TriggerPoint (2010)

Sam becomes a victim of his own delusional game and is trapped within the cycle of his mind.

TriggerPoint is my second project for Advanced Video Production and is a combination of film noir and post-modernism. I was inspired to work on this project after watching Memento and Pi.

 Overall, it was a blast filming it.

WatchTriggerPoint
Official Site
Now on IMDb

Dreamscape (2010)

Elena is trapped in her endless nightmare where escape seems futile.

Dreamscape is my first project for Advanced Video Production and is a short based on the theme of escape (moodscape). The narration was co-written with Ron Williamson. Time was a factor, as we tried to film all the forest scenes at magic hour on the first day.

Watch Dreamscape
Dreamscape official Site

Now on iMDB

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind is a memorable biographical film that has won 4 well-deserved Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Writer.

John Nash, portrayed convincingly by Russell Crowe, is an intellectual math prodigy who could solve the most mind-numbing problems that would bewilder even the greatest mathematicians and is a promising student at Princeton University. For his thesis paper, John is attempting to develop a truly original idea, resulting in a brilliant theory on mathematical economics.

Near the beginning, he admits that he is “better at numbers than people.” However, his unexpected roommate, Charles, is ultimately his best friend. Though he has several other influential acquaintances.

5 years later, he becomes a professor at MIT where John writes a complex problem on the board during calculus and challenges his students to solve it, stating that it would take the average student their whole lives to solve it and some would take a few months. However, no one was able to solve the complex problem, not even one of his most intellectual students, Alicia Larde, portrayed by Jennifer Connelly, whom he married later on.

One day, John meets William Parcher, a Department of Defense Agent who is represented by Ed Harris, and is asked to the Pentagon to decipher an intricate encryption. He remarkably solves it mentally, astounding the other code-breakers, which led him to being pursued by a black car and ever since then John became paranoid and behaves erratically. Alicia is under tremendous stress after realizing her husband is suffering from a mental disorder called schizophrenia. An interlude of hallucinations and delusional state of mind was enough to subject their marriage on a brink.

Eventually, John discovers that William Parcher and his best friend Charles never existed and they are all fragments of his distorted mind. Now, it is nearly impossible to determine who is real and who is a product of his delusional mind.

This film does an excellent job in depicting the brilliant and delusional life of John Nash, who is known for numerous significant discoveries such as the Nash Equilibrium and the game theory, earning him a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1996. In addition, it is truly inspirational and heartwarming watching John’s triumph over his lifelong battle against himself. “Nash. Who's winning - you, or you?”


Check out this equation just for fun!

Ck Embedding Theorem
If M= m-dimensional Riemannian manifold, then there is a number, n (n=m2 + 5m + 3)
Every point p of M, the derivative (dfp) is a linear map from the tangent space (TpM)
(u,v) = dfp(u) X dfp(v)
Partial Differential Equation (PDE)

A Gum's Life (2009) - Festivals

A Gum's Life (2009)

"A Gum's Life" has been screened in several Film Festivals:

2011 15th Annual North American All Youth Film and Education Day
2011 Soul 4 Reel Film Festival

2011 Los Angeles Student Media Festival
2010 Won The Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Prize Best Child Produced Film 27th Annual Chicago International Children's Film Festival
2010 Winner at International Student Media Festival in Anaheim
2010 Los Angeles Film Festival
2010 Reel Teens Film Festival in New York
2010 Sidewalk Moving Pictures Film Festival in Alabama
2010 Santa Cruz Film Festival California
2010 Cine Youth Film Festival in Chicago
2010 Made by Kids: ICA International Children's Film Festival Boston
2010 Newport Beach Film Festival California
2010 10th Annual deadCENTER Film Festival in Oklahoma
2010 Won the Audience Award at Screen Film Festival California
2010 NFFTY 2010 in Seattle
2010 ViewFinders International Film Festival for Youth in Canada
2009 Marlborough Film Festival California

"A Gum's Life" incorporates claymation, which is the process of altering the position of the clay characters after each frame.

Claymation is complex but as soon as we got the hang of it, we were cruising on our way to post. It is advantageous that nearly half of the film is animation and the other half takes place in the classroom.

In my opinion, the most time consuming part in filming this movie, is animating the characters' eyes. Between each frame, we had to change the position of the gums' pupils as well as carefully placing a thin piece of pink clay to make it seem as if they are blinking. The blue pupils were just a little bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. It took steady hands to stick each pupil on each of the gums' eyes. By the end of production, there were numerous blue pupils lying on the bottom of the pack of gum that were accidentally dropped during animation.

Watch it Now! or YouTube!