For a while I was living in the hottest city in the United States.  I'd gone there as a crucible, to burn certain impurities out of my heart.  I somehow had secured the best job I'd ever had after an interview in my pajamas with a government official in my cousin's back yard.  And was doing rather well living in the back yard of a prison in an apartment with a weak air conditioner, baking myself to death and making great strides in my skills as a writer.  But, for reasons I can not clearly remember, I decided to more back to Denver to partner with Ward and become a filmmaker. 

   I had always wanted to write sci-fi, but Ward was fairly gung-ho on horror, a genre I had only passing interest in.  But, I decided to try doing some script writing in it anyway.

   To my surprise, I was much, MUCH better at writing horror than sci-fi. I mean, I'd spent an easy thousand times as much time reading and watching sci-fi as I had horror, but it just came so easy to me to write the scary stuff for some reason. 

   I could write a whole book on all that went on over the next few years. Love and love lost, bitterness and betrayal, brilliance and idiocy.  Well, plenty of drama all around.  But the short of it is we made some shorts (some terrible, some good, one of which is available below), and then we made a feature length.  The feature length was shot on Super 16mm film stock, on an old Russian camera.  It was one of the lowest budget horror movies ever made on film, and unfortunately does often show it.  But the writing is solid, as is the acting of the three leads.  Some excellent cinematography and a world class soundtrack (by the same guy who did the soundtrack for my video game) are also in there. And that's more than can be said for most movies with a hundred times the budget.

   The film has been beset by disaster since day one, eventually bankrupting me and causing many more problems to this day.  It was so hard working 80 hours a week for free that after making it happen, I had the confidence and will to go forth and do every other piece of art on this portfolio site. 

   Below I have links to our best short, and the feature length itself.  It's free to watch on Prime as of the time of this writing. 

   When I think back on the experience now, I remember that for a while, film making was almost my entire social life.  All my friends were the people I shot on sets with. We'd help each other, hang out together, party together.  And not a single one of them remains in my life. 

   One memory in particular seems to exemplify the whole thing, which is towards the end of the day on set in the mountains I would have to go out with a shovel and rebuild the gravel road by the cabin.  It washed away in the rain while we were shooting as often as not. 

   Just me, the so-called boss of it all, rebuilding the road home while the sun set behind the Rocky Mountain pine.