“Well, I’m here at the Con for the web series that I’m producing. It’s called Dark Things. It’s sort of a Twilight-y Zone show but with sort of a running theme and actual plot. So think Battlestar Galactica, mixed with Twilight Zone, mixed with Once Upon a Time. A good influence was Neil Gaiman. Pretty much everything he’s written is like … gold, so big fans of the Sandman series, which has a lot of elements of our web series. [Large inspirations were] Stargate and Farscape. Well, Stargate is just an all-around good show, and Farscape has very unique – it has a very unique style of writing and cinematography that is I think really under-appreciated. That’s more or less what it is. Me and my co-hort, Nathan [came up with the idea]. It’s what we would want to see on TV. It’s the kind of show that we would want to watch. And there wasn’t anything quite like it, so we decided to write it, to produce it, and all that.
[It’s been] very frenetic and disorganized. A lot of bullet point notes, and we sort of had, at the start, a very loose history where we just sort of filled in the blanks with all sorts of things. The main history of the world that we have built has been changed several times since its inception.
We’re in the middle of writing a graphic novel that is sort of the prequel to everything. And hopefully with the material that we generate and the following that we get – or garner, I should say. Whatever the right word is – As soon as we gather that, we are trying to make a television series and pitching that to hopefully Syfy or FX. We just dropped episode 3 for Comic-Con. We got that released on time. These guys are great: CFX, Composite Effects. They make silicon masks. I met them at the Con today, and they have some really, really cool stuff. We were thinking about having them make a custom build for us. There are three more episodes for the first season, and yeah, it’s going to be really good.
I studied at Fullerton College. Before that, I was at the Orange County School of the Arts, which is a charter school with a conservatory on top of everything else. I went there for creative writing and film production. So we would be there until 6 or 7 at night, with the last 4-6 hours being in the major of what we study.
Financing and scheduling: Those were the two main [difficulties]. The scheduling, we’re still really, really struggling with. Actors’ schedules and getting money together at the right time that the actors are also free, that the crew is also free, that the location is also free: it is sort of a guessing game. Trying to get that all working together. It’s a surprisingly large production for a web series.
As a freelance cinematographer, this is what I generally do. I’m also working on a film called, The Killer Inside – it’s a little indie horror movie that the producer is also the owner of the distribution company. I’d say cinematography is my passion. Photography. I had a camera in my hand since, I want to say 2004. [Cinematography]’s significantly more of a challenge, working with moving pictures, and lighting for that is a lot more difficult than photography lighting … which is also hard. When you have to worry about constantly moving the camera and making lighting arrangements so you don’t screw up matching shots: it’s more fulfilling.”
Excerpt may be edited for clarity.