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B_BOOK by M dot Strange

Introduction

This book is written by me, “M dot Strange” Who the fuck am I?! Just some guy really... I can’t remember who wrote this bio but it wasn’t me...

When M dot Strange touched down in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007 for the world premiere of his first animated feature, We are the Strange, thousands of Internet obsessed teens and twentysomethings already knew more about the film than any buyer at the festival. For months M dot had been leaking footage and behind-the-scenes featurettes of the film to YouTube, and once he was accepted to Sundance he put up the trailer. It got 500,000 views in four days. Not bad for a guy who made a movie in his bedroom. With a love for 8-bit video games and stop-motion animation, the San Jose–based M dot has been honing his bizarre brand of stories since the late ‘90s. “I’ve never taken a film class or an art class ever,” he says. “I learned everything through the Internet and reading books — the Inter-net was my film school.” M dot is currently working on his next animated feature film - a 3d Samurai film entitled Heart String Marionette due for completion in Q1 2011. M dot Strange is also an electronic musician and rapper who has produced 19 albums in the past ten years... he also has a bike.

Awards and Accolades from my 2007 film

Official Selection, 2007 Sundance Film FestivalAnimated feature film “We are the Strange” chosen over 3000 other entries to premiere at the festival.

Animated feature film “We are the Strange” beats out studio films from Japan and Korea to win the following two prizes.

Golden Prize, Most Groundbreaking film 2007 Fantasia Film festival, Montreal

Silver Prize, Best Animated film2007 Fantasia Film festival, Montreal

25 New Faces of Independent Film, Filmmaker Magazine 2007

Best Director, Best Feature Film, HDFEST, 2007

I M DOT STRANGE

As shocking as it may seem I haven't always been "M dot Strange". This persona is actually my fourth try. I was born as Michael, then when I first started making films and music I used the name "SomeGuY", then after being exploited because of that name and getting frustrated with film stuff I shifted focus to music for a bit and became "Agent2a03" whilst doing more animation and eventually became "M dot Strange".

We have no choice as to the name we're born with, we're stuck with that name. There's lots of stuff attached to that name. We have usually made tons of mistakes as that person and our old friends and family seem to enjoy reminding us of those mistakes. So what if you want to change? What if you want to be someone else? Be something else? Having that old name constantly reminds and reinforces what we are as dictated by the past and other people's perception of who/what we are.

But what if you don't want to be who/what your past and everyone around you says that you are? By being addressed by that name and responding to that name it almost reinforces that past, it reminds us of our failures and past limitations.

When people talk about "making a name for yourself" they usually mean to go out and make your original name well know or something, but I believe in literally MAKING A NEW NAME FOR YOURSELF! One that you choose, not one that is chosen for you. A new persona that you get to build. Most of us do this with our online names already, but I took it a step further.

It's all about creating your own myth. Your new name is your new hero, a hero whose mythology you will write into history through your actions. I look at "Mike" as some loser. He really never did anything except act like a lil bitch. He was so full of himself for no reason at all, he hurt himself for really stupid reasons and other people as well. I don't like him at all. He's not who I want to be, so I decided to not be him anymore. I created new personas. Let's take a look at these personas.

So it's in third person since I'm M dot now. So this is M dot looking back at these people he heard about.

Michael: Was never a normal child as he had some quirks about him. He hid under a table for the first whole week of Kindergarden. He ran home and cried when a girl called him a "thug" even though he didn't know what it meant. He had a multicolored leaf that he admired and treasured until a teenage friend tore it up making him cry. He brought live toads with him when he went to visit friends and enjoyed the fact that they were scared of them because they thought that they caused warts. He was an unofficial girlscout, as his mom and sister dragged him to girlscout campouts, as dad was not around. He hid in the tent until all the girls ran off, then he would traipse around the forest by himself. He once witnessed the horror of girl scouts rapping next to a campfire, doing a cover to JJ Fad's supersonic they did called "Super Girlscouts". He later found the lyrics sheet and stole it to provide nonstop laughs for years to come. On one girlscout campout he found a dead snake in the street, he took it home and put it in the freezer, then he would take it to school everyday and throw it at girls and anyone else who was scared by it, then take it back home and put it in the freezer. He would cry and beg at the toy store for Transformers. He stopped going to school fulltime in the 3rd grade and instead spent his time in the library reading about dragonflies and frogs, which later branched out to all insects, reptiles and amphibians until the kitchen was filled with tanks containing live frogs, snakes, lizards, tarantulas, trapdoor spiders, dragonfly nymphs etc. Roller skating was another favorite pastime. He was molested and abused by a babysitter, which led to later emotional disturbances. The babysitter would force him to perform sexual acts on her and when he fought back she would lock him outside of the front gate of the house and tell him "The boogeyman was going to get him". He would stay out there crying trying to reach the latch on the gate, to no avail. He could only get back in when a stranger walked by who would open it for him. With his one friend who taught him about how to be a man at age 10 he became a baseball fan and one of their bizarre macho rituals was denting soup cans by head-butting them. Later to shock and intimidate other kids these two would crush snails on their foreheads, as they took pride in being weirdo maniacs that terrified other people. He routinely saw UFOs as a child and many other strange things, both alone and with his friends. He enjoyed singing in the glee club and the church choir as a child. As a fugitive for the school district he was assigned a truant officer who, with a few school district police officers, made it their job to force Michael to go to school. He hid in trees, slept on the roof of the house, in the trunks of abandoned cars to avoid them. His greatest feat was rubbing vasoline on his arms to escape their grasp. During this time he became interested in making explosives. He spent hours at a time making pipebombs in his room out of brass doorknobs which he exploded in the neighborhood and the neighbors would say "IT'S the damned Michael again, he's going to blow up the neighborhood!" Another pastime was fishing for cockroaches from the sewer grate, then torching them with a hairspray flamethrower. He also became interested in baseball. To practice he picked oranges then went to a field next to an expressway. He would wind up like a pitcher, whilst trying to hit the passing cars with oranges. Meanwhile his best friend drank 40s at age 12. When it was rainy they would switch to mud-balls. His greatest success was hitting a guy driving a van in the face. Since he was interested in baseball, but didn't have a dad to practice with, he built a chicken wire structure to practice pitching into with a tennis ball, filled with pennies, to increase his arm strength. He would throw a ball up and hit it, retrieve it and repeat. When he was 12 he was very short and fat. He returned to school briefly each year only to drop out again. When he was 12 and in school he was picked on, since he looked funny and fit into no ethnic or social group. He had no friends. He wasn't white and rich so he didn't hang out with the "white" kids, he wasn't mexican enough to hang out with the cool mexican kids, so he ended up with a Vietnamese kid, a Japanese kid and a Samoan kid. One day in class a white kid kept picking on him. Said kid filled the hood of Mike's sweater with sugar whilst in class, then dumped it on his head. After class Mike tried to fight back against the bigger kid but was beat up with his nose broken, which he had to get re-broken and fixed at the doctor's. He swore to get revenge. He played little league briefly and learned to appreciate the phrases "how gay" and "Get your head out of your ass" from his coach, who bragged about going to the club with his "hair like Booker" and picking up on and banging hot chicks. The coach once had his adult film star friend "Scott Irish" visit our baseball practice. He said "He has the best job! Gets paid to bang hot chicks." One of his teammates who was in a famous gang was arrested for murder, so the team lost its shortstop. After missing school from grades 3 - 10, he returned to high school in the 11th grade. At that time one his favorite pastimes was making crank calls and his crank call tapes were quite popular with friends, as that's what he did every night after school with his one friend. In high school he made a few new friends being a baseball player. Mike quit baseball after discovering the act of copulation. On three different occasions, with two of them being on school grounds, he used cups of urine as weapons, throwing them into the faces of his victims. At the same time he had a writing class, wherein there was creative writing, in which he wrote about his horrible true urine attacks and the teacher thought it was so great that he read it in front of the whole class, not knowing it was all true. He was an angry, vengeful boy. He also used to "handle" people's cars, meaning he would put Dog Poo in a ziplock bag, then would use the bag like an inside out glove to shove it under the handles of his victims' car doors, so when they went to open their cars they could get a hand full of Poo. He also mixed his love of explosives with the evil of Poo when he fashioned Poo-bombs, which consisted of an M-80 with a cigarette timer taped onto a paper bag filled with poo. of his most heinous attacks he placed the Poo-bomb outside of someone's door and lit the cig. Then he and his friends threw oranges at the house so that the people would open the door and come out. A short time after they did, the Poo-bomb exploded, spreading poo particles into the house and all over the people. A car chase ensued and the police got involved. There was also pepper spray. At age 15 he joined Gold's Gym and became obsessed with weightlifting. He felt small and weak since he was picked on earlier in life, so he wanted to be big and strong. After a few years he became big and strong and was picked on no longer. Soon he was as big as a bear, which was impractical when he had to take tennis and volleyball classes in college, so he began to slim down. One of his friends borrowed his grandma's video camera and when hanging out one night, together they filmed one of their pudgier yet more athletic friend doing a martial arts routine and that was the first "skit" he ever made. Afterwards they drove around yelling at people and filming it. Following this they started making more and more skits until they made their first short film named "Hostile Head" about a severed head that was also a serial killer. On the weekends Mike and his burly workout partners would drive up to speed metal shows in San Francisco, Oakland or Berkeley. They would drink "Ultimate Orange" which has since become a banned stimulant. They would mosh all night. They went to the shows to listen to the music and to hurt people. Mike stopped after a night where he kept smashing this little guy with a beanie into the floor because after the show he went outside with that d00ds blood on his shirt only to see that the d00d sitting outside had taken his beanie off and it was in fact a petite girl with short hair. At this point he was an angry, hateful person. On one occasion, whilst drunk, he assaulted a punk rock couple by double clothesline and threw bottles at their house, threw a peeing man over a fence at a party, hurt his friends, got stoned out of his mind and drank till he passed out. When he was 18 he listened to the Pantera song "Walk" for 24 hours straight whilst drinking 40s one night and screaming at some girl he didn't even know till she cried and left. He was also suspended in junior college for "conspiring against an instructor", at which point the superintendent commented that he had "Rebellious body language". Throughout all of that Mike was still making short films and skits with his friends. One of his friends showed the teacher of the psychology classes at the college and the teacher said "You guys need help." but Mike and his friends just thought it was funny. Whilst being particularly drunk at a house party Mike found himself terrified by a man who had just got out of prison. Even though Mike was 240 pounds and as big as a bear the man was able to intimidate him with his mind. This was the point at which he decided that true strength is in the mind, not in the body. So he changed his ways and set off on his path towards being a different, mentally strong person. After almost killing himself with a mix of muscle relaxers and alcohol, or whilst being with drunk/high drivers and accidents or police encounters he decided to stop drinking and doing stupid things and instead focus his time and energy on making films. In doing this he wouldn't have any friends but he decided he didn't want to waste his life being a loser doing dumb shit. He also realized that what he thought was strength, being physically powerful, smashing people, insulting people, being hateful and angry was actually just him showing his weakness. So he did a total 180 and decided to become a sober "niceguy". He decided to be some guy.

SomeGuy: The idea behind SomeGuy was to to be the opposite of the fearful egoist that was Michael. That it wouldn't be about the person at all, the person would be invisible, he would be anonymous. Because it wasn't about the creator, it was about the work. If you've ever done anything horrible then you know you wish you were invisible. When he became SomeGuY he dedicated his life to making films. SomeGuy had no friends, so SomeGuy explored some new places to perhaps make some new friends. One of those new places was the internet. He was finishing his degree in Kinesiology, which started as Zoology because of this love of animals, but his musclehead nature took over and he switched over to Kinesiology because personal training seemed like easy money. He also learned much of a Zoologist's job is killing animals to catalog them and he didn't want to do that, so he learned he was just an enthusiast and could never be a scientist. Since he worked at this interesting looking furniture store he figured it was time to try to make a feature film again. He had tried a few years earlier with his friends, but due to non existent planning it ended up only being a 40 minute mess. He thought he should try it again, but he had NO video camera and NO computer or editing setup, other than the two VCRs and DJ mixer he had used before. So he decided to try meeting someone on the internet who would perhaps want to shoot and edit the film. He had planned to buy his own computer once he was done with college, so it would be great to learn from someone who already had one. He searched online film message boards and met a guy named Tim who was a bit older but they got along great. He had a Sony VX1000 camera and a Canopus DvRex editing setup. So SomeGuy went through the paces to make this film. He started production right after college graduation, which he didn't attend. He was actually in a dumpster at the time, crushing down trash at work, as the money to be made at work that could be put toward the film was more important than some generic ceremony. He actually made a special video for his department's graduation, but never attended that either and to this day has had no contact with anyone he attended college with. So SomeGuy, his friend Tim, some people from his work and some old friends all took part in this live action feature film "Ophidian". It attempted WAY too much and came up WAY too short. It was crap, actually. From this he learned that you have to make a bunch of crap before you can make anything really good. By the time it was done he was so embarrassed of it that he never showed it to anyone. The experience of working with real actors and a little crew in real locations was invaluable..ALSO as he finished college he bought his computer and edited Ophidian with it, he also made the music, green screening and compositing for the film AND some really bad Dragonball Z inspired visual fx. He's still friends with Tim today and talks to him about once a year as they laugh about the old times.The thing about this horrible Ophidian thing was that it had some redeeming values. The trailed seemed interesting and wasn't as horrible, immature, offensive, with crappy technical quality like everything he had done before. So by using a digital video camera and editing on a computer it now looked pretty good, unlike the grainy messes with analog generation degradation of his past films, so it was something he could show others to get them interested in future projects. A new local cafe had opened up that was owned by the family of one of his friends who acted in his films and it had an open mic night. SomeGuy decided that he should start a filmmaking group at this cafe, so he went to this open mic and said that the next week there would be a filmmaking meeting. The next week about eight people showed up and he showed them the trailer for Ophidian to get them interested. The people were interested, so at the next meeting he decided they would actually make a short film there at the meeting. So for the next meeting SomeGuy wrote a short script and his friend Tim brought his camera to shoot it. He asked anyone who was interested in "directing" to put their name in a hat. A name was drawn and that person directed the film right then and there. Anyone who was interested acted in it and they shot the short film. By the time the next meeting came around Someguy had edited the film and presented to everyone. They were very excited, so they did it again and continued this process of making a new film every week for over a year until they had made about 30-50 short films with all different types of people, from all walks of life, including homeless people and French exchange students. They even held their own outdoor film festival on the patio of the cafe and all the people who were involved in the film showed up with their friends and families and they all loved it. This showed SomeGuy the power of film, how it can make people happy and bring them together. He continued to make new films with new people, week after week, as what became known as "Movie Night". He just did it for fun and there was no way to make money off it and he simply credited himself as "SomeGuY' on every film, as he was usually the writer, editor, composer, etc. Here's an excerpt from a San Jose based newspaper from 2001... I was calling myself "Trowa Barton" for some reason at the time 0_o

The Next Dimension

ANOTHER INSPIRATION for moviemakers pulling together as a gang is a local talent named Trowa Barton, who is organizing a collective film project out of a cafe in downtown San Jose. When I meet him, Barton is sitting at a small wooden table, holding a borrowed notebook computer on which he's stored samples from his nearly completed film Ophidian: To the Next Dimension.

"Here's the short-attention-span trailer," says Barton, a frizzy-haired party in a ski cap. The images fly by in a burst of pixilated color: the cold, indifferent face of a dark-eyed, black-lipped girl in a bleached-blonde wig, flashes of light, ghosts, a tracking shot of a terrified man racing through a dank, white-walled nightmare cavern.

It's the "pedestrian tunnel underneath The Alameda opposite the Towne Theater," Barton explains. "We used a battery-powered lantern and a wheelchair to get this shot."

Ophidian means "pertaining to snakes," Barton tells me. His film is about a little girl's recurring dreams of an artist--the imaginary artists' paintings in the little girl's mind expanding the story. Both Japanese anime and David Lynch inspire Barton's irrational, dreamlike narrative.

"David Lynch's Lost Highway changed the direction of my work," Barton says. Barton has made 40 short films shot on tape and edited on VHS. Ophidian is his first digital film.

"I'm not interested in digital for itself alone," Barton says, "but for its ease of manipulation, for being able to change the images after they were shot." It took Barton a year and a half to get the film to the right visual quality.

Barton is excited about the Adobe program After Effects, a digital-video cousin of Photoshop that allows the filmmaker to soften or sharpen the digital image to the look of various film stocks--say, the blur and grain of 16mm. "You can make digital look good; it just takes extra work," he says.

Barton, who took the first name Trowa from an anime character he likes, is bypassing Cinequest. He's planning a one-night filmfest of his own titled Bad Fad--"a bad fad for Hollywood"--of film and live performance by the Film Arts Group, a free collective of some 40 members that meets monthly at Papacito's cafe on South Third Street.

There, members draw names out of a hat to get assignments to direct two pages of script in a one-minute long snippet. Showing further evidence of his preference for anonymity, Barton has signed a few of his films "Some Guy." Richard von Busack- Metro Newspaper 2001

(Coincidentally the same writer did a piece about WATS in 2007 without knowing I was the same guy he interviewed from way back then)

One day an older gentleman came to one of the meetings. At this point SomeGuy was still VERY NAIVE as to the way the real world worked and how people really were, as he was swept up in this whole "it's free and fun" thing. One night, aforementioned older gentleman named Gary invited me for dinner. I went and he asked me "What is your ultimate plan for this film group? What would like to see it become?" Being the naive dumb-ass I was I told this stranger my ideas. One of them was to start a non-profit organization based around the film group, obtain funding and to do it on a bigger scale whilst being supported by the city. The Gary guy came to the meetings and kinda just slimed and lurked around and SomeGuy paid no attention to it. Eventually SomeGuy had a chance to move down to the Los Angeles area, which he had recently visited. He told the film group that he was going to leave, but he set things up so the group would continue without him. He wrote a feature film script for "I Was a German Teenage Werewolf", starring an obese, homeless woman that would keep the film group busy for awhile. Before he left he also created a DVD with all of the films the film group had made, in which he simply credited himself as "SomeGuY". He gave these DVDs to the people in the film group and left, departed to the Los Angeles area and started a film group there, where he began to make films with that group as well. After about a year he returned to his former town and decided to drop in on the cafe during what was supposed to be a "Movie Night". Much to his surprise no one was there. He then learned that soon after he left, the film group fell apart and Gary had been having private meetings with a few of the main members, whom SomeGuy considered "friends" at that time. After getting one of these "friends" to tell him what had happened, he told him that after he had left, Gary had convinced the other members that SomeGuy had gone to LA to become "rich and famous" based on the films that they had all worked on and told them since they worked on the film, they should get some money out of them as well, so he proposed a plan to them. That they would form a non-profit organization based around the film, in which they would all be board members and Gary himself would pose as "SomeGuY". They would take their work to the city to obtain funding for their organization and they would all make sure to keep it a secret from the real SomeGuY. After SomeGuY learned about this he was enraged. He was eventually able to confront Gary and let him know that he was a horrible cancer who would soon be dead. After learning his past film group was dead and most all of the people SomeGuY thought were his "friends" betrayed him after being promised a few dollars by some slimy old guy, SomeGuY returned to his film group in the Los Angeles area. SomeGuY had become quite an efficient editor and After Effects artist by this time. He also did graphic/web/flash design for work. The freelance work he did was enough to keep him going, as he was using the same equipment and computer he purchased after college. Besides which he had a much more diverse and talented group of actors in his new Los Angeles film group. He met the best actor he has ever come across in Venice Beach on accident. He went there with his roommate whom he sort of had an obligation to, as the roommate was a long time heroin addict and SomeGuY had made a deal so that he could live rent free, as part of his responsibility was to be a companion to this person and help keep them off of drugs. The roommate had to check into a rehab program in Venice, it was supposed to take a few minutes but ended up taking a few hours, so SomeGuY wandered along the boardwalk. He came across a painter selling his works on the sidewalk. They struck up a conversation in which filmmaking was discussed. Later the painter came by SomeGuY's kitchen studio and they made a stopmotion animation and that started the collaboration between SomeGuY and Stephen P. Together they made the most outrageous and insane short films that SomeGuY has ever created, many of which can be found on youtube. SomeGuY was amazed at Steve's improv ability. I'm sure whatever improv abilities that M dot Strange has now were learned from watching Steve work. Later SomeGuY became great friends with a guy from Mexico city who lived next door, his name was Sivan. They were both loners and into dark things. Sivan was still learning English when the pair of them were in a hipster cafe in Santa Monica, when Sivan said "I feel bad because I don't speak the language good... I can't make friends... I can't speak with any of these people." So SomeGuY looked around the room and said "These people are a bunch of douchebags! You don't want to know them!" to which Sivan asked "Really?!" SomeGuY looked him in the eye and said "Yeh, really! These are like the worst people ever." and Sivan replied "Wow that's great!" and his weight was lifted. With their misanthropic bond, Sivan and SomeGuY became best friends, even though SomeGuY was always looking for opportunities to play horrible tricks on Sivan. Like one day SomeGuY had gotten a cosmetology head of a bearded man, so when Sivan was at work SomeGuy put the head in Sivan's bed and made it look like a whole person. When Sivan came home SomeGuy told him "Hey man some drunk homeless guy got sick and was puking everywhere, so I told him he could sleep in your room for a bit since you weren't home." Sivan looked pissed but tried to play it cool and just walked away seething. SomeGuY went on working on his computer until, a few hours later, Sivan demanded "Get that fucking guy out of my bed, I have to work early!" So SomeGuY said "But he's sleeping, we don't want to be rude?" however Sivan pressed on "No, I have to work! GET him out!" SomeGuY gave up his fight and said "Ok." so he walked over to the bed and whispered into the dummy's ear "Richard... Richard... Wake up!" He then turned to Sivan and shrugged his shoulders, prompting Sivan to point at the sleeping man as if to say GTFO. So SomeguY kept whispering into the man's ear, whilst slyly grabbing hold of the cosmetology head's hair, which he then flung at Sivan and screamed. Shocked for a second, Sivan then punched a laughing SomeguY in the arm over 9000 times. So SomeGuY was quite a jerk of a roommate, tormenting his roommate for the sake of his own entertainment. When they got too misanthropic and aggro they would go into the garage and abuse the punching bag in there until their hands bled after lifting weights. Then they would walk down Santa Monica boulevard and get ice cream at the Thrifty's on the corner and sometimes walk down to the pier and stare out at the ocean. SomeGuY made his best live action short films with his crew in Santa Monica including Nar-rational, Fellatio: The Hollywood Story, Pomp-ass Pampered Poser and Untiled Insane Short Film.

Addition in FIRST PERSON: One particularly memorable SomeGuY moment. It was 2002 and my little crew and I had kicked out a bunch of crazy short films that we really liked. Since Steve sold his paintings on the Venice Beach boardwalk he met lots of people, so at one point he met this guy named James, who considered himself quite an improv actor. Steve said that he had hung out with the guy a few times and that the guy seemed to really love acting because thats all he talked about. He had never seen the guy act, he had just heard about him talk about acting a lot. We were about to shoot another film, which ended up being "Pomp-ass Pampered Poser", so Steve thought it would be a good time to invite James, whose online name was "JamesActor", to our film shoot to act. So Steve invited him over and the guy came and started talking about acting right away. I was like "Wow, this guy is really into acting!" as he kept talking about how "passionate" he was about acting and how when "people see him act they're usually impacted by his performances" My reaction was "Wow, I really want to see this guy act!" at that time and I can still say that Steve was the greatest actor and pure performer I have ever met, so I was like "Let's take the camera and go shoot something in the garage then!" I was genuinely excited because I knew what Steve could do and I wanted to see what these two guys could do together. I still had to write the script that we were going to shoot that night, so I left my friend Sivan to run the camera, whilst Steve and James Actor would make something up. I went inside and wrote the script, then went back to the garage about an hour later to see how it was going. As I walked in Sivan, with his shoulders slumped, looked over at me with a look of WHATEVER on his face. Steve's shoulders were also slumped and he looked totally dejected, whilst James Actor stood there with his hands on his hips. I said "What's going on? Did you guys do a scene?" and Steve said "Well, we're having some issues." to which I replied "What issues?" the answer I received from Steve was "James is having a problem acting in here." I looked over at James and said "What's the problem?" He fidgeted, looked down at the floor and said "I mean I'm already ready to act... but I just can't work in a place like this... in someone's GARAGE!" A jolt of rage struck me, but I kept my composure and I said "I mean I know this isn't a fancy place or whatever but this is what he have and I think if you want to act you'll act anywhere." but James went on "Well it's just that it's so enclosed and I mean I don't know you guys, I just know Steve!" then continued "I mean I don't know any of you people... I can work with Steve as we've worked together, but..." Steve broke in "No James, we haven't worked together... we talked... we just did a lot of talking... I know this isn't a fancy set but Mike and Sivan and I have made some little films that we're really proud of here... I used to talk a lot about acting, but we're acting, making films here and I think it's great." I leaned over and whispered to Sivan "Has he been making excuses the whole time?" Sivan nodded his head. Seeing and hearing Steve talking about what our films meant to him and seeing this fucking James Actor poser try to tear it down and devalue it, the rage rose up again. I interrupted Steve by laughing out loud like a psychopath "Hahahaha... I see what's going on here!" Steve seemed to sense where I was going and my initial aggression seemed to put him off at first because Steve was a really nice and pretty sensitive guy, as he was super intelligent and not many things got past him. It's like he knew what I was about to do, he knew I was going to make an example of this guy. This guy that embodied the wannabe, the poser, the FAKE, who was putting down what we were doing just so he didn't have to admit that he was a fraud. I was there with two of my best friends, our bond was based on the films we made and we treasured them, they made us happy. I wasn't about to let this wannabe douchebag tear it all down. So I raised my voice and stared at James Actor and said "You know, James, there's two types of people in this world... those that talk about doing things and those that actual do things... we do things here... we make films... we may not have the best equipment, but we do it and it's clear to me that you don't want to do anything, you just want to talk about it." James Actor's hand shook as he whimpered "What you're writing me off just because I don't want to work in someone's garage... I mean Steve and I worked together?!" at this point I really wanted to beat James Fake Actor's ass. Steve reiterated, whilst interrupting James' tirade "No James, we've never done anything...we talked! We talked a lot! I'm tired of talking! Now I want to make films and, granted, the films I'm making with Mike aren't everything I wanted to do, but we're doing it! We're really doing it and we're on to something here and I'm really proud of them!" I kind of sensed that Steve wanted to give James the "FUCK YOU! YOU POSER!", but Steve was too nice so I took my cue "You know what James? This isn't going to work out... you're a poser... you're a wannabe and we're the real thing... you TALK and we DO... so you might as well get the fuck out of here right now because we have no use for posers like you." James looked shocked, teary eyed and full of bitch-made he looked down at the floor. Steve looked over to me and winked "Ok, thanks Mike... James lets go!" Steve comforted James and escorted him out of OUR garage. Sivan and I remained silent until he came back. Steve paced around the garage, then eventually broke his silence "I've been here in LA for four years and I wanted to make films and all I met was people like him... and what we just did... FELT GREAT!" We all started to laugh and high five'd each other. After casting out the walking artistic cancer that was James Actor we went on and shot an awesome short film that night. Years later I found "JamesActor" on youtube. I logged into my SomeGuY account and sent him some special messages. So if you're living in a basement and working in a garage or whatever and people try to put you down for THAT, FUCK THEM! Let all those CANCERS BURN! Because they're all useless wannabe poserS anyway!

Addition in FIRST PERSON: Another fun SomeGuY time in Santa Monica. We had a few core hardcore members in our Filmmaking group. Me, Steve, Sivan and Matt. A friend of a friend referred a guy to our group and the guy was to come over to the apartment. This guy "C.J." had heard that "SomeGuY" was the final boss of the group, but that's all he knew. We were communicating through email and he was going to come by one night to meet us all. We thought it would be funny if Sivan posed as SomeGuY except he would act all Hollywood pompous and we would act like followers in his cult. So we had Sivan sit on this couch with sunglasses at night, with a hands free thing that was obviously plugged into nothing as the wire dangled by his feet. So the guy knocked on the door and Sivan began talking nonsense into the hands free thing. I answered the door whispering saying "SomeGuY is on the phone!" I led the guy inside, but not before bowing to Sivan. I sat next to the guy in silence as Sivan said like "Buy sell! Sell buy!" into the phone that wasn't plugged in. After a while he looked over at us and said "I am SomeGuY." C.J. said "Hi SomeGuY, I'm C.J. nice to meet you." Sivan nodded his head and said "Do you know who I was talking to on the phone?","No" said C.J. and which Sivan stated "I was talking to GOD!" I bowed to him again as C.J. looked on awkwardly. Then we couldn't help it anymore because C.J. was really a nice guy and we didn't want to mess with him anymore, so we told him what we were doing and he was in our group. He was from Cambodia and had just moved to LA. He even brought chips and soda, nice guy.

Someguy continued-At the same time he was dabbling in animation and electronic music. He had been making claymation and instrumentals for a while, but now he started to experiment with 3d animation and rapping. The first 3d program he used was Poser and the first time he ever recorded any vocals on a track was through getting on his hands and knees and rapping into the built-in microphone on his laptop. As he got more experience making live action short films, he did more and more things to challenge himself. Like writing whole scripts on the fly an hour before the actors arrived or just making things up as they shot. Since he had gotten pretty good at editing and manipulating things in post, live action began to lose its challenge, so animation and music seemed much more interesting. Having already made a few crappy instrumental albums, he dedicated himself so that he would make more complex, better developed songs. He also wanted to create a short animated series. At this point he was heavily influenced by 8bit video games and that was reflected in his music and animation that was created at that time. His first animated series "Blue Wander" was just an attempt to re-create the Cinematics from the original NES Ninja Gaiden games, with some gobbledygook thrown in about monsters with daleks as bad guys, since he found free 3d dalek models. Once he completed a few he said "Huh, it works." so then he thought up a bit more story and made a few more episodes, each getting more complex until he had made 9 episodes. These episodes were made with Poser and After Effects. His 3d skills were pretty much non-existent so he used Poser as a way to have working dolls, he just had to pose and the like. Looking for a new challenge and feeling the need to create something substantial, he decided that he should make an animated feature film based around this "Blue" character. Around the same time he completed his first album with vocals called "Songs for Strangers", as at that time he was actually making songs for strangers he met online as some kind of an attempt to make friends, I would assume? He came up with a persona called "Agent2a03". Agent because he was an agent from the future sent back to save the world through ice cream and through decoding the 8 bits of emotion and 2a03 because that was the name of the synthesizer used to generate the sounds inside of an NES. So for the meantime he focused most of his energy on music.

Agent2a03: Agent2a03 was born out of a need to differentiate himself from the exploited SomeGuY, as Agent2a03 made music and not films. One day while at a cafe, a young man was playing the Super Mario Bros theme on a guitar. This got Agent2a03's attention and he struck up a conversation with Joe. After a short while they became great friends and formed their band "Go Robot Team". They added another member named Spencer to their band and together they began to play live shows to bewildered crowds of ten people. They also began to perform on the streets. They played on the streets of Santa Monica, San Jose, Seattle and a few gas stations along highway 5 in California. Their claim to fame was their "Public Toilet Tour" in San Jose. On one Friday night, with their battery powered amp, they did a tour of all the public toilets in San Jose. They put a coin in the toilet so the door would open, then they played until the time was up and the door shut. They then packed up and walked to the next toilet and did the same thing until it was 1am and they had played all the toilets in town. At most performances, they also had an obese, homeless woman sing the national anthem or they had a guy give a speech about mayonnaise. In their short life Agent2a03 and Go Robot Team were able to make a few hardcore fans like Marie, Paul the Dork, Sean, and Brando. Agent2a03 wore a powerglove when he performed, Joe wore a fluffy wig and Spencer wore a neckbrace that had "thug" written on it. Interestingly enough Agent had discovered a neckbrace fetish website online and made a song called 'Neckbrace Lovers". He sent the song and pics from a show to the neckbrace fetish website and they became the "pics of the week" on that site sometime in 2004. Agent2a03 made what he thought were good songs, but they had a strange vibe to them that weirded most people out. He wouldn't figure out how to use this to his benefit until later. Like many non-Japanese outside of Japan who had become obsessed with Japanese culture, Agent2a03 became what is known as a Weaboo for a short time. This was cured by traveling to Japan and learning that it wasn't some magical wonderland. However during this time he had some pen pals in Japan, one of which told him his music and animation was "bukimi", which means creepy or strange, something that gives you the creeps. Harking back to his snake throwing days, he enjoyed the thought of giving people the creeps, so he started to use the name "Bukimi Maikeru" in the credits of his strange animation at the time. He flipped it to "Maikeru Bukimi", then to "Maikeru Strange" and then when he made "Keep it real dog" with his friend Sean B, he credited himself as "M. Strange". That short film played at a small film festival and he did an interview there, in which the interviewer called him "M dot Strange", reading the dot aloud. He liked the way that sounded so he decided to use the name "M dot Strange" from that point on. As things in their personal lives were pulling GO ROBOT TEAM apart, it looked like they would never finish their album or play shows again. Agent2a03 made his "Predator_E" album and started on a script for a feature length animated film based on a song he had made on his "Songs for Strangers" album called "We are the Strange".

M dot Strange: M dot Strange was born sometime in 2005. He wasn't a lil self-centered, whiny bitch like Michael. He wasn't as nice guy, naive as SomeGuY. And he wasn't the hopeful, impractical fool that Agent2a03 was. He was the result of all of those other experiences. He wouldn't fail where the others did. M dot Strange would be a loner, he would work alone. He wasn't interested in friendship or love, he would be a machine that would create work. He would be better and stronger and succeed. If he didn't we would kill him and make someone else to replace him. He took over the live action stuff from SomeGuY with his short films like "FACE", he took over the music things from Agent2a03 with his album like "ALL CAPS" and he took over the animation business with "The Ultimate Sacrifice". If you have heard of me or have across my work it was probably through M dot Strange. A valuable lesson led me to him. All throughout my past, anytime I made anything I thought was nice or heartwarming or whatever, it always came across as strange to people. So I thought "Why should I fight it?! I've been strange all my life, so I might as well celebrate it and let people know that it's supposed to be strange!" That was a huge revelation for me and once I changed my name and made that choice, suddenly my work made more sense to people.

Sometimes people try to hold me to my past personas, but those past personas are dead. Instead of letting my true self die inside, instead I killed the persona and created a new one to replace it. What I also learned through time is that I was trying to portray someone I wasn't. It was who/what I WANTED to be. In all those past personas I was denying a part of my real self and with M dot Strange I'm acknowledging all the parts. I think it especially shows in my work on HSM. I look back at my past personas and the things they did as part of the training I needed to be who I am today. I appreciate my experiences and am glad I had them all, even if one of them had me contemplating jumping in front of a train whilst in a Yokohama station toilet stall. The key is DON'T KILL YOURSELF, kill the persona and create a new one. It wasn't you who failed, it wasn't you who was unloved or hated. It was the part you were playing at the time, it was the mask you were wearing. So create a new role, a new mask. Go on to do the things that you couldn't do with your former personas.

People will probably still have a lot of questions as to how I got to be who I am now and I did leave out quite a bit, as I'm writing this off the top of my head from Cafe Trieste in San Jose, as I listen to Roots Manuva's "Colossal Insight" over and over. Who we truly are will probably remain a mystery to us forever. We supposedly will only show our true heart in our death smoke, according to the Hagakure. I've hurt myself a lot in this life and hurt a lot of other people as well. In the end I was just bumping into people as I was lost myself and when we're lost it's difficult to tell what is right and what is wrong. I'm not lost anymore and I know what is right and what is wrong. If I hurt myself or other people now it's not because I'm lost, it's just because... BEWARE I LIVE.

When I look back on my time as Michael... FUCK I WAS A HORRIBLE KID! When I look back at all the anger and the hateful things I did as SomeGuy... DAMN I WAS A DICK! When I look at the sap Agent2a03... SHIT I WAS INVOLVED IN MAJOR FAGGOTRY!

M dot Strange has already made his share of mistakes and has been a total fucking pathetic moron sometimes, but he gets the job done and as long as he keeps kicking out dope work I'll let it slide. So who is talking now? I'm not really sure.

Next book I write I'll mention the alien abductions, my involvement with a secret government project, the bizarre martial arts cult and time travel, as well as some other things I forgot to mention. I promise.

Where do my Ideas come from?

An idea is born and then what? I get lots of ideas all the time, mostly for comedy bits. I do enjoy doing comedic stuff, but it doesn't really excite me, it's not my passion. So I can start working on a comedic idea, but after the initial inspiration wears off I stop because there is no deeper drive pushing me to realize it as I don't feel it's that important. I know that "laughter is the best medicine" and the world needs lots of medicine. The way I see it though is that lots of people do comedy and continue to and it's great to really laugh at things, but I guess I feel like my purpose as an artist/creator is to go much deeper. I want to speak to people on a deeper level, rather than just "haha". I also love challenges. Challenges are what really excite and motivate me. It's more of a challenge for me to try to make someone cry than it is to make someone laugh. Actually the toughest thing is to put someone through all the paces. Make them laugh, cry, rejoice then recoil in fear. I'm talking REAL deep feelings, not the topical ones brought about by "touching" music and close ups of pitiful or sad things and creating shock reactions. I don't want the quick reactionary stuff, I want to create the deep heavy stuff. So that a day or two after you see it, thinking about it makes you feel something. I don't want my works to only live in the moment they are experienced, I want them to live on in peoples' memories.

So then I get an idea, I search for its root because there is usually something deep within my unconscious mind that is trying to speak out through the idea. I work to find that root and when I do, that leads me into the real idea. The idea that eventually leads to a film can have no bearing on the final film itself, but I find it a major motivating force when working on the film. For instance at the root of HSM is child abuse, childhood sexual abuse. I used my own experience of being abused as a child by a babysitter as something that is driving HSM under the surface. That abuse obviously disrupted my life and I had to work to overcome it and become a healthy human being. So at the root I had this problem in my life and I was able to work through it with my own solution. I hide this stuff in the story of HSM. My problem and my solution is presented in the film, not directly but it's there.

I think that is the true power of art and cinema. For the most part film has been used for malevolent purposes, both intentionally and unintentionally, and I want to use it for good. I want to use it to help heal people and bring people together. Ofcourse I have my own ideals and solutions that I portray, as my films are my soapbox, but I can only be myself and present what works for me.

I've had plenty of ideas that I thought were just "cool", but I've found when you have no deeper motivation, no deeper motivation to the story, you are not going to have the drive to complete it on your own. I also believe if you don't have the drive to make your film or art by any means necessary on your own then it wasn't important anyway.

I mean do you think there were any deeper motivations besides making money and being famous behind most films?

Now obviously I'm blurring the line between art and entertainment, as I think there's room for both and that's what I'm gunning for. That's what motivates me and causes my ideas to realizes themselves through me.

Making your film or your art is going to grind you down and if there isn't something in that work that you believe in, that you're willing to fight for till you breathe your last breath, then you're probably not going to make it unless you have millions of dollars and the tons of support working with the studio system gives you.

Passion is everything and I find that passion has to pull from things that are bigger than us. I mean I believe in the power of art and cinema to change people, to change the world in a good way and even in a great way. That's my cause. Instead of self medicating with drugs, TV, sex, religion or whatever, I believe that art is the answer. That's how I medicate myself and I get to share my "cures" with the world, as cryptic as they may be. Even if it only affects and helps one person, that's one more person than me and it's worth it.

I believe that most people died inside at one point in life. Or they took their true inner voice, the one they had when they were a child, the one that cared about other people and animals, the one that thought that all people should have enough food and a place to sleep without being hurt or killed by others. I always thought that we should have 3 year olds create the rules we all live by because that is our core. I think that deep down we all have this universal goodness inside of us, but we REPRESS it, we STRANGLE this inner child. We throw it down the well. We tell it that it's impractical and immature. Yet I believe that this inner child is the key to human happiness, both for ourselves and everyone else.

Not to say our inner child doesn't like to play war and dream up horrible monsters that eat things!

I've found that with almost everything I've made I'm trying to say the same thing, but it doesn't quite come out right. So then I make something new to try to say it again. And again and again. Hopefully after I've made enough things my message will be visible.