For some reason, a lot of people have been asking me lately about my former life as a filmmaker, so I thought I’d post one of my most successful films, CheckMating on YouTube for all to see.

About 15 years ago, I was riding a bus to work in Seattle, where I was living, and a little nugget of an idea came to me:

So simple. At the time, I was a filmmaker working at a motion picture laboratory. I had recently completed a half-hour 16mm nugget called Greenwich Meridian, which was a pretty standard first film: artsy, opaque and pretty much unwatchable. I was ready for a new challenge – to make a film people actually wanted to see.

CheckMating had a number of things going for it. It was short –  half-hour films were hard to program at film festivals because they were too long to open for a feature film and too short to stand on their own. I pictured CheckMating with no words, just images and music, which would make it perfect for the international film festival circuit. And I was pretty sure that I could shoot it on 35mm film, and have it look amazing on the big screen.

So I budgeted the film out at $12,000 and started looking for deals. Although I wrote, produced, directed and edited CheckMating, my biggest skill as a filmmaker was always as a producer. I found a free camera, free short ends of 35mm stock, a free editing location. My peers at the motion picture lab where I worked were willing to slide my footage through as “test” footage and not charge me. I ended up bringing in the film for 15% of my budget, a mere $1,800 all in.

It was a one day shoot at a friend’s house. The actors were awesome, especially Amy DeBourget who carried the film. The crew was a dream. The musicians on the soundtrack were brilliant.

It was a charmed little production. I was super-pleased with the final product and I started entering it into film festivals. I had entered my previous film into 18 film festivals and gotten rejections from all of them. With CheckMating, I was accepted into the 19th festival I applied to. Perseverance paid off. I found out after coming back to work from my honeymoon in July of 1996 that I got into the Boston Film Festival. More acceptances poured in, and by the time the film was done on the circuit, it had played something like 60 festivals, events and showcases, and picked up a few awards along the way.

And this little film inadvertently led me to where I am today. As a filmmaker I was an early adopter of screening my films online. I just wanted people to see the film, and wasn’t snobbish about how that happened. While many filmmakers were pontificating about the beauty of film (and not video or digital), I wanted to open source the damn thing (although I’m not sure I knew what open source was at the time).

I got a distribution deal with a little start-up in Seattle called AtomFilms. They were a great group and I was their seventh acquisition. They did extremely well as a company, defining what online film distribution could look like, and sold my film to airlines to show in-flight, to websites seeking quality content and to TV stations around the world (international sales validated my choice to make the film silent). I was written up in the NY Times and the San Francisco Chronicle as a filmmaker willing to try new things. The film was a success. CheckMating even made money, given the minuscule budget I was working with.

That early embracing of the web, as well as an eventual job at AtomFilms as a web producer in charge of their online community of 1.8 million fans steered me onto a new path of doing web stuff instead of film stuff.

And then more recently AtomFilms was bought out by MTV and the rights to CheckMating reverted back to me. And so I have put it up on YouTube where it can be seen once again.

One of the biggest lessons of filmmaking that I draw on everyday is the ability to work with people as they are. Directing actors was perhaps my favourite part of making films. The collaboration, the creativity, the connections. Every actor is different and the key to being a successful director is knowing how to connect and communicate with each actor individually to elicit their best performance. Some actors like line-readings, some like deep philosophical discussions about the character’s motivations, some meditate, some pick fights to work themselves up. Working with each actor in the way most suitable for them is a skill I still draw on daily as a team-member, as a manager and as a contributor to an organization I believe in.

I hope you enjoy this glimpse of my filmmaking side. It’s good to have this film out there again…