Growing Up Geek: My Second Short Film — TOP SECRET JET
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.
My last Growing Up Geek article focused on my dad buying a video camera and me starting to experiment with it and shoot my own short films. This next series of Growing Up Geek posts will revolve around my adventures in filmmaking and learning how to make films guerrilla-style.
After having completed our first short film (a horror movie about a killer crocodile mauling a little boy to death), we decided that our follow-up film would be an action spy thriller.
I had the in-camera editing thing down pretty well, now it was just a matter of taking things to a whole new level of awesomeness. The next film we made was called Top Secret Jet and we set out to make a thrilling, balls-to-the-wall action movie with all kinds of over the top ridiculous action and violence.
Being thirteen years old with no budget and working with my younger brothers, we were forced to get creative with what we had. We obviously didn't reach the level of Michael Bay action, but in our own minds as little kids, when we watched the completed film, that's exactly what we thought we accomplished.
Top Secret Jet was our masterpiece, and to this day it's one of our favorite things that we've done. It was just so fun to make and the end result is ridiculous bliss.
The story follows a villainous contractor who is hired to steal a top secret jet from the United States Government. But a hard-ass cowboy hired to protect it stands in his way, and the two characters end up in an insane fight that rivals that of what we saw in Batman v Superman.
Like I said, we had to get creative to bring this story to life. For example, I wanted to throw one of the characters off a balcony, so we built a dummy that fell apart mid-fall. I also wanted to break one of the characters' legs, so we stuffed some pants and put a long stick in the leg so that when the leg was pulled back the stick would break and make a gruesome snapping sound. There were a few other things we did that I'm sure you'll catch while watching it.
Ok, that's enough set up. Sit back, relax, and enjoy Top Secret Jet, the second film that I made with my brothers. Just a reminder: we were kids when we made this!