Growing Up Geek: My First Short Film — KILLER CROCODILE FROM HELL
This is the latest in a series of articles about my experience growing up as a geek, working as an actor at a young age, and developing interests that would eventually drive me to start GeekTyrant. For all of the entries in the Growing Up Geek series so far, click here.
After doing a stint of acting both on stage and on screen, my agent disappeared, never to be heard from again. It was around that time that my dad bought our very first VHS camera! This is when my interest in being in front of the camera faded and my desire to be the guy behind the camera making the movie started to manifest itself.
My dad bought that camera for himself and for the family, but once I got a hold of it, I never let go of the damn thing. I was shooting everything I could all the time. I never stopped. If you were to watch our home movies, it was me shooting it all and it was the most random stuff. I was trying to get reactions from my brothers, so I would annoy the hell out of them. It got to the point where I wanted to start shooting movies. I was always experimenting with the form and seeing what I can do with it.
The first short film I made features a killer crocodile toy brutally attacking a kid, who was played by my little brother. Everything I shot as a kid was experimental because I had no idea what I was doing in. It was just self-teaching myself stuff. Hell, I had no editing equipment, so I was doing in-camera editing, which meant I had to shoot everything in sequence.
I remember my goal was to make it as bloody and violent as possible using what we had to work with. As I've said before, I was a huge horror fan when I was a kid and I thought it would be funny to make a movie about a cartoonish toy crocodile killing a little kid. So yeah, I was a demented child. I love that I had a whole sequence in which my brother basically attacked himself with a toy crocodile.
Shooting this film immediately hooked me, and from that moment I knew I wanted to write and direct movies for a living. That was my dream! Hell, it still is. Ever since I made this first movie, I never stopped wanting to be a filmmaker. I was thirteen years old when the directing bug bit me.
It was just a ton of fun shooting this thing and I thought how cool it would be to actually do that for a living. My first short is absolutely ridiculous, but I still can't help but bust up laughing whenever I see it. Hell, they're all ridiculous and embarrassing as hell, but I'm gonna be sharing them with you.
I just had all of the short films I made with my brothers and friends transferred digitally and I will be uploading them to YouTube. My next set of Growing Up Geek articles will focus on these films that we made. Again, to catch up on all of the previous Growing Up Geek posts, click here.
So without further ado, I present to you my very first film: Killer Crocodile From Hell!