The New 8-Bit Heroes
What was your childhood ambition? What if you rediscovered it as an adult?
While visiting his parents’ home in Central New York, Joe Granato discovered a box of forgotten illustrations, designed by he and other eight-year-old neighborhood friends—concepts for a video game for the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. He decided it might be fun to try to realize those ambitions.
But instead of creating it for a mobile device or modern console, he set out to use the same techniques and adhere to the same limitations that would have been employed in 1988 to make a new cartridge-based game actually playable on the now-archaic hardware.
Gathering a small team of modern creatives, what began as an explorative novelty project about building a video game for a system 30 years removed from relevance escalated to a two-year, ten-thousand-mile journey into an esoteric subculture made up of devotees to creating new NES games; artists who thrive on limitation.
Film Reel
Some highlights from various films.
Travel Reel
Some highlights from various travel videos.
Caster's Blog: a Geek Love Story
Ray Caster has no idea how to talk to girls. He coasts through life in Sarasota, Florida, writing his blog about beer, pizza and Star Trek. So when he meets Shadoe Beaupre—quite possibly the coolest, most perfect girl he can imagine—he’s completely unprepared. Now Caster needs a crash course in romance, so he enlists the advice of his online followers to man up and get her attention before she surfs away for good.
Quicklime
Seth Berger has his share of problems. A gambling addiction, a girlfriend who's had it with him, and arguably the world's most terrible job. But now he's got something even worse - a dead body on his hands!
Life in a Glass House
A deep space miner, left for dead on an alien world, struggles to make it home before his air runs out - only to discover he has no home to return to. Based on an 8-page comic short I Illustrated for Nightmare World, written by Dirk Manning. It was my second film, with a volunteer cast and crew, produced for under $2K. It played at festivals from New York to Florida, and received an honorable mention at the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival in 2013.
The Mop-Up Crew:
Custodians of the Unexplained
MEET THE CREW! Watchdog operatives pose as janitors in a shopping mall built on an alien graveyard. Aliens visited this world. Some crashed, some got sick, some we shot down. It's all buried here... at the mall. Ghosts from beyond our galaxy, inter-dimensional portals, technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic. Shoulda cleaned it up 'fore they paved it flat, but you know how it is. We're here to catch the things they missed. We're the Mop-up Crew.
It Happened Like This: By The Sword
A HEMA fighter discovers his sparring partner is an evil robot. Will sword fighting be enough to save him? Part of a web series concept about sentient robot programs from outer space using earth-bound robotic resources to infiltrate human society.
Sarasota Orchestra: A Week in the Life
Embedded with the Sarasota Orchestra Production Crew for a look behind the scenes of a week of programming and concerts, director Austin McKinley's short film played at the Sarasota Film Festival in 2017.
Sarasota Orchestra
Beethoven 7 Virtual
Performance
In spring 2020, the Sarasota Orchestra got together from home for a virtual performance. I edited the result.
By The Numbers
A Representation of Cinematic Structure in Color
By the Numbers is a feature-length experimental abstract animated film created in less than 24 hours. It explores cinematic structure in a non-representational way through changing color, shape and sound - illustrating the pacing and building blocks of film from sequence to scene, from dramatic turns to individual shots.
By permutation of the simplest of initial assets - a single color matte and a 440 hz tone - over the course of its 90 minute run-time, it utilizes no plot or objective storytelling but nevertheless contains all the basic components required to discuss it as a minimalist narrative experience in critical vernacular.
This is cinema in its most elemental form, the tools and craft of screenwriting and editing reduced to a mesmerizing abstract composition that evolves through every beat of motion picture syntax “By the Numbers.”
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