Thanks for asking me. As for about myself, I'm a whopping 23 years old and I live out in the middle of nowhere, Kansas. I grew up watching lots of films and made sure I got to see as many movies as possible despite the fact the closest theater/video rental store was 20 miles away. I think it's because of this interest that I began reading magazines and newspaper articles and later on internet articles on the subject. I have yet to garner a full understanding of filmmaking but I have a pretty good idea on how the business works. Lately, I've been studying up on distribution as my film, "Zombiegeddon", has a good shot at getting a decent deal.

I started tiny, like most. I did a short called "The Day the Vampire Ate My Brain", a feature called "Mob Daze", and I helped out a kid by producing (not financially) his short "Shotgun". This past summer I decided to put every cent into a script I rushed out in no time at all and just before production. Basically, I didn't want to wait another year to make a film. I certainly look forward to learning more and progressing along.

Well, this was a tough shoot. Let's start with the script. I had a project planned to shoot July 13th but I wasn't too happy with the script and neither was the lead. So, I scrapped it and decided to move up this movie I was making just for fun to the top spot. The thing was, there was a local actor somewhat known for horror movies who had appeared in "Mob Daze" so I joked around one day about taking his character and throwing him in the middle of a horror movie. So, this became the big project. I wrote the script very quickly and everything seemed fine. Then, all of the sudden, the main location told me they couldn't give it to me like they had said. So, I had to rewrite the last 60 pages COMPLETELY. I'm sure most didn't expect it to even shoot because I came up weeks upon July 13th without having a finished script. Then I had to mail the new one out to like 50 people. So, that was problem #1.

Everything I did with the production was as organized as could be, although the errors seemed to happen when someone else was dealing with an actor. We had two that I hadn't even talked to so I had no idea when they were going to be willing to shoot. They didn't get in until 1am and then they had to leave the next evening--do you ask an established producer/director to get up at 6am when they just got there? Well, I did. I guess since it's a nice thing, I can say it was JR Bookwalter that I made get up less than five hours after he got to sleep but he was incredibly gracious when I talked to him later at a convention, shrugging it off because he said he was used to it. That's a good example of someone who is used to low budget filmmaking.

Unfortunately, he was not one of many gracious people. We had people get upset over the stupidest things. If Bookwalter had gotten upset, that'd at least be justified. He's a name producer/director/writer who was doing this as a favor to my co-producer. We had nobodies get upset over stuff we still don't know what they were upset about. We had a b name actor go crazy at the hotel for no real reason. We had "pro" actors who couldn't remember their lines. I know editing has been tough because we had two actors with large parts who changed their lines so much it's not the same each time. We had a lot of dead weight on the sets too, something we'll correct more and more with each film.

Some of the above reasons are the things that scare me out of shooting on film just yet. I'm hoping to find the right actors who have the right mentality to do things right so they will follow the blueprint. Once you go off of doing things right, you mess up the blueprint. <.p>

As for equipment, it was shot using a sony dsr 300.

I hope to have some VHS available by the end of April but I certainly encourage folks to bookmark wild-range.com (as of the time of this interview, this site is not yet up) which will be ready about the time "Zombiegeddon" is done. We hope to take it many places over the course of the summer and, hopefully, someplace near you.

I attended my first convention in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the Trek Expo. At the time, we were in search for someone to play "God". The film "Eight Legged Freaks" was just about to come out and they had David Arquette, Kari Wuhrer and some others there so I was rushing over to see them on stage. As I crossed from the food room to the stage, something caught my eye to the side. I overheard a woman talking with Ed and backtracked back to him. I looked over his pictures real quick as he held out his hand to greet me. I was real quiet, thinking too much, and instead of saying very much of a "hello", I went "you don't happen to be able to work non-sag do you?" Surprisingly, he didn't seem too shocked and happened to be non-sag because he lives in Texas (a right to work state like Kansas). We talked a bit and he laughed when I mentioned playing "god" and, as luck would have it, he did the film. As it turned out, Ed was great in the movie.

Well, I'm distributing the film myself to theaters because who else would go out and promote a movie that's going to have to be shown on a video/dvd projector and is a b movie called "Zombiegeddon". As for the theaters to approach, I just found some and asked. I have yet to get turned down, although I know it's coming. I mean, we're talking about a b movie during the hottest weeks in July.

If I had something to do over again, I wouldn't have brought in name talent for "Mob Daze". I probably should have gone with a no name cast and directed it myself so that everything worked right. If that turned out nicely, then I could go on to something with names in it, such as "Zombiegeddon". Basically, "Mob Daze" became my film to practice producing on and "Zombiegeddon" became my film to practice directing on. I'm supposed to direct a short film of about 30 minutes but then I have to decide if I'm ready or not for a feature. In the end, it's all a matter of practice and studying. You really don't have to have money to do a decent film. If you're smart, you could do a movie for nothing but people don't seem to have either the wits or courage to do that.

It's also a good idea to slowly surround yourself with good people. I won't work with any of the people that had problems on the sets of my films again. I'm currently putting together a crew for next summer that one of my regular actors nicknamed "the Dead Dozen". To do a true indie film, you have to have people willing to go without eating, sleeping...willing to drive 24 hours to get to a location...I'm sure the majority of the people reading this will scoff at that but that's the honest truth--if you don't have those people, your life is going to be a LOT harder when trying to make a film.