Benjie Messer

I made a short film last weekend as part of the Almost Famous Film Festival 48-hr challenge. Our PIFMG team already had a composer- Bogdan Rygalski- so I signed on as boom boy (which meant I held the microphone), and I ended up helping out with the lighting too (I guess that means I was an “assistant grip”?) It was the first time I’d been on a movie set, and I learned a ton. It was interesting and boring and fun and hard work all at once. I guess only the top twenty teams even get their films screened, so I don’t know if ours will make it or not. It’s a goofy 5-minute middle-class-economic-fear comedy about a guy who can’t pay his mortgage and ends up in a sort of alternate horror universe of the poor.

Anyway, if you want to come see it- don’t! Come see At Best Derivative on March 6 instead. I’m sure this one will be posted on YouTube in a week or so, and I’ll put it up here for all to see.

Two weeks ago, I composed music for the romantic comedy “The Mating Game”, the Phoenix Independent Film Makers Group’s entry in the IFP-Phoenix 48-hr film challenge. Friday at 7:00 PM we were given a prop (a spatula), a line (“How did that get in there?”), and a genre (we got comedy). Our completed 3-minute film was due Sunday evening at 7:00 PM. There were 30 or so teams that participated- the screening this Thursday involved more spatula-related homicides than most of my evenings out.

I didn’t get to score to picture, just to the script, because of the time contraint, but I think the music ended up working fairly well anyway, and it was fun to do. Here’s the 5-minute “director’s cut”: