2000: Destinos

Date of Creation: 2000

Synopsis: Two hit men are hired to protect an investigator tasked with discovering the events that lead up the disappearance of a rich family's son. They quickly find themselves tangled in a web of deceit, lies, conspiracy and mistaken personality in the tradition of a typical spanish language drama.

A Brief History: This was, believe it or not, a spanish assignment. For, again, a class I was not taking at the time. The assignment was to create your own episode of "Destinos", a film series that students watched in class to, I suppose, get a stronger understanding of spanish culture and further their language skills. But you tell me: http://youtu.be/-_Ex8R06kqY

Either way, Mike and I set out to create an epic, if not slightly off topic, finale for the series. With death! And Drugs! And Car Chases! And Guns! We spent way too long shooting it for a class project. I'm talking 9 or 10 days of solid shooting. And probably a month's worth of edit time crammed into a couple weeks, but we got it done. And I hope Mike and his group got an A.

The movie was obviously, erm, heavily influenced by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, even borrowing a few...look, okay, it was a straight up rip off. But I like to consider it more of a "mash up". Take these characters, put them in this situation and see what happens. It was a fun exercise. Most people in the group were relatively accommodating to our insane concept, considering they could've just as easily shot a single shot, 2 minute scene in a classroom and still have gotten an A.

Definitely my favorite memory of this shoot was convincing the mayor of st. charles to let us shut down main street for a couple hours so that we could spin a car around and shoot guns out of it. Something like that would've easily cost me $10k to do out in LA. Also, because we were constantly filming after school and scenes took us a really long time to shoot, there are several scenes where it goes from mid day sun to hilariously dark throughout the scene.

Critical Analysis: Disjointed would be an understatement, but maybe I'm being a tad too critical for something I made in high school. I can't believe it's a solid 40 minutes long though, and GOOD GOD it drags sometimes. I also have a little trouble keeping up with what's going on, but that's probably because of the spanish. But the car stunts and squibs were totally balls. The car chase is at about 16 minutes and the fight scene is at about 30 minutes if you want to save yourself some time.