My Latest Filmmaking Experience (Including...Acting??)

I'm grateful to have had the opportunity this past weekend to help my friend Craig McCourry, an accomplished filmmaker and the founder of the Battle Ground Film House group, with his latest short film project!

Titled The Singularity Protocol, it's a period sci-fi/drama about two British soldiers during World War II who get trapped in an underground bunker and then subsequently make contact with an AI from the distant future (or not-so-distant from our perspective).

We shot it over two days at his studio in Battle Ground, WA, and it was a great experience. The main actors were from New York and one of the producers was from Palo Alto, but the rest of the crew were local to the Vancouver/Battle Ground area, most of us already having met before in the aforementioned Film House group.

I ran sound, which, thanks to the cool tech provided by Craig and the DP/cameramen James Chick and Joey Hammond, was a pretty straightforward gig - I just had to monitor the sound recorders to make sure the batteries didn't die mid-take or anything like that.

I also got to make my acting debut (my uncredited cameo in Hold My Beer doesn't count) as a Japanese soldier named Kenji Saito who gets shot by one of the main characters! By the time I appear, I'm already a corpse, so I didn't have any lines. However, I discovered that acting dead is a lot harder than you may think, as you have to hold your breath and lay completely motionless for what feels like a very long time. But it was still a lot of fun! I think I may have caught the acting bug...

Anyway, big thanks to Craig, James, Joey, Grace Mak, Kathy Wen, Mary McCargar, Marianna Cruz, Chris Crowley, Marty Meisner, actors Kenny and Mason, and everyone else who was there for making it an amazing experience!