Clear Toxic

'Clear Toxic' was inspired by the stylistic formula commonly employed by EC Comics in the 1950s -- and HBO's adaptations of the same, in the late 80s and early 90s television show, 'Tales From the Crypt': morally bankrupt protagonist commits unforgivable sin, gets creatively rendered just comeuppance in the end.

On production:

The project came about when a friend of mine, Bethany Schmidt (a Brooklyn-based rapper who goes by the moniker The Buttress) was offered a curatorial opportunity at the Chicago International Music and Movies Festival (CIMMFest). The offer was to present a night of short films directed by members of her collective, Ghost Gang. We had a little more than a month to write and direct the films.

'Clear Toxic' was written in a day after visiting Mana Contemporary, an arts building in Chicago where our star John Paul Glover worked security. We rode in the menacing freight elevators, explored large, barren spaces still under construction. We walked around the storage floor, looking in the little storage units with the grate ceilings and said, "Hmmm... what if..."

The shoot, planned for one day, turned into 3-4 days spread throughout the month we were given to finish. A rough cut of 'Clear Toxic' screened at CIMMFest in April 2014. To my delight, it was well received. But we needed a gore scene, and some scenes needed to be re-shot, some scenes needed to be dubbed, etc. So we continued shooting with our tiny crew (myself, John Paul Glover, Z Yun Chen, Mark Ciarleglio) throughout the following summer.

We shot on a Canon 60D and used a Zoom H4n for sound. Nothing fancy. The long tracking shot in the storage facility was done using a wheelchair and took twelve takes to get right. It was inspired by a particular shot in the locker room scene near the beginning of Amy Holden Jones' 'The Slumber Party Massacre', which I had seen the previous October at a 24 hour horror festival. We spent the most time on the gore scene (obviously!), for which we used 3D gel, burn makeup, fake blood, baking soda, a spray bottle, a bald cap, and a smoke machine.

Matt O'Shaugnessy from Ghost Gang works at Technicolor in NYC and was able to give the film a nice gritty, saturated look. The title for 'Clear Toxic' came about in an interesting way. We were shooting a scene with toxic chemicals pouring out of a bucket, for which we were just using water. I wondered aloud if toxic chemicals were typically clear. Yun said, "They are in this film. And the name of the film should be Clear Toxic."