Here's my latest short film which screened at a number of international and Academy Award qualifying film festivals. In the past few weeks, it was featured by Nofilmschool.com and Filmschoolrejects.com.

Broken Cycle on Vimeo

Synopsis: After being chased by two bullies who destroyed his bike, a teenage boy searches for safety and acceptance with the neighborhood thugs who came to his rescue. Soon, their continued protection comes at a price.

Contains Language

Nice job Cliff. I'm usually not a fan of handheld shallow focus look, but it worked excellent for the story. The same with the editing.

The sound editing was really good, kudos to who worked on that!

Love that you work outta Denver i grew up there. Can you give some details on the production?

Jay, thanks for the feedback and taking the time to check it out!

Most of the cast, including the lead, are untrained actors. We shot in Denver, mostly in the Five Points area (well, a bit west of there because it was safer). The shoot was over 5 nights, but that was mostly because we had to work within curfews.

The sound design and production audio was done by Thomas Cassetta. He's a local guy who I feel does great work. He is slotted as our audio guy on my next short which is scheduled to film in 3 weeks.

Initially, we planned to shoot on the RED MX, and had done numerous tests to ensure it could handle the lighting situations and we could handle the workflow. About a week prior to filming, a huge blizzard hit and sub-zero temps lasted all week. On the first day of principal, the snow had barely started to melt and we were all struggling, so I called it early. After that, the DP and I decided to switch to the 7D. We later reshot the first day since there wasn't much and most of what we had was barely usable. We knew that our aesthetic choices allowed us to work within the shallow focus without too much worry, plus the smaller camera setup greatly increased our mobility. We used minimal lighting for the most part, with a few scenes containing a 1200 HMI as a backlight, and augmented with LED panels. Much of the exterior was shot at 1250 ISO.

Thanks again!

Brilliant Clifton, would have liked to have seen faster focus pulls in some scenes but that's the downside of working handheld with a DSLR i guess. Otherwise excellent production all round, superb work and love the cold wintery Denver setting.

Very well executed but what stood out most for me was the sound, I only thought the shallow dof was overdone at times which made it distracting.