YOU NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST…..
Hello and welcome to Fresh Farm Films.
A production company created by Peter Grey and SDZ! A place for Actors / Crew in the Pacific NW to come together and have some fun while we create content for sizzle reels and film festivals in the Pacific NW.
What started as an idea to pick up a camera and bring some of our creations to life ended with a successful full length 84 min B movie!
With the help of various Actors / Crew in PDX we’ve created some fun and very memorable moments in film!
It may come as a shock to learn that we have no formal training or education in film, we just love movies! Portland is known as a place for weird underground stuff and after 6 years of creating content we believe that includes us! As long as we work hard and remember to have a blast, we will continue to grow and create in Portland Oregon.
VIDEO SHORTS PRODUCED BY THE GANG OF FINE FOLKS AT FRESH FARM FILMS
Submitted to IMDB / Film Freeway:
2018 Our Chronic Problem IMDB: 8 min VID Short
* Short about a CEO who will try anything to save his business!
FESTIVAL: 2022 Portland Comedy Festival / Portland OR
2019 THE ILLUSTRATED WOMAN IMDB: 30-40 min per EP
*4-part web series about a tattoo artist whose art comes to life and doles out life lessons to her subjects. Some lessons so harsh they fail to live through them!
We decided not to post all 4 episodes here but this is one of the first experiences we had with YouTube and their very tight restrictions on videos and the importance of what a copyright is and isn’t! So here is the link to the YouTube channel for The Illustrated Woman if you want to watch the entire series.
FESTIVAL: GORST Underground / Seattle, WA
2022 Attack of the Mortapillarz! IMDB: Feature Film / 84 min
B-Movie about fuzzy creatures who show up but eat all of the garbage. Until one of them discovers how tasty humans are and then let the carnage begin!!!!!
Follow Hailey as she dodges killer 5g lawnmowers, underground monsters burrowing to the surface, and ,worst of all, her parents expectations!
FESTIVAL: Octopus Marque / Bosie ID
Below is a more detailed account of what the project is and some of the stuff we learned along the way.
We include entire clip of the project as well!
2018-2019
This is where it all began! These are the moments when we learned to aim higher. These are the projects that let us get our legs on firmer ground as we taught each other the basics of shooting a scene and other lessons that can only be learned through experience! These are our first attempts and usually only come out amongst friends, you are friends are you not?
KLAX– (summary only )This is a sci fi short that one of the folks thought would make a funny skit. So, we set up a WKRP style DJ booth and took a couple of calls about alien abduction with a ton of sexual innuendo! The shoot was fun, and we did learn the importance of a well written script because this wasn’t it, but the poster is defiantly the best part of this 33 min short.
My Mothers T.V. – Film Freeway Link – This was another attempt from a rather peculiar fella. SDZ was able to get the keys to her day job at a little café in a place in Portland named The Pearl. The place was originally the commissary for the Paramount movie lot the used to be in Portland.
We got to set up some real equipment! 2 handheld digital cameras and some homemade soft boxes with gels strapped over aluminum lights and C-Clamped onto a large stand that someone liberated from high school long ago.
The script was, let’s say familiar but the shoot was a blast! Our first attempt at GONZO style of film making.
Here is where all the past 18 months’ lessons pay off!
With better writing, updated concepts of Cinematography and a slew of new-ish equipment!
By far the most popular thing we’ve done so far!
– “ Sales are down but the CFO is up? A desperate CEO has one last chance to save the company. A tale about desperate mesures and drugs in the workplace “
Come along for a peek inside one of the worst consultant decisions ever!
OUR CHRONIC PROBLEM
This is it! This is the one where everything came together! From the Actors we cast from Craigslist to our camera placement and out TASCAM that gave us independent sound source. By this time, we learned that audio was very important and if you wanted to submit this project anywhere people had to hear and understand it without subtitles! We did our first overhead shot by setting up in the lobby of the hotel where we rented out the conference room to film this little gem. This was the first project that was both successfully uploaded to YouTube and accepted into Film Festivals to this day. It’s still one of the funniest things we ever did!
4 PART WEB SERIES
Film Festivals do have a class for TV but on the internet titled Web Series.
2020-2021
The Illustrated Woman A detective is searching for a murderer. All he has is a sketch, some truly bizarre stories, and a mystery woman.
Someone is giving less than reputable people tattoos and some of the customers end up dead with gruesome ends.
So you want to take things to the next level do ya? This is where we try to bring it all together. It’s a 4-part web series but it might as well have been 4 Shorts with a connecting theme. We learned a lot about film production from these 4 insane episodes. We had our best rigged up equipment by placing our new condenser mic on our old PVC BOOM pole. Hey whatever works right?
This project threw a bunch or curve balls like when our lead who is in 2 episodes as the main guy decides to move to Pasadena. That’s when we came up with the concept of the detective’s son who will eventually fall victim to the voodoo woman and the evil Dr. Case.
The special effects were homemade, and a B grade was awesome! We came up with our villain Mirror Face who reflects the sins of the victims in his face! And it was super easy to put together. Our episode 4 finale is a testament to flashing lights. Smoke, and cheap camera tricks that keep me coming back for more!
We did 4 episodes that ran from 28 min to 46 min so it was a lesson in the editing room as well. This is where we went from the free version of Coral to an older but still serviceable version of
Sony Vegas / Majix. More features but more to learn. We got the hang of it by the end of the series so enjoy!
For the entire 4 part series on YouTube we created its own channel and can be found HERE
https://www.youtube.com/@theillustratedwoman4886
FULL LENGTH B-MOVIE
2021-2023
Attack of the Mortapillarz!
This is it folks! Overture, Curtains, Lights here it is! This is what we set out to do but needed to learn some hard lessons first. This was 18 months of just plain madness. From arguing over the script to have 3 different Hally’s enter and leave the project. Now we have a movie but its not the movie we want, not yet anyway.
It took a team of folks with a common vision along with some good-ish writing from yours truly to pull this off! It was all of us from SDZ locking down the locations to Sheryl helping with the script and a bunch of others as well! Other people, crew and actors, who put this together and our thanks go out to each and every one!!
I could go on and on and tell you about the fun finale we filmed and the crazy shoots we did for special effects! We pulled it off and submitted our work, amateur as it was, to film festivals.
Then COVID hit and traveling to exotic locations like Cherry Hill , NJ was not going to happen. We had a 5 festival string all set up and ready to go when all of a sudden every single festival we paid to submit to and got accepted by was canceled! No refunds!
We had a horror festival in Idaho, the ABQ fest in Albuquerque with John Waters as the headliner, then we finished with 3 festivals in L.A. but no dice! COVID took it all!
No worries dear reader, After producing 3 under 30 shorts, a 4 part web series and now an 84 min B-Movie we learned our lessons and built up the gear in our inventory and are going to try our hand at a real documentary!
After doing what we set out to do and after 6 years of filming we decided to shelve Fresh Farm Films.
We established Red Stool Productions and started our first production Gen-X: Generation Mess and we know that after filming in Portland for all this time this town loves a good story!