Dir. David Murakami
Gun with the Wind-Genre Parody. Cinematographer/Lighting Designer. The mob calls in a favor, sending a man on a quest to find a missing mobster, Benny the Rat. A short for SF 48 Hour Film Festival 2014.
Dir. David Murakami
Gun with the Wind-Genre Parody. Cinematographer/Lighting Designer. The mob calls in a favor, sending a man on a quest to find a missing mobster, Benny the Rat. A short for SF 48 Hour Film Festival 2014.
Dir. Evan Hartney
Little Violins-Faux Documentary. One of three Cinematographers/Camera Operator. Follow the mute boy Jackson, and his fascination with capturing peoples’ stories for documentary purposes. Jackson sets the stage to capture the broad range of emotions that people are willing to share with someone who is only capable of listening.
Dir. David Murakami
God Particle– Drama. A film/theater hybrid. Cinematographer/Camera Operator. An explosion at the LHC may have produced the elusive Higgs Boson particle, otherwise known as the God Particle, but the two scientists attempting to discover it are killed. Using morally questionable tech, the remaining scientists use a machine to comb through the memories of the recently deceased in order to see what they discover.
Cinematic media accompanies live acting on stage.
Play Time from Joe Bourekas on Vimeo.
Play Time-Adventure. Director. Writer. Cinematographer/Camera Operator. Animator. An homage to the younger years. A child’s imagination leaps to screen as we see the world through the eyes of a boy playing pretend.
Two Way Time Transfer with Chris Anderson– Producer, Cinematographer, Editor, Animator. Chris Anderson explains briefly what Two Way Time Transfer is and how easy it is to set up the Symmetricom TWTT system.
SDA Capabilities with Peter Cash– Producer, Cinematographer, Editor, Animator. This video was made as a market value proposition on the research in the Space Defense and Avionics group. A challenge lay in the sensitive nature of the SDA group work, and thus could only scratch the surface on SDA Capabilities.
CSAC Production with Scott Rassoulian– Producer, Cinematographer, Editor, Animator. A video made about the upgraded CSAC manufacturing process. This was made to showcase Symmetricoms ability to produce the proprietary CSAC product at high volume.
Dir. Joe Bourekas
Primal-Thriller. Director. Writer. Cinematography/Camera Operator/Lighting Designer. Editor. A wallflower of a young man ekes by until becoming the victim of a mugging. Newfound attention and a sense of fear pushes him to listen to the primal call for violence.
Dir. Joe Bourekas
On the Hunt-Thriller. Director. Writer. Cinematography/Camera Operation. Editor. A deadly forest surrounds our protagonist. Lost between time and space, is this a soldier recalling his hunting days to survive, or a hunter struggling to divorce his experience as a soldier from his now civilian life? The only thing constant is the forest.
Dogs from Joe Bourekas on Vimeo.
Dogs-Faux Documentary. Cinematographer/Camera Operator. A budding documentarian provokes directionless losers into becoming violent criminals in order to exploit them for his “masterpiece”.
This film required a lot of staging and thinking about how best to seem like a single camera documentary crew, while still providing an interesting film-like aesthetic. The big challenge to this film was finding a way to look like a believable one crew documentary. This meant picking apart the script with the director to find natural “cut points” in the script where the character of the filmmaker would cut to a differnt point in a conversation. To make the video feel real, we essentially had to make each cut feel like something happened between the last cut and the next cut that the filmmaker chose not to show the viewer. The hardest challenge technically, for me, was to find a way to fight my cinematographer instincts and appear to look “professionally homemade”. My favorite shot in this piece has the be the turning point with the gun. The long build up and the character break within the camera really set a precedent for how out of control the narcissistic filmmaker’s project got.
The Good: This piece screened at UCSC for a combination of the classes Senior Exit Narrative as well as Senior Exit Documentary. That means documentaries and narratives were played without a break separating docs from narratives. When this piece played, and the character shoots at a house, people thought they were watching an actual documentary. A funny story, but it also proves I nailed the doc aesthetic!
The Bad: I should’ve gathered more insert shots of the havoc they wrought. This would’ve showcased their progression better, from petty vandalism to real crime. As it stands, the vandalism they do does not look that drastic or grand, and thus makes them look less intimidating.