1986-1999
My attitude to filmmaking was simply a fascination and incorruptible, unswerving, immovable desire to tell stories. I picked up the camera – to which the depth of my knowledge was simply pick it up and point it at the thing and press the button. I told people what to do, which I liked. Later I would get cumulatively frustrated by people not doing what they’re told. I eventually decided that if people were paid, they would be obligated to do what I say – therefore I planned the ways that were available to me, to raise the eleven thousand dollars to make my first professional grade short movie.
I would get a job, finish my novel and hope to sell it, and leverage my old web design paid gigs into a computer game programming job via learning Python from books. Somehow I would earn and save that money and I would make my movie.
In high school (having dropped out for a year at the beginning of NCEA 2, this was my second attempt at sixth form/NCEA 2) when I was making my first student short movie – the epic horror parody entitled The Giant Satanic Potato and the Killer Apes from Hell (1999)– it has changed titles many times. These days I just refer to it as Demo Reel 1. There was a scene where a white trash stalker/rapist creeps outside the house of a young blonde teen. He is supposed to masturbate while watching her through the window. With a spark of inspiration, I filled a water bottle with milk, so that the actor could cum on the wall at the moment of climax. Unfortunately, it was a white wall, so the effect was not as it could have been.I later wrote a (so far unpublished) book about my micro-budget and guerilla movie-making experiences.
the joy of eating and the folly of thinking 