Assembling the Team Part 2: Ryan Chambers

The next thing I wanted to do was make sure that this movie didn't look crappy, like all other 51 Productions movies had. The problem had always been that none of us knew anything about lighting or really how to work a camera. If we could see the actors, then we considered ourselves to be doing pretty well. This would not be the case this time around.

Enter Ryan Chambers.

Ryan and I met at Rolling Hills Prep School in junior high. He was dating my sister, so I didn't exactly hang out with him, but he, fortunately, had an obligation to not see me murdered.

This was no easy task as in sixth grade I weighed about 70 pounds and had a tendency to run my mouth a lot. As one can imagine, this is a poor combination.

One day I'd said something unconscionably dumb to a group of 10th graders and was about to have my ass beat deservedly. As I cowered to receive my punishment, I saw an object doing at least Mach 2 fly across my field of vision, and suddenly my opponent disappeared. I found him on the ground, pinned by the significantly smaller and younger Ryan who was making various threats on my behalf. Intimidated, the 10th graders left me alone.

When he wasn't saving my life or making miracles happen with my crappy passes on the soccer field, Ryan was taking the best photographs in the world.

And yet, this is the best picture I can find of him.

You should seriously check out his website or his other more commercially driven website. He's amazing.

One day he posted some video he'd shot of rain when testing the video feature of his Nikon D90, and I was blown away. When it came time to do Brickwalk, I had no doubt that this was the guy who could finally give us a little production value in one of our movies. If you've seen the trailer, you know that he was successful.

All the nice things I can say about this kid, and I still can't explain this picture.

Ryan is currently working on color correcting the movie, one of the final stages of the process. I'm glad I'm not doing it because I have about a 0% clue of how it's done.