Zombie Tag

This past week I spent a few days up in Ellijay, GA, working on the feature film “Zombie Tag”.  This is an independent production being put together by the amazingly energetic Bentley family.

I play “Chase Taylor”, the main bad guy in the film, which surprisingly is about the game of Zombie Tag.  Filming took place in and around two cabins nestled deep in the woods of the North Georgia mountains.

Here are just a few pictures I managed to capture.  Hopefully I’ll be able to grab some official production stills soon.

Committed to Murder

“Committed to Murder” is a comedic murder mystery for dinner theater.  I wrote this a couple of years ago for my theater company, RedruM Mystery Theater.  After producing it to great applause (and even a small profit!), I decided to release it to the public domain under the Creative Commons licensing system.

Through the beauty of the internet and just-in-time publishing, I can now claim to be a published playwright.  You can preview it and purchase an electronic or paper copy at Lulu.com.

Here’s the quick description:

James Wiltshire, head psychiatrist and administrator of “Colonel Wiltshire’s Asylum for the Mentally Diminished and Old Women”, knows the pressures of running a four-generation family business. With rumors swirling that his board of directors may be questioning the Asylum’s profitability, Dr. Wiltshire has decided to hold a fund-raiser to offset some of the more difficult to explain “expenses” he’s incurred. But he has more than just the board to contend with — a resentful head nurse, a patient multi-layered in psychosis, an overly ambitious PR man, twin executive assistants, and a conniving board member, all have their reasons to hope Dr. Wiltshire takes an early “retirement”.

Minus Cowboy

Here it is — the final product from the fun and crazy team of Wicker-Hu.  Our entry in the 2010 48 Hour Film Project for Atlanta screened at the Plaza Theater on Sunday, June 27.  We were in Group D, along with about a dozen other teams, some of whom produced great films.

The audience seemed to enjoy our short, even laughing at a few of the comedic moments.  A big round of applause at the end really made me feel proud to be part of such a great team.

Just for fun, I made a video combining some behind-the-scenes footage taken by Ohki Komoto with the actual scene that appears in the film:

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48 Hour Film Project, 2010 – “Minus Cowboy”

From the 48HFP website:

The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which you and a team make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours. On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete. Then it will show at a local theater, usually in the next week.

First, I have to thank Kelly Tippens of Kelly Casting for putting me in touch with the great Wicker-Hu team.  I got the call on Thursday afternoon that the crew was still looking for a few actors.  After short conversation with JR Wicker, I was officially signed on to my first 48 Hour project.

Call time was 9:30pm on Friday.  First stop: Command HQ, or rather a nice apartment rented by some of the team members.  When I arrived, there was plenty of activity going on as operations, logistics, and planning overlapped wardrobe selection, team member introductions, and draft revisions.  A quick read through with a couple of the others actors and JR cast me as the “Cowboy” of the film’s title.

At the start of the weekend — 6pm Friday — each team draws their film’s genre from a hat.  Wicker-Hu pulled “Western”.  Oh boy.  Plenty of deserts, old town saloons, and horses to be sourced in downtown Atlanta.  Anyway, by 9:30, we had a script.

By 10:30 we were heading to our first location, So Ba Vietnamese Restaurant in East Atlanta.  This is where the meat of the film takes place: an unusual interaction between the Cowboy and his old high school principal.  12 hours later we wrapped the location and took a two hour break.

Saturday afternoon we took advantage of the mildly overcast day to shoot outside scenes, mostly of the Cowboy wandering around and running into interesting characters.

By 11pm on Saturday, we had arrived at the final location, Jai Shanti yoga studio, to capture just a few more scenes.  Thankfully one of these included a bed, so all I had to do was lie there with my eyes closed.  At that point, it was about all I could do.

I wrapped at 3:30am, Sunday morning.  Now, everything was in the hands of the editors.