Lost Soul


My friend Nathaniel Nose called me one day asking if I could be a grip for the production company he was working for. Well, I am not the grip type, but I needed an extra cash so I decided to go to the interview in his office. At the interview I realize that they were in need of a production team as well. So I ended up getting hired as 1st AD. I brought my friend ML Wills and Jack Brungardt to work with me. ML was the 2nd AD for 2 days and Jack was the 2nd 2nd.We had a production manager called Jaydine Valencia and we also had a producer called Cyril O’Reily.

The production office was located in west Hollywood inside of a building complex. The owner of this company is called Dana Schroeder and he is also the owner of the building. He is a very nice guy who is starting his career in filmmaking. He has a lot of gear that helped us in the making of this picture. The film is called Lost Soul and stars Dave Vescio, Nick Mancuso and Zadran Wali. It is a psychological thriller where Dave’s character Donald is searching for love using dark magic.  I was hired to do the additional photography for the film that was shot in 2009.

The dp was Pierre Chemaly. We worked together a couple of times before. I also brought Amor Sanchez as the costume designer and Kevin O’Farrell as sound guy. My friend Felipe Borges also helped us one day as an actor. He is my buddy from Brazil and we worked in a lot of projects together.

We shot everything is 4 days at the production office. The last day we had a company move to Hollywood Hills in a Mansion overlooking Los Angeles. It was really cool that night, because the place was amazing, we had a lot of extras, there were a fire going to warm everybody, we had implied nudity in one of the takes, and we got everything we needed, and we wrapped early.

At the production office the hardest part was working with cats. We had to do a couple of scenes with cats jumping the camera, running down the corridor, and being held by the actor. The good part was that the building was filled with cats. I mean, there were at least 20 cats laying around the building. The bad part was getting these cats. We had to come up with a strategy where we had a holding area for the cats, and we would lock all the exits where the cats could leave from. This way the cats had always one path going one way. At the end of the path, we would have a couple of PA to get the cats back and bring to the holding area. Even with this strategy, we had a very hard time dealing with the animals. My suggestion to anyone is to hire a professional animal handler because it will avoid  being scratched all over your body.

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