Well, last night we wrapped on a short project, Wappo vs. the World.

Gustavo Stebner contacted me a couple weeks back to help out on a project. He was coming to town to put together a short film to be used as promotional material for CineFestival (the nation’s oldest and longest running Latino film festival). The piece will be broken up into a few webisodes, building up to the opening night of the film festival, which runs February 23 – March 2, 2013. Gustavo wrote, directed, and is currently busy editing the episodes. The story involves a masked wrestler, Wappo, as he transitions from a career as an underground wrestling sensation, to greater fame. Along the way he battles vampires, zombies, and the wrath of a spurned woman.

Some of our actors remarked on what a calm set we were all working on. I found myself pointing out, on no few occasions, that when you spend eight days to shoot fourteen pages, you can maintain a certain relaxed atmosphere. True, it also helped that we all like one another.

I keep finding myself on these pro bono gigs. But I did realize the other day that I am getting better at being selective — if the project isn’t financially rewarding, it is always fun. Here are some random pictures of the shoot.

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Years ago, back when my friend Pete and I were working on our digital feature (Vaya Con Dios, Asshole) I was playing around with Garage Band. I built up an industrial drum and bass sort of tune and laid down some dialogue from the film. Specifically some semi-ad lib rants from Marc Daratt, in the guise of a televangelist. I quite liked the outcome. (I have no idea if it still exists on a hard drive somewhere….) I had this idea that I would do a playful musical collage for every project. Sadly, this never happened.

However, I began playing around with the program Ableton Live recently. I built up some dubstep-esque track and began layering some of Martha Prentiss’ monologue from my recent short film with her (“Celebrating the Solstice”). The rough edit is parked on Soundcloud. “What’s the Soundtrack to Your Apocalypse?”)

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/75268253″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

I put it on my iPhone and it’s in my playlist I listen to while running. Twice. Surrounded by the likes of the Flaming Lips, Cafe Tacuba, the London Apartments, and the rest of my workout miscellany. It amuses me in that, if I take the River Walk route downtown to HemisFair Park and back, I inevitably hear my Martha song whilst running past a location we shot at in the film.