Two Little Capes

Those that have known me for a while, know the twist-filled turns my life took from 2006-2007. I was a senior in high school and had decided that I wanted to attend Azusa Pacific University in the fall of 2007. I also wanted to play football, and study music. For reasons that would be too great a diversion from the main narrative of this blog, those two desires were mutually exclusive. So in the heat of the moment, wanting to still play football, I switched majors during the class registration process. 

I landed on the other thing I was interested in doing with my life. Film. I had done some little short movies with our Church’s Mini DV camera (Perks of being a pastor’s kid!) that were TERRIBLE, but nothing of any real narrative value. Still, I thought it would be fun to make that my major.

The fall semester started, and I had dropped out of football and was attending the film major orientation class they had for freshmen the first week. I sat there with my new friend Rik who lived across the hall in my dorm. We sat there a little awkwardly as many of the incoming freshmen asked questions that made us feel that we were way behind.

As we walked back to the dorm, we both kinda talked ourselves out of the film major. Rik wasn’t going to be taking a film class, but I was. I decided to give the class a shot. I soon realized I was out of my depth for even the intro class. Immediately following that class, I had the fateful first day of Public Communication. It was a life-changing class that I’ve written about before on other forums. I decided I would devote 4 years and $100,000 to pursuing a communication degree. Rik picked Graphic Design and now runs his own print shop, Kinetic Print Co. (If you need some shirts or stickers hit them up!)

Don’t get me wrong, I loved it. Allison and I had the same major so we were able to take most of the main classes together and those were some amazing days! 

However, there was still a little ember inside that wanted to eventually make films. It laid dormant for a lot of years. Then, when Allison started getting into blogging, I started picking up a camera and we did some video stuff, then I started doing video editing and filming for my Church, and that kept the ember hot as I learned how to use a camera. When we moved to Sac and started making more of an effort to vlog and I started Focus Video, the ember was finally allowed to burn. 

I poured myself into learning more about cameras, lighting, composition, and started teaching Allison some of those same things. Our vlogs got a little better, and when we went to Pismo last October, I made what I would call my first short film “The Salt and Foam”. I was so happy with it, and with the reception it got!

So I wanted to do it again. But, I had no idea what to do. I like for art to “say something”, and sometimes, I don’t have anything to “say”. So I just lived my life for a while hoping the next idea would hit me.

It wasn’t until I had made the capes for OJ & MJ that I had the idea to actually make it into a little short film. The girls were so excited about the capes and wanted to run around in the backyard, I quickly grabbed my camera just to shoot some b-roll stuff to maybe use in a vlog down the road. Or just cut the footage to some music and post on Instagram and call it a day. But, then like a day later, I had “something to say.” I started working on a script and found a good track to use and cut the second sequence to it and then needed something for the first part. 

That night, after we put the kids to bed, I reset all the sewing stuff, rigged up lights, and taught Allison how to use our Blackmagic Design Ursa Mini 4k (A 10-pound monstrosity of a camera) and we filmed the sequence you see in the film. 

It’s crazy sometimes, you have to work for an idea, other times it’s like a switch just turns and there you have the whole thing laid out.

I hope you enjoyed this little film, we really like it and we’re proud of it!

If you want to see more like this, let us know, we’ll start banging our heads together and see what we can come up with!