I’ve known Matt Allen, the director and co-writer of HOAX, since I rented his RED One camera to make my short film, INCUBATOR in 2010. Over the years, we’ve worked with dozens of the same cast and crew members on numerous projects of our own. Throughout all this time, he was quietly cooking up HOAX, his love letter to the B-movie heyday of the 1980s. When he needed a few muzzle flashes and some wires to be removed, he shot me an email and we finally got to work on something together.

The project was a blast. There were no deadlines, just milestones, a good budget and plenty of freedom to try out new things. With a project like this, it’s all about making your work completely invisible - which I think is really fun. I learned a ton of little tricks on this project. HOAX was edited by by Peder Morgenthaler and he also handled the visual effects supervision. He took great care in managing the entire project within the ACES color space workflow. This meant installing industrial grade color management software so everyone on the team was working within the same color space. To say I learned a ton throughout that process is an understatement. This was also my first project really utilizing cloud based project collaboration tools, like Frame.io, which is something I’ll do on every team project moving forward.

All-in-all, from the Fall of 2017 to Spring of 2018, I did 44 shots plus Rum River’s opening production card. The whole thing was a blast. If you want to check out more about the film, you can do so below!

Oh hey! I just realized the shot for the trailer thumbnail is one of the shots I worked on! Neat!