David Flores describes the people in One-17 Productions as a bunch of guys doing what they love: making films. On Wednesday, Dec. 8, Flores and his four friends who make up One-17 (Ryan Bloom, Roman Arriola, Thomas Dylan DiMaggio and Steve Kundrat) will show four of their locally produced shorts at the Loft Cinema from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Flores says he and his friends are all Tucson natives, media arts majors and recent UA graduates. Admission is free (but donations will be accepted). For more info, visit www.loftcinema.coM, or look for "One-17 Productions" on Facebook.
What is One-17 Productions?
We're basically a team of five members, five guys, and we're all former UA media arts students. Our degrees range from film and television studies to media-producing. We all met at the UA, started off as friends and started getting together making short films in 2008, and then we thought, "Let's start a film-production company."
Just the films?
We're also starting to do outsource video projects: a couple of wedding videos and a couple of promotional videos for a music company. For those gigs, the money goes toward our films.
You said you feel like the work you do is local filmmaking at its best. How so?
We're all Tucson natives. We are all local Tucson guys and all have a passion for films, and when we work, we work here, with local actors and local crews.
What are you showing at the Loft?
Our main film is called Harvester. It's a 25-minute short film that we filmed last summer. It took us a full year to make this film, and, yeah, it's only 20 to 25 minutes, and why would it take so long? Well, it's only five of us, and at the time, we were still in school, and we all have different jobs, so it was literally when we had free time. It's our biggest film so far. We put out a casting call on acting listservs, and had an audition process. All the actors and film crew are local.
What's it about?
It's an interesting little tale. It mixes genres, a little horror and a cop movie, and takes place in the 1930s. A veteran detective teams up with a forensic photographer to figure out who a serial killer is, and they figure out the serial killer is not quite who they think.
What about the other films?
One is called Broadcast, and we filmed that one in January. It's around 10 minutes and is also a period piece set in the 1930s, about a little boy listening to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, and imagining an invasion in his home.
How do you guys work so well together?
I think the biggest reason is that we are all friends first. We respect each other and each other's work. One of us will say, "Hey, I have an idea for a movie," and we'll say, "OK, write a script," and then that person will do that and do a treatment and pitch it to us. Whoever writes it has an option to direct or be just a writer. Whoever is director becomes the main boss and makes all executive decisions on the film. We all can do a little bit of everything. One person will edit, and another will produce, and someone will shoot it. That's really it. It's a cool little system we have worked out.
Where do you see yourselves in the future? Hollywood?
Ideally, it's kind of hard not to see yourself going to Los Angeles to be a Steven Spielberg. At least two of us ... have big aspirations of going to L.A. and making it there. I don't know; I think eventually, that's kind of the plan. It's a tough industry to break into.
Why are you having the screening at the Loft?
First of all, like any indie or local filmmaker ... we want to have our products viewed by an audience. It really means nothing unless you get people to see (your work); even if just 20 people show up, those are 20 new people viewing our work. ... We're not a big movie studio, just regular guys with regular jobs, but we have such a passion for it that in our spare time, we want to make films. If someone else has the same dream we do, they can come to the Loft and maybe leave saying, "I can make a movie." When I was a kid, that dream seemed far away from me. When you graduate (from college), there's no real job lined up for you, but you have to go find out how to make it happen.
