6/22/08
Ghost Story, Magic Rabbit Productions second feature film, is now complete! Please check back soon for instructions on how to order your copy of the dvd.
5/9/08
This fall, Magic Rabbit Productions will lend a hand to produce “Branch to Branch”, a new play featured in the 2008 Philadelphia Fringe Festival.
7/21/08
Branch to Branch tickets are now available through The Philly Fringe’s website! Click here to reserve yours today!
For more info, check out:
Branch to Branch official website
8/21/08
Two exclusive media clips have been added to the Media section. Check them out!
9/5/08
Last year, while at the Philadelphia Zoo, Elizabeth Green saw a huge silverback gorilla slam into the front glass pane of his cage ... (more)
9/6/08
Branch to Branch has been reviewed by Mark Cofta for Philadelphia’s City Paper.
I’d like to quickly address Mr. Cofta’s concerns about the structure of the show.
B2B is intended to be episodic. While not plotless, it reflects the mind of an ape; sometimes direct and specific and sometimes wandering and aimless.
In short, be prepared for a theatrical safari; what you encounter on the way is more important than where you end up.
- MSJ
11/14/08
Magic Rabbit Productions has announced a new project:
Mother Superior:
Let There be Lead
Casting for this short film has begun. For more information, please visit the Mother Superior page.
1/12/09
A partial Cast List for Mother Superior is up. Production started January 10th, so keep checking back for updates!
1/19/09
The first pictures from the set of Mother Superior are on line! Click the picture below to see them.
More to come soon.
1/26/09
Even more pictures from the ongoing Mother Superior shoot have been added. You can see them on the newly launched Mother Superior Media Page.
More to come!
3/3/09
On Sunday March 1st, principal photography of Mother Superior officially wrapped. Let post production begin!
Check out some more pictures at the Mother Superior media page!
4/21/09
The official trailer for Mother Superior is online!
11/17/09
The full version of Mother Superior is now online!
03/17/10
The official Mother Superior channel on Vimeo is now live!
As always, my goal is innovation in the digital cinema world. DVD’s, while still a perfectly acceptable media format, have fallen behind in the technology game. Blu Ray in a step up, but are very expensive to produce. Therefore, in leu of physical media, we’ll be posting exclusive content here. Watch for deleted scenes, commentaries and more!
07.10.10
Mother Superior is an Official Selection at the Action On Film Festival in Pasadena CA!
We’re screening at 10pm on Friday July 23rd at the Academy 3, so come out if you can!
Click the angry nun to watch the full movie online now:
08.01.10
Mother Superior in the Lebanon Daily News:
NLSD grad's movie accepted in film fest
When Matthew Scott Johnston was 16 years old, he shot his first movie -- a short film about a dinosaur hunting for candy -- with a Sony Handycam and a remote-controlled tyrannosaurus rex.
Ten years later, the 2003 Northern Lebanon High School graduate's movie, "Mother Superior: Let There Be Lead," has been accepted into the Action on Film Festival in Pasadena, Calif. more
07.23.10
Ashley Kelly has been nominated for Best Actress in a Breakout Action Role at the Action On Film Fest:
09.09.10
Mother Superior is an Official Selection at Thrillspy International Film Festival in Washington DC!
We’re screening on Saturday October 2nd in the 2-5:30 block. Tell your friends!
Click the angry nun to watch the full movie online now:
09.15.10
More info on Thrillspy and a big picture of actress Ashely Kelly on On Tap Online:
Confidential:
2nd Annual ThrillSpy
International Film
Festival
By Ashley Bryant
The District is a familiar host to numerous film festivals, but only one lives up the city’s moniker as “Spy City.” The Thrillspy International Film Festival is returning to DC this month with its second festival focused on thriller and spy films. more
12.01.10
Devil wins first place at the Canon Filmmakers :30 Second Film Festival!
05.18.11
48 Hours
It’s 4:00am Sunday morning, and I’ve been up for twenty - two hours. I’m sitting in front of Samuel Hall’s editing suite in South Philly. He’s just finished color correcting the last shot from our movie.
“Okay,” he says as we watch the yellow render bar slowly creep. “What’s left?”
Somewhere, deep inside my barely - operational brain, a list begins checking itself off. Fix the dialog for the second half of the movie. Record and add foley. Write, record and mix music. Render a master and compress an online.
Is it four in the morning? Shit.
“I think,” Sam says, “for our health, we should get some sleep.”
02.26.11
Art with an Invisible Hand
“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”
-The Dark Knight, 2009
I think I just lost a potential client because I charged for my services. It doesn’t bother me that much, but it does highlight a topic I’ve been thinking about for some time, and it seemed to be a good first blog post.
A bit of background: while I’m mostly a filmmaker, I do some photography work on the side. I prefer to do model work rather than “documentary” style (weddings, events etc). This is probably because model photography is as close to filmmaking as I can get. Most of the work I’ve done has been free, but I have done some commissioned work too. Recently, I put my portfolio up on modelmayhem.com and offered to work with interested models and photographers.
5.26.11
More From the 48 Hour GFC
Hey guys,
The 48 Hour Guerrilla Film Competition has issued a new challenge: the team with the most hits on their video will win $1000! Please help us be that team by taking a minute (well, five minutes) and watching “Blood” on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMjXyuejpkM
Thank you so much for your support!
5.28.11
Lightroom Holga
Recently, I found myself flipping through some of the stunning images from uer taken at Hashima Island. One of my secret passions is urban exploration, but I’m way too cowardly to actually do any infiltration. I love reading stories about people chartering local fishing boats to take them to remote islands, but I don’t have the balls to attempt it myself.
Hashima is a derelict island off the coast of Nagasaki. Once a coal mining facility, it was abandoned in 1974 when coal went out of fashion in Japan. For the past 30 odd years, it’s been left to rot; a ghost town in the middle of the ocean.
The explorer who snuck onto the island took a Holga and shot everything he could see. I found myself entranced by the pictures. There’s something so appropriate about shooting abandoned locations with a camera like a Holga. It’s an atmospheric device, to say the least.
7.2.11
This Is Not About Final Cut Pro X
I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon and write a blog post about FCPX.
I’m not going to do it.
I’m not.
Crap, I am, aren’t I?
Fine. You win.
I first sat down with Final Cut Pro in 2001. I was in my school’s visual broadcasting program at the time, and they upgraded their tape - to - tape editing suite to a Quicksilver Power Mac G4 and FCP 2.5.
I hated it. Coming from an iMovie background, Final Cut was hard to use and incomprehensible. I followed some of the included tutorials, but they were way out of my league. For most of the year, I ignored it.
Next year, in a new program with a new teacher, I dove headfirst into the program. I learned straight from the manual this time, teaching myself page by page. By the end of the year, I had purchased a copy for myself. I loved it. For the past ten years, Final Cut has been my reason to own a Mac
7.26.11
Return to Assateague
Mom turns to look at me. We’re seated higher, on the dry sand above the tide line. There are still some people around; tourists catching a few last waves before darkness falls.
“I’ve been looking for this place,” she says.
“What, Assateague?” I ask.
“No,” she replies and I understand her meaning immediately.
10.21.11
Dinner and a Movie #1
Wild Hunt and Pizza
* This is the first of a series of blog postings I'll be doing. They are recipes for dinner I make and reactions to movies I watch. Enjoy and please leave feedback and suggestions! *
I've been having trouble sleeping recently. Which isn't that bizarre, to tell the truth. I'm very sensitive to loud noises and I live in the city; a place full of screaming football fans and dump trucks. On some nights, it gets to the point where I can't UNHEAR the noises, like they're echoing around in my mind. These nights I put on a box fan in the background and try to get lost in that white noise. Most of the time it works. Sometimes it doesn't.
On bad nights, like the one I had last night, I think about other options. Buying earplugs or sleeping pills. Just in case it gets bad again. But I never will. Because I'm afraid of escalation. I'm afraid of that day when one pill won't be enough to get me to sleep to I take another. And another.
I'm not the type of person who'd give into that impulse. I'm really not. But when we are put in situations that make us feel trapped, situations that strip away our control, we do things that surprise us.
That's what I find so fascinating about this movie. It's an honest, brutal, nasty and quirky look at the steamroller effect of escalation. And it's terrifying because it happens so slowly that anyone could have stopped it at any time. But, by the time you realize you could have, it's already too late. And there's nothing left to do but ride it out, and hope that you wake up the next morning.
11.15.11
Self Portrait with Corpse
I remember that was the first story that made me afraid to venture into the woods alone. Not because I thought the woman with the green ribbon was looking for me, but because I had such a sense of unease just thinking about what that ribbon meant. It stuck with me. It haunted me.
It did exactly what horror should.
01.03.12
Roman - One Love Baby (Prod. by J Farell)
This is a music video I shot with Samuel Hall for Roman last month. I’ll be writing up a blog post on it soon, going into some of the technical details about the shoot. Until then, enjoy.
01.20.12
One Love Baby Hits Music Blogs
01.24.12
S*it Bikers Say
A video I shot with Bill Dwyer of atlasrider.com. Don’t ask me what any of it means, yah tankslappers.
