Fire-Wired Blog

Believe it or not, 2020 has been a really fun year for me when it comes to filmmaking. Tiny Explosions released six short films, I wrote four short film screenplays, one of those screenplays was accepted into the Snake Alley Festival of Film (of course, Covid-19 put a real damper on that, but it was the only place I submitted it too so ya know... Woohoo!), we won a few awards along the way, I started writing a bunch of promising feature length scripts, and then finally, I guested on a podcast that I really enjoy. The Cinematic Heartland podcast is produced and hosted by  Kevin Isaacson of I Like Ike Films , a North-Central Iowa filmmaker who within the last five years has produced a nice run of short films and feature film. He is a really down to Earth guy and an easy person to hold a conversation with. It was a real treat to talk about my year in film, how I got interested in storytelling, and an opportunity to promote The Film Lounge. If you have an hour, I suggest to give my e

11 months ago Tiny Explosions produced Family Tree as part of filmracing.com 's 100 Hour Film Race, and after it's "festival run" here it is! Following the production and release of Red Flag , Hogan and I felt the sting to keep going . Not wait another year to make a short as we had been doing as of late. I love the 48 Hour Film Project as it allows all your collaborators to lock off a weekend, write-shoot-produce a short, and then see it on the big screen a couple weeks later. The 100 Hour Film Race is similar except you get double the time and it screens at the Film Racing home base in Atlanta, so the team didn't get a chance to see it on the big screen. And of course due to the pandemic, we never did.  So instead of just saying "Hey, we made that" and let it hit the internet –KER-SPLAT– I entered it in a bunch of Iowa film festivals. It was programmed in a handful, won an award in one, and even had an in-person screening at the Des Moines Undergr

 Here it is, Tiny Explosions best (?) film yet, El Engaño! Made as part of the pandemic version of the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project 2020, I am really proud of this film . It's the best shot film we've made, it is paced really well, there's no over-the-top acting, no gross out humor, it is a stand alone story not a sketch, it has actual visual effects (an explosion...), And oh yeah, it won the award for best editing. Plus I was told it was the runner up audience award for our screening group, always cool. It was nice to win an award that I felt the film was worthy of , and truth be told, this online release is an even better edit on all accounts. To repeat my annual refrain, these awards are almost always mystifying and quasi-meaningless outside of winning it all. And once again there are some head scratchers in the final awards. One difference this year is 48HFP shared their scoring criteria: Artistic Merit 45%, Technical Merit 30%, and Adherence to the Assignment 25% .

Update : As was expected, The 2020 Snake Alley Festival of Film has been delayed due to Covid-19 concerns. No dates have been set, but the hope is now for the fall. Seeing as the USA is not New Zealand (where they made the hard choices and have effectively eradicated the virus), I'd call that optimistic. I guess the old saying is right; you can lead a country to quarantine but you can't make it shelter in place. I'll update again when there is more share. I am excited .  Last fall, I got the lightning strike idea that I needed to adapt a story my Grandmother wrote as a child into a screenplay. That may sound slight, but this story is incredible; it is the story of my Great Grandmother Martha Adams giving birth during the German invasion of Belgium in World War I , followed by her braving the war, losing her husband, remarrying and moving to Illinois, and then personal trials galore up until her death in 1976. It is a story that would make Scarlett O'Hara say "Than

If there is any silver lining to the crisis that is Covid-19, it is the creativity is running wild. I am one of the lucky multimedia people out there; I have a job, I am essential, and I have a lot of work to do. Still I'm trapped at home most of the time and have many hours to fill. So sure I've watched my fair share of streaming TV and movies, but what works better at passing the time than watching? Making! Week one: make a short featuring two lines of dialogue. One from a classic film, another from 48 years past. There are a LOT of quarantine film challenges going around right now. Locally,  Iowa has a local weekly cellphone film challenge and internationally, the 48 Hour Film Project created a variation of their theme called " Stuck at Home 48 ." With the Tiny Explosions crew more or less trapped in their houses, we decided to hop on the bandwagon with more than 1,800 filmmaking teams worldwide.  Two weekends in, we've had a blast