Filmmaking as an Adventure Sport! (Part 1)

So how did this all start? We' ve been making movies forever- and when I say that, I mean my group of childhood friends, who have seen me through every transition and major event of my life, from grade-school to now. We started with simple Hi-8 camcorders and quickly-produced scripts, focusing instead on just being able to get people together at the same place at the same time for a day of filming. The editing was crude, the soundtrack ripped off from whatever mix tapes and soundtrack CDs we had lying around. And the final movie products... well, they're more for nostalgia than any true artistic merit these days. But Aaron and I kept making them. The movies, I mean. Even when there was no one else, it was me, the budding pre-med student, and Aaron, the talented graphic designer, shooting stuff with our cameras and thinking about scripts. He'd set up the shots, and I'd figure out how they all went together. In the summers in-between college and grad school, I would come home and we would shoot film. Some of it was decent- most of it was pretty nonsensical. As fate would have it, the filmmaking progressed, helped no doubt by the advances in editing technology and digital filmmaking. Suddenly, we didn't need time in a studio to edit our films or lay soundtrack to picture- we could do it all with the click of a mouse, and our hours of meaningless footage could now be digitized and moved easily on a computer timeline. The cameras got smaller, more accessible. Suddenly, we could easily visualize scenes and movie sequences and our little 'amateur' projects started seeming less like a waste of time and more like... real movies.

It was the summer of 2005, after my first year of med school, when Aaron and I made "LandCruiser". This short spoof was created over the course of a week in Torrance that summer, centered around a lovely 1995 Toyota LandCruiser I had gotten as a birthday present the year before. We didn't quite know what we were doing when we were running through parking lots, getting shots of the car idly rolling by itself behind "scared" amateur actors (that is, Aaron and I ). But when I sat and put the whole thing together on my decade-old PC, what resulted was nothing less than cinematic gold (if I do say so myself!) I went back to med school that fall and showed the video to my classmates, who immediately fell in love with it and made it an early 'viral' hit for us. I would be stopped in the hospital hallways all that year and cheerfully egged on as the "LandCruiser Guy". I upgraded my camera equipment and started taping my classmates, now a little more seriously than before. And before long, I was dreaming about a new project for me and my filmmaking crew. That was in 2005. I would be bogged down for the next few years getting through those pale white halls of UC Davis Medical Center and earning my medical degree in 2008. The filmmaking would take a backseat... but not for long. Unbeknownst to me, my medical residency would see the true beginnings of my filmmaking career, and would be the start of what would eventually become '3rd Call Productions'. And, of, course, that was only the beginning:)

#filmmaking #3rdCallProductions #CodeShortMovie