Category Archives: Movie Culture

The Beast – a good scene, a failed short movie (2000) When I first started making movies, I was inexperienced, so I didn’t realise how difficult making short movies would be. So I would write these epic, intricate, sweeping, complex stories. Then I would shoot the first few frames and I would find that IContinue reading “CREWING FOR MOVIES – AN EXPERIENCE”

The Poltergeist Movie: Part One (script development) Somewhere in the middle of 2010, I put an advert on the New Zealand Art and Creative Website called The Big Idea – my advert described an opportunity to make a short movie without a budget – my ad explicitly stated that I had a mini digital video camera (notContinue reading “CREWING FOR MOVIES 2 – AN EXPERIENCE”

The Poltergeist Movie: Part Two (Principal Photography) On day one of the shoot, our SFX guy had done some research and had found out that cooked pumpkin-mush mixed with red food colouring can give the effect of blood and guts. We mixed the red food colouring with some blue, to darken it. I cooked aContinue reading “CREWING FOR MOVIES 3 – AN EXPERIENCE”

1986-1999 The concept behind The Thing Under the Bed (1986) was that there was a monster under the bed and he wanted to consume the living. I was four. I was also the writer, director and director of photography for this, my first short movie. I also played the monster. This was the beginning of a tradition ofContinue reading “CREWING FOR MOVIES 4 – BACKGROUND”