"I strongly believe that culture is driven by entertainment. Unfortunately, entertainment tends to push negative extremes which results in the softening of culture’s tolerance. Little is done to counter this change, but even the smallest push can yield a big reward. That prospect is amazing to me."
Brendan Sandham began making movies with his family's VHS camcorder when he was eleven, using various siblings as his actors. Without means to edit, he would plan out each feature and shoot in sequence, rewinding and taping over previous takes on each shot before moving to the next. Space, the news room and the wild west were achieved through an active imagination and a lot of construction paper.
He created several acclaimed short films while attending Grove City College before taking on the most ambitious student film project in the school's history. Silverwhere was shot over the course of a semester and edited over Christmas break. A full length heist movie that also poked fun at aspects of college life, Silverwhere became something of a campus sensation. It also had a lot of heart, centering its plot around the rebuilding of broken friendships. Silverwhere started a wave of movie making at the school that continues nearly three years later.
Heroes focuses on the older of two young brothers who do not get along. He has a wonderful imagination, and uses it to escape the boredom of his mother's weekly shopping trip, while also avoiding his pesky younger brother. But over the course of both his real life and imagined adventures, he realizes that there is more to his sibling that he originally thought, and animosity give way to true brother hood.
Impressed with movies such as Spy Kids 2 and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow which were shot primarily or entirely on green screen, Heroes was also an attempt to use the same process on a smaller scale. Large portions of the movie were shot on green screen resulting in over 150 effect shots created for the feature. Effects were created through the composition of live action footage, CGI and still images manipulated through computer animation.
Heroes is an official selection of the 2005 Hollywood DV Festival, the largest digital video festival in the world. It features an even younger batch of siblings as actors and runs 16 minutes. Heroes is currently being sent to many more festivals.
Brendan is currently working on three scripts, and is preparing to shoot his next short at the end of January, 2006.
Lincoln with Brendan Sandham
Congratulations at the end of the Heroes shoot