Tag Archives: azaroff

CheckMating – 15 years later.

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:

A woman who tests her dates by playing chess with them. CheckMating.

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.

CheckMating

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…

My morning with Colbert.

Today was awesome. No other way to describe it. It is exhilarating to have the world come to Vancouver, and feel the great energy and vibe the city has going on.

I have been particularly excited about Stephen Colbert’s impending visit to Vancouver. My brother-in-law and friend, Eric is a writer on the show. Eric and I go way back, we were friends in high school, and traveled Europe together, and I’m married to his sister. Eric came with the crew here for the filming during the Olympics, and he was generous enough to let us into the VIP section this morning.

He was also the warmup act for the crowd to get them pumped before Colbert came out. It was exciting to watch him perform before a crowd of thousands in the city he went to high school in. Cool stuff.

The taping took place in the park literally across the street from my work. I asked a co-worker (whose meeting I skipped out on to go to the taping) to take a picture from our floor. Not sure how many people were there, but it must have been a few thousand by the time it started.

The camera guy was nice enough to take our camera and take some pictures of the crowd.

The set was great, and the backdrop was perfect. It was a glorious day here in Vancouver.

Our spot was amazing, and we had a great view of the whole thing. His guests were Michael Bublé and Bob Costas, who mounted a Moose used as a backdrop.

Many thanks to Eric for an unforgettable Olympic morning!

Let the games begin.

So the Olympics start tomorrow here in Vancouver. I gotta admit, if I had lived here when the vote took place to approve the olympic bid, I would have voted against it (we were living in LA at the time). I just wasn’t that into it.

Then I became complacent, I was resigned to the massive spending, and just hoped for the best.

But then in the last few months buildings started opening, the new SkyTrain line opened, the excitement started building and I became much more optimistic.

When I found out a couple of weeks back that the torch would pass right near our place, like four houses down at our nearest street corner from where we live on the flame’s way to opening ceremonies, my excitement increased.

Now, wandering around town, everything is ready. My work is across the street from Olympic Village and the Russian pavillion for the Sochi 2014 winter games. Our home is not far from the stadium where opening ceremonies take place. My life is right in the thick of things, and it’s pretty cool.

Because Vancity is a slang term for Vancouver, and I monitor what people blog and tweet about Vancity, I get to see where Apolo Ono is hanging out and how much he loves my hometown.

I’ll take pictures of the torch passing near my place tomorrow and take some photos from the Vancity head office roof and post them.

Let the games begin…