Fire-Wired Blog

First things first, Junk Mail is out and available for home streaming ! Go watch it with your kids and then awkwardly explain the main conceit. Or don’t… but if you do, know that is exactly what happened at the official 48 screenings. We laughed a very meta laugh. 2025 DSM 48HFP has been something special. Spoiler alert, we won Best of City for the second time , took home Best Directing for the 3rd time, BEST ENSEMBLE for the first time (lots of thoughts on this), and audience award for Group C. The hardware this year was also super cool. It should be mentioned Chris Kottman, new DSM 48 City Producer, nailed the assignment. Were there differences from a Sam 48, certainly but nothing to complain about. I can’t wait to see what Chris comes up with. The important parts are the big screen showings are still in place and the Best of City felt like a serious event for the people who are invested in 48. So Junk Mail, when we were announced as Best Film of the competition I was surprised of co...

There she be, "Wheel of Death" in all her incredible, gory, gnarly, fun, and funny glory. There is nothing like finishing a film and just knowing it is a success. Not perfect, maybe it had perfection programmed into its GPS and along the route saw a tourist trap that was too good to pass by and soon decided that in its heart it needed to stay there for the night. That is what I'm talking about. Wheel of Death is a wonderfully wild tourist trap of horror comedy that actually delivers the good.  There are so many points I want to hit but I'll start with the thing everyone needs to know: Craig Bahnsen's performance as Doug the Demon is so impossibly good. I love so many things in this film and hit so many of my goals in it, but the top of the praise heap is definitely Craig. I didn't know in 2019 when we asked him to slap on some JNCOs that he had this in him, but I am so happy he hung around and delivered a performance that makes this film the most rewatchable ...

On set of "Essential Essence." Tiny Explosions did something we have never done before; we pre-planned an important element of our 48 Hour Film Project film. I am a bit of a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to the rules. I don't care if it is a month, week, or hours before the kickoff- if you have an idea for our film, keep it in your head. Does that box have a logo on it? We need a different box. Can you see that Kohl's signage in the shot? We need to reframe. In fact, I get rather cranky when other teams break the rules and pre-write their film. What's the point of 48 if not for the constraints? Still, we kind of massaged the rules a bit in that we made puppets.  For as long as I can remember, my family has watched the "Muppet Family Christmas" on or around Christmas Eve. It originally aired in December 1987 and I still watch the original recording my parents made on VHS. It is one of my favorite things; the songs, all the Henson characters, the gags, th...

Making "Elf Off the Shelf," photo by Erin Hogan. I love the experience of watching something great. It could be film, TV, a stage play, live music, and many other arts, that feeling of you and a piece of art meeting for the first time is exquisite. There's only a couple things that top it, one is actually creating that art. When I discovered the real power of movies around 13 or 14, I think I watched my favorites on a loop. I would toss in new discoveries here and there, and it quickly grew into an obsession. But then a funny thing happened, I borrowed a camera from my media production classes in high school and one Sunday afternoon my friends and I made a mockumentary mixing skate culture and free-style walking called " Midwest Money Money. " This rush was similar to watching movies but the intensity was jacked to the nines and I carried that feeling for weeks. I showed our film to everyone and anyone who would sit in front of a screen with me. The filmmaking ...

 A year and a half ago I had an idea for a short film. Between that moment and roughly a year later I turned that idea into an actual thing, No Shortcuts . That is probably the best thing in filmmaking; a match is sparked and if you've got the supplies you can get a pretty righteous fire roaring. Well my small fire came together this past March and TONIGHT in Burlington, Iowa at the Snake Alley Festival of Film , audiences will get the chance to warm their hearts and minds with it. Did that metaphor work? I'm not sure. Idea, production, creation equals match, spark, fire. Right? Oh well. I've been watching a lot of Justin Hawkins Rides Again lately so I'm prone to metaphorical and performative fun at the moment.  If you haven't been playing along, No Shortcuts is a one-man-band film I produced over the course of 2021 and early 2022. It's a mix of my 8 year-old self wishing he had the strength of The Ultimate Warrior so he could run a mile in 5 minutes and my 38...

Well it took 10 months but FINALLY..."No Shortcuts" is in the can. A one-man band short film I undertook in Winter 2021 to give myself a creative project when I had practically no free time is shot, cut, colored, scored, and ready to be submitted to a few festivals. Now looking back, I gotta say it was much more work than I was ready for. No Shortcuts has practical effects, computer generated effects, sound effects, compositing work and color touches that all together make it happen. Most films require a lot of post work, but science fiction requires an additional layer of care to make them work and not turn an audience off. Much of my efforts worked well, some will be nitpicked. But that's okay, I wasn't going for perfection. I was simply going. I will say I learned a lot about my tolerance for imperfection when tired and/or cold. I also cemented my belief filmmaking is meant to be a collaborative endeavor. Not only to produce a better end product, but get a grea...

One month ago Tiny Explosions made it's 10th 48 Hour Film Project, The Special. Good times were had and here is said film. For the third time in our ten year run, a Tiny Explosions film did not make Best of City and you know what, I was totally cool with it. Why? Because for the last four months my life has been a blur of packing, moving, work, unpacking, and parenting two silly little girls. I've been so busy I was barely able to carve out time for 48. Our old house closed the day 48 kicked off and our new house closed the day The Special screened. I love 48 but the timing this year ended up being counter to practically every responsibility in my life. I barely managed to carve out time to write, shoot, and edit. Our film was written in one hour, filmed in five hours, and edited in eight. In May, I had all these plans for camera tricks I wanted to try, goals I had set for this year's film, and hopes for it's post-48 life. As soon as we accepted an offer on our house I...

  A year ago I was super jazzed to share that a short film I directed and a screenplay I plucked out of my family history were headed for the Southern Iowa short film staple the Snake Alley Festival of Film . Sadly, a certain global minor apocalypse got in the way of that happening. But if the delta variant doesn't ravage the state of Iowa over the next month, it looks like A Widow's Might and Family Tree are all set to take the stage and screen in Burlington next month. I don't know if anyone was planning on making the trek to the " Backhoe Capital of the World, "   but if so, mark your calendar for August 5th and purchase your tickets now. Burlington is a lovely town and SNAFF is supposed to be the bees knees. If it wasn't for how busy my life is at the moment I would be staying down there all week for the film festival and all the filmmaker events. Alas, I will probably only make it for my projects and a little bit more. Tickets are quite reasonable for ...

I have always been terrible at sitting still. My parents used to make me sit on my hands as even when I was in "time out," I would pester my siblings and drum on the wall or counter. So decades ago after my umpteenth hand sit, I realized this time was a gift to develop new adventures in my hyperactive mind. At the moment, my creative motor is standing idle . For years I've juggled several interests and outputs including:  Working a video production job,  Writing a weekly tech column,  Semi-regularly writing-directing-producing short films,  Composing music for video bed music and video projects,  Producing family videos and Podcasting.  As I type this, all of that has been culled to just my day job. This is of course temporary as our household becomes proficient in parenting two young children, but still... I'm restless. So since my 2nd daughter's birth in November I've returned to my handsitting brainstorming to figure out how I can fill the void left by m...

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 ...

 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% . ...

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 ...

For Tiny Explosions ' 6th bout in the Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project  we lucked into the opportunity to make either a "Road Movie" or Sci-Fi short. We decided to kind of do both, and the result was a film worthy of screening, titled  Snap Back . Required Elements for this year's film included: Character : Freddy or Fiona Brown, poet Prop : Rubber Band Dialogue : "You heard what she said" While we did screen at Best of City this year, we didn't win any awards. A head-scratcher because why would our film screen again if it didn't receive any specific acclaim? Maybe we Being There'd ourselves . In the long run awards (outside of the overall winner or runner-up) are no big deal as you don't know how the judges graded and the recipients are almost always puzzling. As an example a couple of Tiny Explosions' past award wins have been confusing. The important thing is we're all exceptionally proud of the film and I don'...