Sometimes I forget that my brother and I made a movie together.
It wasn't just us - we had so many people involved but my brother and I wrote the script together (well, my brother Wilson did the typing) and we tag teamed the directing. He also did all of the sound recording and I shot the entire film (except a few scenes that my brother picked up my slack).
This all took place in Austin. (Side note: most of the photos I'm taking from IMDB since I uploaded them myself long ago and don't know which hard drive I have the original files on)
Here's the IMDB page.
This idea for a film hit close to home. It's basically a weed dealer in Texas that is trying to corporatize his weed sales by selling pizzas (with gift bags of weed) included in the price. His goal is to blow up just before legalization has finally arrived in Texas but doesn't realize he's stepping on the turf of an already-established dealer. How's that for a plot? haha
The concept was simple and allowed us to fund this thing with only $10-20K (can't remember the specifics) and I threw in my savings of about $4-5K.
Here's the trailer:
There were a lot of cool things that happened during this month long shoot. One being that I've never taken off 30 days to shoot a movie. We would get up at 6 or so every day and end late at night dropping footage from the day and making sure everything was charged to do it again the next day.
My brother and I worked so hard to make sure everything went according to plan on such tight resources. And it wasn't just us, Andrew Wofford was running on empty the entire time - he was not only producing the film (with us) - he was Mr. Greenpepper, the weed entrepreneur in the movie.
Another neat thing worth noting was that Andrew's professor helped us out by playing the villain - the established dealer in Austin. Played by the great Roger Guenveur Smith - an actor that's been in tons of movies and appears in a lot of Spike Lee films.
He was incredible to work with and was in town for 7 days where we made sure we captured all scenes he was involved in. We even had to scrap a couple days worth of shooting because the putt-putt course we were filming on (with permission) found one of our printed script copies and read it not realizing the mature content. They made us leave after we had filmed so much at their place, but we ended up keeping a lot of the footage in the film.
Another cool note is that my brother just married the main actress in the film - KarieAnn is one of my favorite people and they hit it off during the 30 day shoot.
There were so many talented people working on the film and it was awesome that we knew almost all of them beforehand - Nuri Hazzard was my brother's roommate in college (or if not they were always hanging) and the other main character Buster was played by a good friend of Andrew's Joseph Santos.
We made a lot of interconnecting stories throughout the film and one of my favorites was that of Chilly Willy, the homeless Austinite. He plays guitar and the soundtrack is pretty much all him. Basically all of the soundtrack is played by Don Hymel who plays Chilly Willy, or my brother.
So many memories come up as I type about this and I'm feeling quite nostalgic about making this film. I'm not sure what else to say about it but I'd love to answer any questions or maybe I'll type some more info as comments and replies. We're not professional filmmakers but we both went to film school (I went to the University of North Texas in Denton and he went to University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.) I started a videography business in 2011 (travel videos, weddings, real estate) and he's been into production and was hired by Info Wars and Alex Jones in 2016. He literally finished a 6-7 year script last week and we plan to sell it to fund other projects instead of filming this one ourselves. It'd require a huge budget.
We've always been inspired to make films since we were very young and this was the big one we had a go with. I'm very proud of it and love showing people so I'll provide the link and if you're interested comment below and I'll send you the password to watch.
This isn't a way to get views on the movie but I love sharing it and I feel like we didn't truly get to share it with the world. We entered into tons of festivals (thank you brother - that's quite expensive) but we were only accepted into 2 if I remember correctly. The one we all went to and spoke was the Austin Revolution Film Festival and we ended up being nominated for Best Actress due to KarieAnn's talent.
Anyways, I leave you with this stream of conscious mess of a post but I was thinking about it all day and wanted to share with you fellow Hive Homies. Hopefully this was an entertaining read and I'd love to share the film with you. It's a 2 hour flick so no worries at all if that's a bit long for you to casually be surfing Hive haha
Full disclosure: I posted this handcrafted article last night on Den.Social as original content and copied most of it over to Hive. I like to be transparent and love being involved in both platforms.
Have a great night!
I watched the film and, frankly, I'm surprised it wasn't accepted into more festivals. Really good production values - sound and lighting were top notch for such a small budget. The acting and music were good as well, especially Karie Ann and Roger.
Thank you so much for the kind words! We had fun making it and our funds were exhausted after submitting around the area (and even country) but I'm glad we tried so many - not sure why it wasn't accepted at a lot of them. And yes, KA and Roger did amazing - glad we got to work with a talented cast and crew.
Wow! You weren't kidding with "film" and "filming" in your profile. I'd like to see the film. My wife and I used to be members of the Independent Film Society of Colorado. We were programmers for their Indie Spirit film festival, so we love watching independent films.
The only actual film I was involved with making was Tsunambee, which has a 1.8/10 rating on IMDB, probably due to my performance as "Professor." I got killed in the first few minutes. The film used to be on Amazon Prime, but it looks like it got demoted to Pluto TV.
Haha hey at least you made it onto the screen! That's pretty awesome being involved in independent films, and I'm sure you got to see a good amount of them during that time. I'll look into Tsunambee! We didn't really know how to approach the Amazon, Netflix, etc platform world so our film just sits on Vimeo. Sometimes I think it might not be too late but I'm so busy running other projects/businesses. I've never direct messaged someone on Hive - you can do that right? I can send you the link/password to our film. Or I can message your Instagram, Twitter, or something that has direct messaging!
Thanks. Not sure how to dm on Hive. My only other social media is Twitter - jkunsch (@jkunsch2).
Awesome! Just followed you on Twitter, I think you might have to follow me back for us to be able to DM (I rarely DM on there too haha)
Followed you as well.
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