There is a tendency to shy away from creative work for the simple reason that it is a solitary effort. Creating something can take months and these months are often spent alone, in a feedback deprivation loop that can discourage many. This makes lots of us crave for collaboration, especially in situations such as writing or filmmaking, where it can be months or years before we can share our work. 

But some studies tells us that we are at our most creative when we are alone, able to bounce ideas in our brain and make them grow and mature for some time. Susan Cain is a very vocal proponent of this theory, and both in her new book and in a compelling TED talk she suggests that brainstorming, a very catchy practice in the creative world, might be useless or, worse, damaging. 

Click to read more ...

The fastest soundtrack ever recorded

As much as the Tear Me Down production was stripped down and made with zero budget, we wanted to have a real soundtrack. Luckily enough, this was a mockumentary about a musical, so we had a band avaliable. Ian Mikyska, Tomáš Mika, Pharaoah Smeaton-Russel were joined by Anar "Keytarman" Yusufov and myself for a very brief jam (literally an hour or so) at Sype Studios, a very high quality Prague studio run by Tomas Patlich and Jakub Simandl. Most of the ideas were either improvised on the spot, and layed down before any editing was done on the film itself, trying to set a mood and shape the edit before it started. 

I want to thank everyone involved the recording, this helped a lot in making the mockumentary feel more cohesive. And thanks to Laetitia Desroches for putting together the artwork. Enjoy, share, and use if you wish (the whole thing is released under a Creative Commons licence).

  Tear Me Down OST by zionsiva