Josh Pavlock: How "Checked Out" Became Reality

What does it take to turn a lifelong dream into a feature film?

This week on The Hook with Johni & Jess, we sit down with Josh Pavlock, founder of Osprey Media Studios and the writer, producer, and director behind the independent thriller Checked Out. Josh shares the incredible six-year journey from mowing his lawn and deciding to make a movie, to filming a feature-length thriller, building a cast and crew, navigating the challenges of editing, and preparing for film festival submissions. 

Along the way, we talk about:

•  Why he traded his dream sports car for a movie budget 
•  The surprising challenges of casting, directing, and editing 
•  How a sinking boat nearly derailed production 
•  The reality of making an independent film from the ground up 
•  Why collaboration matters more than control 
•  The future of Checked Out and the trilogy already in the works 
•  Advice for aspiring filmmakers who don't know where to start 

Plus, Josh shares his favorite films, directors, soundtracks, and the philosophy that helped him bring his vision to life: "Don't wait. Go make a movie."

Whether you're a filmmaker, creative entrepreneur, storyteller, or someone sitting on a dream you've been putting off, this episode is packed with inspiration, behind-the-scenes insight, and proof that it's never too late to bet on yourself.

🎬 Learn more about Checked Out and Osprey Media Studios, and hear how one idea grew into a full-fledged filmmaking journey. 

Monsters performed by TJ Peterson 

Transcript

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Today we're sitting down with Josh Pavlock, founder and CEO of Osprey Media Studios, and the writer, producer, and director behind Checked Out. We're talking filmmaking, the real behind the scenes process, and what it actually takes to bring an idea to life. Josh, I think that a lot of people growing up or in life or whatever, they kind of imagine themselves making a film, but of course they don't. Right. So was there a moment when you realized you had to become a filmmaker and not just that it was something cool one day to maybe think about? When I was younger, I was into theater. I wanted to actually go on Saturday Night Live. That was like my dream when I was in high school. But things, you know, happened in life. I ended up going into the military and then I started a family. And when you start a family, all that kind of goes to the back burner. So I worked on my professional career and it was always in the back of my mind making movies, being in movies. When my kids graduated from high school and went off to college and they were okay, and everybody was like, okay, they've got their own career paths, they're doing their own thing, they're gonna be successful, they don't need my help anymore. I was like, it's my turn. My thought process on that was nobody's gonna give me a Hollywood movie to direct or star in right off the bat, because I've done absolutely nothing in years. So I was like, I'm gonna have to do it myself. And that's when I got the idea of I'm gonna write a movie and make a movie. And that's how that whole thing came about. I was out just mowing my lawn one day and I'm like, I'm gonna make a movie. I'm I'm gonna do it, and just made the decision to do it. Huh. Yeah. Some of my best moments happen in the shower, but I'd imagine mowing the lawn is similar. Yes. I have like three acres to mow, so I'm out there for a while. So I do a lot of thinking out in the mower. That's so cool. Well, what was the first one you wrote? This is the first one. Okay. This is the very first one. Yes. Checked out is the first one. Okay. This has been a six-year project for me. Wow. Yeah. From idea to finally coming to having a private screening has been six years. Oh my God. I can't wait to dive into it. We want to know everything. Yeah. We're gonna know everything. So all the filming has happened. Yes. Obviously, we're way past that. So yeah, we filmed in 2024, the summer of 2024. I broke it into three different sections. We had one section in June, another section in August, and then the last section at the end of August. And I broke it up. I did the first section, it was like a thr a weekend. It was the smaller parts of the movie because it was the first time the crew had met, the actors had met, and we wanted to get a groove going, and I wanted to figure things out and then give us a month to go, okay, let's do lessons learned, let's figure out what we can do better, how can we make this more efficient? Things like that. And so I took a whole month and then I started the major filming process. The next filming set was like six days, and then the last one was 14 days. We did some reshoots too. It ended up being like 24 days in total of filming. Did you have a chair with your name on it? I did. I did me. I did. I did. Actually, I didn't have that, I didn't own that, but one of my associate producers was like, Hey, you need this. And she went out and bought one for me and brought it on set. And I was like, Oh, that's great. Yeah. Well, I have to ask, what's the wildest thing that maybe happened on set? Or can you tell us? So the wildest thing that happened on set, I would have to say the most like craziest thing that happened is we have a boat in the movie, and during filming, the boat sunk. Oh man. Yeah, and it was nuts because we were doing night shoots and everything looked great, and we cut and we all went inside, and we slept during the day, and then we went to go shoot the next night, and I went outside, and the boat was underwater, and it was underwater like two inches above the brim of the boat, so it wasn't completely underwater, but was just underwater enough where I could save it. And so I had to like go buy a sun pump and get a truck and some straps and pump out all the water and try to pull it out of the water, and it was a big mess. Do you know why that happened? So there is a specific scene in the movie where we are doing stuff around the boat. And when we were doing stuff around the boat, one of the actors accidentally, I guess, undid the drain plug in the bottom of the boat while they were acting, and we didn't know it, and water slowly started to fill into the boat, and then up higher in the boat, there is a location that's where there's a hole where all the wires and stuff from the engine goes into the boat. And when the water got to there, it filled in. And that was that was the most frustrating and the biggest problem that we had on set. There were some other pivot positions. We had some talent that decided not to show up last minute, and I had to replace them, but it actually worked out. There was there's a lot of those moments where it was like, oh my gosh, this is a big problem. And it was a happy accident. We ended up getting somebody better actually at the last minute to fill the position. Way better, way better. Uh, two positions, actually, way better actor and way better actress were replaced with. So the universe was looking out for you. Yes, I was very fortunate. It is crazy in life how some of the things that seem like the biggest disasters end up being the biggest blessings. Yes, yes. We call them happy accidents on set. Happy accidents. And then with a big thing too with our crew is we we do the uh whole Ross and Rachel pivot, pivot. We say that all the time because every time something goes wrong, we're like, all right, we're gonna pivot. That's good. Yeah, that's good. It's a way to take a negative and make it a positive. Yeah. Well, you seem like you're not the nightmare director at all. Like I would not be afraid of you in any way. I'd be totally stoked to work with you. Yeah, thank you. You know, because I know you as a person and you're just you're sweet, you're friendly, and but I'm sure you gotta get down to business. You do. You gotta get down to business. But I run my set very collaboratively. I allow even the lighting guy and the best boy to, hey, this, I was wondering why, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we may change a scene, we may change some lines. If somebody's got a good idea, I'm all ears. But that's also another reason. I think it shows in this film that, you know, it wasn't just one-minded, one, it was a collaborative thing. So I also I told the actors, I said, you know, I'm giving you this character and I'm entrusting you with this character. If you read a line and you think my character wouldn't say it that way, let me know. Well, during the table read, let me know. We'll change it, we'll alter it, you know, if I think it's appropriate or if it goes with the rest of the story, then um we can change it. I love that. I'm by no means an actress, nor did I ever want to be one, but I was talked into two years in a row for a nonprofit doing a murder mystery and having a character. And my character was really kind of bland, and there was all these vampires in the last one, and people with these accents, and I was just like some regular like person, and so I kind of channeled into Anna Nicole Smith, and I had a blonde wig and I went super southern, and I kind of changed my let my like my lines a little bit to make it all flow, and it worked so well. And if somebody hadn't allowed me to have that kind of freedom with the character, it I would have had the most boring, it really kind of added to the whole thing. It was fun. Please tell me there's video of that. There is video. There is definitely video. I have a blonde wig down to here, booty shorts. There we go. That was just a couple months ago. Oh my gosh. I hear in my head right now midnight margaritas and Jess's movie. Oh my god. Okay, so you gave us the time frame for filming, and you said that was a total of I think 23 days. 23 days. Okay, so l let's break down that. So that's the actual filming, but there is so much more. Yes. So how much of that compared to everything else that had to happen? So there is a lot of prep before the filming. There's a lot, so you have to, of course, write something, you have to have a script. So I had never written a script before, so I had to learn how to do that. So it was a lot of Googling, a lot of researching. Then you have to find a program that does it because what I have found is that a lot of Hollywood producers and film people out in California, they want to see a certain style. It's they've got different templates that you can use, like Warner Brothers has a template. And so I used Final Draft. That's the one that I found that I like the best. It's easy to write, easy to manipulate, it's very user-friendly. So I downloaded Final Draft, I paid for that, and then I started writing my script. I thought of different exciting things that I wanted to see in the movie first. So I thought of a general story that came about because I was trying to think of the cheapest film to make. I was like, what's the cheapest film to make? I I don't have a special effects budget. I don't, I, you know, I don't have uh video effects or any of that type of budget. And so I can't do like a sci-fi movie. I couldn't do a space movie. So and then I started thinking, okay, maybe I could do a rom com, but then you have to get permits if you film out in town. And I'm thinking, oh, if we go to a we need a restaurant or we need this or blah, blah, blah. I gotta have permits. I can't afford that. This is a super low budget film. So I had a friend of mine who had an Airbnb, and I was like, I'll film at the Airbnb. I asked him, I said, can I film at your Airbnb house? And he was like, Yeah, absolutely. So I said, Okay, Airbnb, that's where I'm gonna start. And that's how I actually started thinking about the story. I was like, what are my assets? I have an Airbnb that I can use. And so I'm like, all right, I'm gonna do a thriller. And because I could probably do that mostly at one location. I don't have to move around, I don't have to get permits, I don't have to any of that stuff. So I started there and then I went to my IT background and I came up with the idea of, well, what if somebody had an Airbnb and the killer knew that they were there? And I was like, how would they know they were there? What if there's an auction online and on the dark web and serial killers bid on Airbnb information that's on the dark web? And I was like, that would be I was like, kind of like eBay for serial killers. So then I kind of went down that path and and then I started thinking of the characters. I started thinking of how they interacted with that, and I built the story around that premise. That's kind of the baseline of the movie, but it doesn't get touched on a whole lot. I actually wrote a trilogy. There's actually two other movies. Yeah, we were gonna ask about that. Yeah, there's actually three other three movies. This first one is kind of an origin story and an introduction to the story, so it doesn't cover too much of that, it just introduces the idea so that the audience knows what's going on. But I started thinking of each of the exciting moments that I wanted to have in the movie and how it would end, and I wrote those down in three by five cards. I wrote little notes and I placed them out, and then I was like, okay, how do I go from this one to that one? How do I go from this one to that one? How do I go from this one to that one? And I started filling in the blanks with three by five cards, and each three by five card was a scene, and then I would take the three by five cards and I would write the scene and write the characters, and I that's how I built the story, basically. Do you have all those cards? I don't. I don't have them anymore. What in the world? They they you know, they get tossed out. You change them all the time and you toss them out. It's so funny because when we interview musicians, there's always a story of that one song where they wrote it on a napkin really quick and it's gone. Yeah. So that's your napkin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh uh I apparently a lot of artists and a lot of writers do that with three by five cards. They write scripts with three by five cards. That's how they do it. So Okay. I did not know that. Yeah. It makes sense to me because if you have it in a long dock that just keeps going, you know, it's it's harder to piece it. Yeah. It's kind of like piecing together a puzzle. Right. When you're when you're when you're doing it, especially the first time. This was my first time. So I'm I was it was a slow process to get going. Once the momentum started going, though, then it just kind of flowed. But it was a slow process to get into that like idea writing flow. So the cards sound like they're very time consuming, but is that the most time consuming when you're building a film and making a film? I think the most time consuming is the editing. Editing is there's so much involved in it. And and people a lot of people don't know that, you know, once the movie is filmed, there is still you're only a quarter of the way through the process. There is still so much work that has to be done. You have to edit the film, you have to put all the pieces together, then you have to do sound design, and you have to make sure that all the audio is correct. You have to make sure that you have all of your continuity. If you have one angle and you have an actor and their hands are in one position and you cut to another angle and their hands are in a completely other position, that screws up your whole scene and you have to go through all your shots. And then there's also the tedious task of finding all the files once you put them on a hard drive and labeling them correctly and then importing them and then matching them up because you have your audio files and your video files. Then there's coloring. Coloring is absolutely a nightmare because you want to get somebody's skin tone absolutely right because you don't want them to look orange and you don't want them to look blue. You want them to look like you see in real life every day. And so you try to get that perfect color, but then you export and then you stick it on one thing, and you're like, oh, the gamma settings on this program are different than the program that I was in, so now it looks completely dark. I can't see anything. It's like I didn't turn on any lights, so I have to edit different for that. Let me export in a different gamma ray. Oh, nope, that's not right either. And it's a nightmare. So, and getting it just right, and like for our private screening, I had to find out exactly the gamma settings for the theater for the projector that they use so that I could properly export it so it looks good in the theater. Now, when I go to put it online someday, I'm gonna have to export it a different because QuickTime looks different than Media Player, and YouTube looks different than Vimeo. It's it's all you gotta look into the technical specs of all that stuff. So it's it gets to be really tedious. And then, of course, staring at it constantly. I had my associate producers, I would like edit scenes and send them to them. I'd stick them on YouTube and send them a link, private link, and be like, what does this need? Like, oh, you need to cut this, you need to cut that. Oh, I see a boom mic here. Oh, I missed that. You gotta punch in on this, da da da blah blah blah. And they would help me see the things that I didn't see because I was staring at it for so long editing, you start to just go glassy. So yeah, it takes a really long time. Well, and they have those people who spend their days watch going to movies and trying to find the things that are wrong, you know? Have you ever watched those? Yes. It's wild. I mean, things I would have never noticed, but the things like you're saying, well, he was holding a red cup and now he's he was holding a blue cup and he turned at a different angle, and it's like, oh my god, who has time to? Yeah. I just want to get lost in the movie. I don't care about any of that. Yeah. What is something that you experienced in the movie that you realized, you know, might look really easy to people seeing a movie, but that is super complicated behind the scenes outside of the video editing? A lot of it is camera angle and lighting. Camera angle and lighting. People probably don't realize how much time goes into camera angles and lighting and camera movement, and like there are little tricks we can do to, you know, when a certain person walks into a room, maybe you turn the light in the background, there's somebody back there holding a light and they turn it and it changes to red. If you want that person to be kind of subconsciously tell us, say that that person is evil or not good, or whatever. There's there's all kinds of different lighting techniques, and a lot of it goes consciously unmissed, but subconsciously it tells your mind, like, oh, this is happening, or it preps you for the next thing. And so there's a lot of that to go on, and I rely on my gaffer, I rely on my crew, my DP, my director of photography. Very important when you're filming to make sure that they get those, they focus on those things and make sure that they're just right. And then as a director, I watch as I'm directing the actors, I watch on a screen shots that are being taken. And if I've got any adjustments or anything that I want to make, then I can refer to those people, the professionals, to do that. Is there a documentary of filmmaking? There's a couple. A lot of the stuff is like behind the scenes. Yeah. Um, before I started directing, I signed up for masterclass. Okay. And I did a lot of director masterclasses before I started getting cast and crew together because I wanted to make sure that I had a real good clamp on that and how to do it. So that was another bunch of this is a lot of research. This has been a learning process for me because I had never done it before. So the writing was a learning process, the directing was a learning process, all the technical stuff. You know, I was buying equipment. I bought a red Komodo X, you know, which is a $30,000 camera setup, and there's lights and there's microphones. That just the microphone alone was $900. It like there's then there's the mics that you put lava mics on people, so you've got a backup. And then I had to technically know how to use all this stuff. So when we were on set and somebody's like, hey, this isn't working, I can go, oh, we have to do this, this, and this. This is how to get it working again. So there was that technical aspect. There was also the IT stuff. I mean, if I wasn't good in IT, the budget alone for IT would have been astronomical. Just having a SharePoint so that we could put people who sent in their auditions and then put them in a folder and label them and put their information so we could go through it later. Things like that are were, you know, really important. Having meetings and throwing up ideas and pictures of, okay, well, it might look like this, it might look like that, we could do this. Uh, storyboarding, shot lists, all that stuff has to be organized. And having a SharePoint to organize it was was invaluable. So I love that you just go from never having done any of it to literally being the one running the show, writing. I mean, it's quite the endeavor. I mean, it will be seriously. That's unbelievable. And you said it takes twenty-four, it took twenty-four days to shoot. To shoot. We had the schedule and hired all the actors and actresses and got the crew together, and I wrote it and now I'm understanding where six years comes into play. Well, and especially being low budget, I have to do a lot of it myself. I can't afford to pay somebody to do all that stuff. I gotta do it. So I had to learn how to run the camera. I had to learn how to do all that stuff so that I could show somebody else. Right, this is how you do it. And uh you're a DP, you know how to get the angles and how to you know move the camera, but you you may not know how this camera works. So let me teach you how this camera works so you know how to do it. Every little aspect the lights, the slate, the timing, the audio recording equipment, the microphones, all that. And then it's okay, where are we gonna shoot? Okay, here are the locations we have. I gotta find the locations because it ended up not being just at one location, it ended up being in five locations. So I had to get the five locations, and then you have to go, okay, does the crew and the cast for that location can they go this day? Is that location available to rent that day? Nope. Okay, oh, it's available to rent this day. Are you guys all available? Nope. One actor can't make it that day because they have a thing. Okay, now I'm gonna check another day. Scheduling, nightmare. But yeah, it's it's a lot of stuff. Wow. Yeah. And dealing with a lot of people, yeah, different kinds of people from the artists to the back of, you know, back of the house kind of people and the brainy acts. And I just I lose my mind. Very surprised. I did not expect to have the problem that I had, which is I had to make decisions on who was going to act, who's gonna be what character. I thought when I first started this, I was gonna put out a thing, people were gonna show up, I may get one or two people, may if I'm lucky, one person for each character, and I was just gonna have to go with them no matter what their skill level was. The response I got was incredible. And I actually had to go through and painstakingly pick which is the best person for the each character. And the talent that we got was absolutely amazing. I'm I'm so impressed with every single one of them. Well, so let's talk about how you knew when someone was the one for the role. So if they're all coming in and you've got all these people, are you shifting things around based on what you're seeing from them? Or so I had a casting call at my house. I also allowed people to send in vials and do their casting call that way. But I had auditions at my house. In my garage, it was me, my associate producer Kaylee Kelter, and my other associate producer, Anna Molner. And we invited people to my house and we had a schedule, and they came in and they would read what's called sides, which is just a couple of pages from the movie of the character that we want them to be. The important part of that is on the website, how I would get actors and actresses to apply is I would put out stuff on a casting call on Facebook. I put out casting calls on uh a website called Backstage, which is where a lot of talent put put their auditions and stuff and resumes. And then I would on the website, the checked outmovie.com website, I had each character and I had their character description. And the actors could go and they could like read the description, what kind of person they're like, so that they could prepare. We had some people that were didn't seem very prepared. They would just show up and didn't know the lines and their sides and would just read. But we had people that would really spent some time thinking about this is what this character is, this is what this character wants to be. And so that's how we went through the process of deciding who was the best. It was a lot of it, I do a lot of do a lot of merit-based stuff. So, like if I found that somebody was really trying to learn about the character and be the character and did some research before, that went a long way with me. The people who kind of just thought, well, I'm gonna come in and just do my thing and I'll be okay. Those people didn't impress me very much. But the people that really focused and like thought about the character before the beforehand, you could tell when they came into the room. Same with their online auditions. It was the same way. And what I would do is whether it was an online audition or in person, once they did the reading, I would give them direction because the next important thing is can they take direction? If I tell you to act a little happier, Or give me less, or you know, maybe we've got somebody who's does a lot of theater and there are a lot of facial expressions. Oh, tone it down. I don't want all the facial expressions because that really pops on camera and we can't have that. I need to be able to have somebody to do that. So you have to weigh all those things in. It's not just about how good they are as the character, it's also can they take direction? Did they do their research? Did they learn their lines? And you have to kind of find a happy medium in all that. Can they pivot? Can they pivot? Right. Can they pivot? That kind of leads to how much does casting shape the film versus the script shaping the cast? Oh, it's pretty big. Casting is very important. Crew is very important, but casting is very important as well. I always uh bring up the crew too because it's they they do so much that people don't know. Like I just I wanted everybody out there when you're at the when you watch a movie in the theater, sit for the credits. Just look at all the people involved to make it because everybody worked very, very hard. And some of them you don't even know. It's you have no idea. But the casting is very important as well. And having a character, a person who can portray the character that you want is very important. Did any of the characters that you had obviously developed when you wrote the film evolve based on the actor's interpretation? Yeah, I think that happens. I would I think that happens almost in every I would happen in almost every film. You can't get somebody exactly the way you imagined it, so you do tend to alter things. But like I said, I told my actors that I was entrusting them with this character and that I wanted to them to use their professionalism and their minds to build the character and be the character. But that's part of the collaborative thing, you know. It's like you if you hire somebody to come in and fix a wall in your house, you don't go, well, you should do it this way. Because well, you hired them. So it's my vision for a director or being a director is that it's not just your job to be a storyteller and tell the story, but it's also your job to support the cast and support the crew to make sure that your story is told the way it needs to be told and to make them look good. If they need something, it's your job to make sure they get what they need so that they can be successful at their job. And their job is to be this character. So basically, you're saying like you also have to find out if you have chemistry with the people, if they can take directing and and all that. So when you're on set and you have your characters, how do you test if their chemistry is gonna work and flow? I mean, was there ever a moment where you're like, this these two are just not gonna work together? Yes, there was actually there was an actress we had, she came on set and her attitude basically, and she said this during her audition, she was very good. She was very prepared, she took direction very well. But one of the things that she had said during the audition process was, I'm not here to make friends. If I need to tell somebody blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I'm gonna tell them blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That turned into something that did not mash with us, and she was she was replaced. Yeah. I can understand that. You gotta be a team player for something like this to be working so close together for so many hours. Was that one of those things that ended up being a secret blessing? Because Yes. Yes, yes. It was um the person that we replaced with replaced her with was uh is absolutely amazing, ten times better than than the original. Yeah. So I'm curious, we were watching something bad is gonna happen on Netflix, and we were talking about how in a lot of movies or series, it's more believable when the actors are less known. Because it's not somebody that you're familiar with in ten other roles, so you can really buy into them being this character. So, what's your philosophy on you know, the big name self? Obviously, tickets. Where do you land philosophically on hiring somebody lesser known? Let's say ten years from now, when you've got some of the biggest films out and you have the opportunity for Scarlett Johansson versus Sally from down the street that Yeah. That is something that when I get to that point, hopefully I can go back to, like I mentioned before, my merit-based audition system. I I don't care if you have a big name, I don't care if you've got, you know, all the best if you're not right for the character, then I'm the storyteller, then I don't want you to be in the story. And that's nothing against the actor. It they just may not be a good fit, they may not be able to grasp it. I think though, that actors in Hollywood, there are a lot of them out there that you can and and I'm I kind of think it's from the beginning. If they start jumping around in the beginning of their career, it helps them. And they don't stay typecast, it will help them. But I've seen actors who will play in different movies and you're like, I that's not the same person as over there, and that's not the same person over there, and that's amazing talent to me. Like that's I think there's two different levels of acting. You know, having done this stupid little murder thing, I've realized how hard it is. I mean, it's hard. Yeah. And so being able to deliver lines believably is a skill in itself. Yeah, you have to feel it in your heart, in your head. You have to like be there. But being able to then slip into an entirely different character that's almost unrecognizable and then slip into yet another one is next level to me. I did, I looked this up because I was curious. From a production, the producer and the writer, there is a lot of overlap, even in Hollywood, right? I didn't know that. I always thought it was separate. So that was interesting. But when you're writing, are you also visualizing the scenes in your head because you are then jumping to the other hat of being the producer? Yeah, I the way I wrote this, how I write is I basically watch the movie in my head and I just write down what I see. So I and then if I don't like a scene, I just watch it again differently and I write it down or change it. So that's my writing style. That's how I write. There are people that can't do that or they don't do that, or but that's how I did it. You don't get a lot of sleep. I don't get a lot of sleep. I don't sleep a lot. I would imagine during this six-year period, you were waking up in the middle of the night grabbing a pad of paper. Well, also I'm a night owl, so I'll I'll be up sometimes I'll be up writing or doing something along the lines like editing, and you know, you look at the clock and you're like, All right, it's nine o'clock. I can do this for three hours, go to bed at midnight and get some sleep. And then the next time you look at a clock, it's three thirty, four o'clock in the morning, you're like, what did I just do? What happened? And yeah, that happens a lot. So But that goes back to doing something you love, the time flies. When you're in the wrong place doing the wrong thing career-wise, oh my god, five minutes feels like five hours. Yeah. Yeah. But when you're in the right thing, you can go five, six hours and have no clue what happened. It is really, I want to go back to college students and say, here's how you'll know you're doing what you were meant to do. We're gonna save you a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of hard. You need those, you know, it's a it's a ladder. You need those jobs to, you know, sometimes gain the knowledge you'll need. Yeah. Experience. So and when you were talking about seeing the film in your mind, I mean, we hear artists and creatives talk about that, you know, they it just comes to them. So basically, you're downloading a movie. Yeah, yeah. Which is super cool to me. Yeah. I always I always thought like if we were in the Matrix for real, how much easier it would be this whole process because you could just plug in and then just download it to the computer and be done. And it wouldn't take six years to do all of this, but yeah. I just listened to some a podcast where they were talking about AI. I think Sharon Osborne was actually being interviewed, and that's scary because we might be heading that way. Yeah, it's pretty scary. That could be your next movie. Yeah, I I don't I it's a big thing with in Hollywood now, too. The the whole AI thing. It's it's starting to take over and it's not exactly where everybody wants to go because it's cutting out jobs for cast and crew and and true creativity of the person that's having things download in their mind, their ideas and thoughts downloading in their mind. Yeah, and it's it's sad. Getting that getting from your mind to screen is there's a lot of communication involved. That's the most important thing, is the communication because you see it, explaining it to somebody else, and then getting those people to do certain things, and you know, everybody's got their own job, and you get them all to do this job to try to get what you saw in your mind on screen. That's a huge task. It's it's a lot to do that. Do you feel like you accomplished that? I feel like I did, yeah. It it changed, of course, in my mind several times as locations changed or they don't work out and you change different things. You know, you have to pivot, always pivoting, you know, it's ever evolving as you're doing it. It's a live thing that happens. But yeah, I think that what I saw in my head is what you you're gonna see on screen. Yeah. Well, let's talk about Checked Out. It's a thriller trilogy following a serial killer grappling with their past. Yep. And as both the writer and producer, how do you balance telling a complete story in the first film while still building something that can carry across a trilogy? Yeah, so that actually happened when I realized that the story that I wanted to tell was gonna take more than two hours. So once I realized that the story was gonna take more than two hours, I was like, okay, we gotta break this up into pieces. And so this is gonna be the first piece, this is gonna be the second piece, and then this will be the third piece, and that'll be able to tell the whole story. But I also thought of it like acts in a play. So you had first act, second act, third act. Yeah, and so that's what I did. I wrote, broke down the first section. I told the story, I found a good ending spot that would lead into the others, but while I was writing it and while I was filming it, I made sure to keep those other two films in the back of my head because continuity, you can't go back and shoot something. So there's some things in this film that happened that the crew and the cast, they're like, I don't understand why this is happening. And I had to tell them, like, you'll find out later, you'll find out later. The other thing that I was able to do with this, because it was a low budget film, I think this helped. I wrote it in sections. So there's one section to two sections, there's like seven sections in the movie. There's three main groups of actors that tell this story, and they only two of them interact with each other. The rest of them do not interact with each other. So I was able to keep the section separate. So the reveal at the end of the movie, only the person playing the character and the people who are in that section know the reveal. None of the other cast knows what happens at the end of the movie. They just know that they were in this part of the movie and this is what there happened to their character, and that's it. So when they go to the theater and watch it, they'll be just as excited to watch the movie and surprised as the regular audience. And I did that intentionally for them, and I and I gave them the choice. I said, if you want to know what happens, I'll tell you. But if you want to wait to see the movie, I don't have to tell you anything. So I only gave them the scripts of the sections they were in when we filmed, and they just that's all they knew about the story. So they still don't know what the story is. That's so cool. Yeah, I love that. Just keep circling back to my murder mysteries because exactly how they did it. I had no idea. Really? I love that. That is really brilliant. All right. What I want to know is if you are intentionally thinking of scenes to scare the hell out of people. Like, how does that like jump scares? Or I mean, is there any of that in there where you're thinking through what would scare me or what, you know? There's there's not a lot of jump scares in the movie. It's a thriller, so there's more. I I wanted to tell a story. I didn't want to go horror. I didn't want to be gory. It's very, uh as I told everybody, very Alphed Hitchcocky. You don't see any blood splatters or anything like that. But I wanted to focus more, I wanted to find a nice balance between the thriller and then getting the audience invested in the characters. So I found, I think, a good balance between the two. So my my thought on that was that when something happens to a character, I want the audience to feel either sad or upset or happy, or I want them to feel it instead of just if you rush through character development, then the audience doesn't feel anything with the characters. And it and it kind of ruins the experience. So I really wanted the audience to be invested in these characters because of course that's also what brings them to the theater to see the next one too. So yeah. I want to know, like in high school and college, were you in theater or art or art design, or what was like really piquing your interest when you thought you were gonna go fly high and make movies, or what was it? So when I was in high school, I was I was an art major. I did did art, I drew, painted, pottery, all that stuff. I also did I got my first taste of film there. We actually, in one of my technology classes, we filmed and did a technology instructional video where we edited it. It was on an old machine. We did it on VHS, and we had the machine where we ran the VHS through and had to actually splice and edit things together, film it and edit it. That was kind of the first point when I was like, this is great. I love doing this, I love telling these stories, I love this. This could be something great. I'd love to do it. And then, of course, I was in theater. And then I got out of high school and I went directly into the military. I did five five years in the Navy. And when I got out of the military, I was starting a family, so all that kind of just went to the side. And I was I got out of the military, I was working at Circuit City, and when I was younger, I was really into audio video stuff, and my dad always had stereo equipment around, and I learned how to hook all that stuff up. And I was working at Circuit City and I hooked up all the TVs and the stereos to work, so when we came in in the morning, we could just use one remote and turn everything on. And there was a guy in the computer department, and he's like, Oh, well, if you're good at that, you should be into computers. And so he kind of showed me how computers work, and I learned a little bit about that. And then there was a friend of mine I was in the Navy with, and his wife worked for a company called EDS, which is Ross Pro's computer company, and she gave me a blueprint map and told me how fiber optics worked, and I went into an interview at EDS, a subcontractor of EDS, and BS'd my way through the interview. In case you're listening, yeah. Got the job, and then I walked in there and was like, oh, I don't really remember a lot of this stuff. If you guys could, you know, kind of OJT me. Walk me through it. Walk me through it. And I loved it. So I started getting computer certs, and I just completely moved away from the ide ever the idea of ever going to Hollywood or being an actor or doing anything in film, and then I took that to the fullest. I ended up being an executive at HP junior exec. Yeah, I worked with a program called NMCI, Navy Marine Corps Intranet, which we built the first intranet in the military from the Navy and the Marine Corps, and we connect all the base we connected all the bases in the entire United States together on one intranet. And this was way before Office 365. We were partnered with Microsoft and Dell, and like I can see stuff today in those solutions that they give to businesses that grew from that project. That was the first time anybody had ever done anything like that. So I was on that for 16 years, and then I got out of there and started my own IT company here in Richmond. But there was always that itch in the back of my mind of I really want to do this, I really want to do this. And so when my kids graduated and got out of high school and they were on their own and good, I was like, I'm it's my turn. I'm doing something for myself. This is what I'm doing. Now, from a creative standpoint, were you doing anything to keep your creative juices flowing? Because the IT is not. Yeah, I would do like little videos of me and my buddies. We'd go snowboarding out west, and I would like make little videos of of us, and I they would be so annoyed with me sometimes and be like, all right, I'm gonna go down, I'm gonna sit up right down here. You guys come down, come down really fast, and I'm gonna film you, and then they'd be like, Oh god. And we would have like a day in the vacation the the vacation that we would take. It's guy's vacation, and I'm I'm on the film, you know, I'm filming everything. There we would pick a day, and it would be Josh's day, and that was the only day I was allowed to film heavy because they were like, We just want a snowboard, dude. We just want a snowboard. So I would film, but then they would love the videos that would come out of it. So Yeah, I wish we had a Josh in our family because we're so in the moment, which is great, but we never there's no proof of anything in my family that's ever happened. Yeah. Not pictures, we just don't remember to do it. So anytime you want to come film us, I've always thought about this in terms of the experience and your your taping time wasn't as long. Some of these movies that take months and months or a year even. But there seems like there'd be such a bond and such a connection with the crew, with the cast. You're in this moment together, and then suddenly it just feels like it would be so lonely and cold and sad when everybody kind of goes away. It is, it's a big thing. When we when it was over and we were done filming and everybody went their separate ways, it was it's a big there's that loneliness that sets in on the car right home that you're like, oh man, like you just spent all this time with these people making this art, and now you're not hanging out with them every day anymore or seeing them, and it yes, it's a we just filmed a miniseries. One of the actors in the film uh was inspired to write a miniseries, and so I executive produced two of the episodes because I want to take it to film festivals with the movie next year, and we all got back together and it was so happy. We were all excited to see each other again, and it was just great. And then again, you get done with the first episode, and everybody's like, Oh, it's like on the way home, it sucked because you guys are awesome, and we love I love working with you guys, and it really shows one of the things we talked about is it really shows why you see certain directors and certain producers and certain actors all stick together in films, like you're like, Yeah, and you're like, Oh, look at there that they were in this movie together, they were in this movie together. Direct same director for all three movies. It's like once you get a crew and a family that like knows how to work together and you just want to and vibe and just be together and do what needs to be done, and you all can read each other and what what the other one's thinking, and it becomes like a little family, yeah, it's it helps. So, and then you get somebody that comes in from the outside that doesn't vibe, it really sends ripples through through the whole creative process. It'll set you off kilter. Yeah. I don't think I can handle it. I get so attached. I mean, even when we're here tonight and Johnny drives off, I'm like, Yeah, I just I want all my favorite people to just be together all the time. Yep. Especially after a bonding like that, yeah, where you're creating almost like you're a child, like you're well, and also being a low budget film, the locations that I rented were Airbnbs. And usually I would I would rent the location Airbnb, but then I would have another one, another house that I would rent for crew, and so we were living together too. We all was like it was a lot of the people that worked, especially in the large section of the movie, they were like, it was like it was like video summer camp. It was like movie summer camp. We went and we spent two weeks together making a film and we stayed in these Airbnbs, and it was like summer camp. And I was like, Oh, that's great. That's what I like to hear. Like that means I had I put together an environment and people that could work together, and that's that makes me satisfied. That is pretty amazing, actually. I mean, to be together like that and that's pretty cool. I'm curious after all the time that you put into this editing. We know you lose perspective in the midst of it. You're just trying technically sometimes to get there. When you for the very first time sat back and watched it from start to finish, what did that feel like? Um, it felt really good, but my perfectionist brain was not happy. And immediately I went to my associate producers and I was like, watch this, tell me what to fix. That was my biggest push. Like, that's where it's really important to have a valuable team too, not just onset but afterwards, to look at this stuff and be like, What? Why is this why am I getting the feeling that this is garbage? You need to tell me because I can't see it, because I've looked at it for so long. You get to that point where you watch a scene and your brain tells you, I know it's gonna happen, and it stops paying attention. And so that's the one of the hardest parts, like I mentioned before, about editing. So it's important to have a good team to watch it with you. But once we got all of that fine-tuned and worked out, and then we watched it together, and we showed it to an outside source who was somebody not invested emotionally, and they liked it, then that's when you go, Okay, I got something here. This this could be good. Yeah. Nice. That's kind of what we did on a smaller level. We sent it out to somebody. I sent it to Lisa and John, and they were my first, and they were lovely. So that was good. Yeah, it's it's important to have somebody and to be able to take constructive criticism and have somebody who will give it honestly and not candy coat it and be like, oh, you're the you know, you're the writer producer. I'm just gonna blow smoke up your ass. Yeah, last thing you need is yes, men. Yeah, yeah. I know, yeah, you don't want that. My associate producers are brutally honest with me, and I love it because they're like, this sucks. You need to fix this. Okay, cool. Blah blah blah blah blah. Like, yeah. You'd much rather have them tell you for you to throw that out there and have to hear it from people that don't know you. You can't be thin skinned in this industry. You can't. You have to be able to be able to take the criticism. Okay, you were talking about you one of your casts started, got the opportunity to do a mini series and you were just working with him on that, him or her on that. Yeah, he actually Wrote it. Oh, nice. Yes. Yes. Dwayne Daniels, the second. He plays Braden in the movie, and he was inspired to write a miniseries. And I read the first script for the first episode, and it was amazing. It blew my mind. I was like, this is great. And he was like, I'd really like to make this. And I said, Let's do it. And he started a production company and started putting some money into it. And I said, Well, I'm going to let you, we're going to use all my equipment and from the movie, because I have all this equipment, all this lighting, all these mics, all this the camera equipment, top-end stuff. And I said, I'm going to also, you know, put some money into this too. And let's get this made. And we made the first one, and it's really good. And then he has a second episode, and we just wrapped on filming on that. There's eight episodes. I told him, I said, I need you to flush out the ideas of the rest of the episodes. And when we go to film festivals, we can try to pitch it to production, bigger production companies, and see if we can't get this thing made. That's the goal with it. There's a lot to learn about that too. Film festivals and the business side of it and pitching it. And there's tons of stuff I'm learning about that. It's kind of a day by day. I find something new. Or I went to recently I went to the Virginia Production Alliance, had a director come in to talk to a group of people and invited us to come. And I went and talked to him and he looked at the the president of the Virginia Production Alliance and said, You're probably going to hate me for saying this. And then looked at the crowd and said, If you want to be in the big boy league, you need to play with the big boys. You can't take a film and stick it in a Virginia Film Festival and think that that's going to do something. You need to put it in Hollywood. You need to put it in the Big Ten. You and they want your premiere. So you better not put it in any other film festival before you send it to South by Southwest or Tribeca or any of those. You they want your premiere because Warner Brothers, Sony, they're all there with checkbooks. So and I didn't know that. I was ready to go, okay, this is done. Let me stick it in the next film festival that comes around the corner. Blop, there you go. I would have ruined my chances at any of the Big Ten if I had done that. So thankfully I went to this director's TED Talk and heard that. And then I started doing research and I was like, holy cow, I can't, I gotta wait till next year now because all of those deadlines are in January. So I have to wait till next year before I can submit this because I was gonna submit it right away. I'm I was ready to go in June to submit it to something, and nope, I gotta hold off. So is Sundance still a thing? Yep. Yeah, that's Park City, right? Yes. Yeah, that's if you go to that for any reason, one of my best friends lives there. And she goes to all of them because she lives there. She's right there. Yeah. And I didn't really understand what that was, but I mean people are like loving this idea of supporting and going and seeing these premieres and giving people like you a chance. Yeah. And what's his name? Say his name again. Dwayne Daniels. And Dwayne. Yeah. Dwayne. Yeah. So I have a question for you. Now that you've been a director and a writer, and now you've helped someone direct and write, where do you think you really like being? I like being in the director's chair. You do? I do. Okay. I do. I didn't help Dwayne write anything. He wrote everything. But I was there on set. I was he wanted to direct, and I said, Yeah, you need to direct because I was trying to I started teaching him. So I wasn't necessarily any I was the EP, but I wasn't any really any crew position, but I was there kind of like in his ear going, you should do this, or blah, blah, blah, blah, or try to do this, and like giving him the lessons that I learned the hard way. And he would always, you know, refer to me for stuff. So like, oh, does that shot look good? Blah, blah. Yep, it looks great. But it's it's very important when you do something like that to make sure that the person who wrote it and the person you give gave the helm to is actually driving the boat. You don't step in and step on their toes. I'm I tried to make it, I would have Dwayne say many times because he would be on set. And one of the things you call before you say action is you ask you you say roll camera, roll audio, and that tells the camera operator to start recording and the audio guy to start recording. So roll camera, roll sound. And he would say, roll camera, roll sound. And I said, Dwayne, is that a question? Or are you telling them to do it? And and he'd be like, I'm like, you're the director. This is your set. Whose set is this, Dwayne? He's like, This is my set. Say it again. This is my set. Like, yes, this is your set. You tell people what to do around here. So what is it? And he's like, All right, roll camera, roll sound. I'm like, there you go, that's it. Nice. You're building good karma. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Leader. A leader. Yes. And it's great. So that you know, little things like that. But I try to help out, but I really like the directing more and being in the director's chair than I'm happy to do that with anybody. I have another castman member, Charlotte Kulak. She wrote a short film, and we are filming that in August, and it's absolutely amazing. It's so good. The script is, it's it's hilarious. It's so great. But we're filming that in August, and she's another one who's gonna step into the director's chair. So I'm gonna help her and guide her through it. But I would much rather be the director for stuff. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you're almost creating your own umbrella where you could bring people in. That's the goal with this. So this isn't like something willy-nilly that I'm just doing. It's become being an entrepreneur, it's become a a business that I want to feed it and I want it to grow. And everybody who's been involved with these productions, I want them to continue to be involved with them. But my goal basically over the last, well, the six years was the movie, but we filmed in 2024, and we filmed both we filmed the first episode of Dwayne's miniseries in 25, and then the second episode in 26, and then later 26 is the other short film that we're we're doing. It's basically the resume for Osprey Media Studios, and it it's this is the work we can do with the team that I've put together. And so hopefully other EPs and production companies will look at this and go, okay, we need to hire this company to make our movie because this is what we want. So the process of picking a soundtrack. Yes. That is crazy. So that's another part of the editing process that's absolutely it's the sound in editing. That's another thing that probably people take for granted. You have to pick out the sounds that happened around the actors. It's not just what you get on set. You do something called could you it's foley and you take different sounds like footsteps, doors opening, creaking, floors creaking, knocking on a door, all that kind of stuff you have to add in there. And then there's 5.1 or 7.1, or at most design where you take the sounds and you move them around in the scene so that you hear them from one speaker into another speaker. All of that has to happen. And then there's the music tracks on top of it. And you may want to use a song, and I have the very bad habit of sometimes finding a song that creatively I will hear it and it will trigger a scene in my head, and I will watch the scene and listen to the music, and then I will write and edit, film, and edit a scene to a song, and now I'm stuck, and I'm like, this song goes with this, and I can't use it because it's copyrighted. So I use in my writing, I use music a lot for inspirational feel for things. So that's a bad habit to get into, but you have to work around it, pivot. So I have some composers for this uh to fill in the blanks, and I've sent them cuts of the movie with the songs that I wanted to use or the songs that inspired me so that they could get, you know, they could go in that direction with it. So I think we've hit the mark pretty good with that. But that's that's something else that's very important too, is the music. You gotta have the music to give that extra feeling. Sound is I would have to say more than 50% of the emotional pull in a film, just watching it and seeing it. But if you've got a soundtrack and sounds to back it up, really put the audience in that scene with that person and try to help them feel what the feeling is going on, then that's even more gold. So I mean, most of the time for me, just when the music starts getting scary, I automatically start going, I put my finger in my ears and I go, la la la la la because I know it's coming. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that movie that came out a couple years ago that was innovative, I'll give it that, but what that had no sound because if they spoke, it would awaken whatever. Yeah. I sat in that theater and I'd say probably 15 minutes in, and I'm a little ADHD, but I mean, I was bouncing, I was twitching. Yeah. Uh halfway through, I'm like, I can't do this. I can't, I I could not I had to walk outside. I couldn't do it. I couldn't sit there without anything else. All right, Josh. Yeah. I don't know if you've listened to any of the hook episodes, but we are at the stage in our interview that we call the speed round. Oh boy. Okay. So put your director hat on, your writer hat on, your IT hat on. No, I'm just kidding. These are gonna be really easy questions, but it's just first thing that comes to mind. So don't overthink it. I know you can be an overthinker. Yes. Uh just first thing you think of, and we're gonna do, I don't know, a handful of these. Okay. You will be able to return the favor if you want, and you can ask Johnny and I one thing, anything you want. We'll try and be completely honest with you. So we'll do that. But anyway, we're gonna kick off our speed round next. Favorite movie of all time. Star Wars. That was quick. Most underrated film. Oh geez, that's a tough question. I just had a Rolodex go through my head. I saw it. I just had a Rolodex go go through my head. There is a movie called Best Laid Plans that came out, God, I think it was the late 90s. It was it's great. It's a lot of people don't they're like, I've never heard of that movie. Yeah, it's a great movie. It's got a lot of twists and turns, and at the end you're just your mind is blown. So and you don't expect it. Favorite director. Oh, Martin Scorsese. Actor that you would drop everything to work with. If I could work with Jack Nicholson, I'd drop everything for Jack Nicholson. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, The Shining. Uh right. Amazing. Amazing. A movie you wish you had made. The Godfather series is one of my one of my top movies. Also Goodfellas. I was gonna say that would be mine. I love Goodfellas. I have movie posters in my house down my hallway and up my stairs. I've printed out some of my favorite movies. And Goodfellas, Fight Club, but then there's classics like E.T. and Jaws, 2001 A Space Odyssey, movies like that. Scream, The Ring. Oh my gosh, The Ring is a great, great thriller scary movie. I love The Ring. Yeah. Guilty Pleasure movie. Ooh. This is like a movie that you'll you'll watch no matter what it's on. You're in the middle of it. Good fellas, for sure. I could be changing the channel. If it's 10 minutes left in the movie, I'm not changing the channel anymore. I'm gonna watch the rest of that movie. Same. Yeah. Best movie soundtrack. Oh, best movie soundtrack? Forrest Gump. Force Gump has got the best music in it. It's so amazing. Yeah. That's a good one. One movie everyone should watch. I'm gonna go with Forrest Gump again on that one. Because that movie is really good at like pulling your heartstrings and then also making you laugh. And then also it's and it's beautifully filmed. All the locations are absolutely amazing. And the soundtrack is like top-notch. So I was just sitting here thinking about soundtracks, and I think my favorite soundtrack movie would be Garden State. Oh, that's a good one, too. Yeah. I loved Garden State and the soundtrack. I bought the C D back then. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, you have passed, you have passed your speed round. Good. We can flip it around if you have any questions you want to ask us or a question or two, anything you want to know about us before we wrap up. What kind of movies do you guys enjoy? Well, I just told you Garden State, but my all-time favorite is Breakfast at Tiffany's. Oh, yeah. Like, I feel Holly Girl Lightly's heart. I can't even tell you. I can I just feel her. Yeah. Always have. Johnny and I are always opposite. My favorite movie of all time was Pulp Fiction. Oh, great. Followed by Silence of the Lambs. Oh my goodness. Very good. Very good. Those are both. It goes back to me going la la la la. Yeah. Such a chicken. I have to leave the light on forever if I watch a thriller, but I do like thrillers. I don't like the gory stuff, so I'm excited. I get to watch your movie. So Tarantino once said, you don't need to go to film school, you just need to make a movie. That's your film school. And I agree 100%. After going through this process, I 100% gr agree. That is the best way to learn how to make films, is just go do it and make a film. Yeah. Beautiful. And you don't have to film it on. Like I was afforded the luxury of having funds to be able to buy the expensive camera and the expensive lights. And that stemmed from talent that I was able to get. Once I started seeing the talent that I was hiring, I was like, these guys deserve more than being filmed DSLR camera. I'm like, I need to do more. And then once the story started developing more, and I was like, I need to buy more. And what had happened was I had been saving up for a sports car for about 15 years. The sports car that I've always wanted my entire life. And I was almost at the goal. And I was looking at the money in my bank, and I was like, I can either buy this sports car and it can sit in my garage and I can drive it every once in a while, or I can invest in myself and I can make this movie that I've always wanted to make, do something I've always wanted to do, can make this movie, and I can someday die knowing I can't I won't be able to say, Oh, I wish I would have done that. And that became more valuable than the sports car. And so I took the money and I spent it on this. And so that's where I got the funding for this film. I tried to do a GoFundMe, that didn't get much traction. Indiegogo, that didn't get much traction. So I ended up just saying, I'm gonna just put the money into it and make it, because I I need to get this made. I'm not gonna sit around and wait for and play that whole game with like trying to get people to to donate and ask people for money, which I'm uncomfortable with anyway, asking people like, oh, invest in me because you I've never done anything before, and so invest in me because it'll work out. Like so yeah, so I just did it myself. I had I had some people who who donated, but it wasn't nearly close to the budget that I ended up spending on this thing. But I that's where that came from. Let's talk about where people can find out more about your work. So right now we're developing the Osprey Media Studios website, ospreymedia studios.com. We're gonna be putting on the short films and the movie, links to the the the um IMDBs and actually pages, special pages just for those things. But right now, if you go to checked outmovie.com, you can see the trailer and you can read about the story. The IMDB link, I think, is on the website. But if you look up Checked Out on IMDb, you can get some information on it there. For closing credits, who do we have in Checked Out? So if you want to see more about the the cast and crew on Checked OutMovie.com, I have an entire list and their headshots of who's in it and the part that they play, but I can go over that really quick. All right, so we have Emily M Phelps, who is a true crime author. He's on the New York Times bestseller list, he's written a lot of books, excellent writer. He also has a podcast called Paper Ghosts, and he's he's one in the movie. He plays Dr. Russo or Professor Russo. Then we have Gia Ray, who Gia Ray is actually an artist, and she's in Charlottesville. So look her up on Spotify and Apple Music. She just came out with a new album. She's a great artist. Alex Underwood, we have him playing the father role. We have Margaret Renner, she's playing the older sister. We have Kathleen or Catherine Richter. She plays the middle sister. And then we have Leo, and his his family doesn't put out his last name. But we have Leo, he he plays the boy, the first section of the movie. He's a child. He's a child. He's like the yeah, it's like a family. I'm really freaked out for a minute that there was an adult whose family wouldn't let him. It's gonna be a long life. He was six, he was six when we filmed this. So she was like, we don't wanna we don't wanna put his name out on anywhere. I was like, okay, we I got it. So we just call him Leo. We have Ike Fessler, he plays John. Vivian Lee, she's out of Chicago. She is she's in a lot of stuff. You look up her on Instagram. Same with Ike Fessler. Look him up on Instagram, they're in lots of movies and shows. They they do a lot of work. Jason Robinson, he plays Dennis. Sarah Lemon, she plays Michaela, Charlotte Kulak, she plays Sarah. Patrick Pfeiffer, he is Jordan. Or I'm sorry, Patrick Pfeffer. I'm pretty sure that's how I'm pronounced. He plays Jordan. Dwayne Daniels II, he plays Braden. Olivia Cruz plays Marilyn. Dwayne Daniels is the one who wrote the uh mini-series that we're we're filming now. He's he's an excellent writer. His stories are are very dynamic and it's amazing. Lucas Green, he's out of Virginia Beach. He plays Malachi. Malachi's character is is kind of all of these characters have stemmed from either people that I've known or me, a lot of me came went into these characters. Malachi is uh he's a film student, so you can imagine what that how that is. Every thriller has to have a Malachi. And then Jayla Hill, she's in Virginia Beach, and she plays Taylor. That's the cast. Well, that's a pretty big cast. It is a pretty big cast, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have some other, we have a couple other like smaller cast members, but they're not they're not listed here. They're just like two second, like background people and stuff. But yeah. Josh, uh what I would love to wrap up with is for anyone listening that wants to get into filmmaking, what would you leave them with? What advice would you give? I would say go make a film. That's that's it. Go make a film. You don't have to do anything like I've done and put a ton of money and your personal money into it. I've I've done that because I'm in the point in my life where I'm older and I don't have time to slowly build up but make a film. One of our crew members, uh Jones Lee, he is a high school student here in Richmond. And he's actually in a production at his school. He's the Cowardly Lion. They're doing The Wizard of Oz. He came on set because his brother, Tommy O'Tarrell, is my my DP, my director of photography. And so he came on set and he was like, Can I bring my brother? He loves film, he loves doing stuff. I said, Yeah, bring him along. We'll teach him anything he needs to know. He pulled focus for the whole movie. So when you see a shot, if it's in focus, it's because of Jonesy. We call him Jonesy. Wow. Yeah, and he was 15 when he was on set and working with all of us, and he fit in and like he's very mature. He actually filmed a movie and he did it on an iPhone. And on the private screening, he's cut together a trailer for it. I'm gonna show it as in the previews, but he's gonna release it in July and he did it with his friends on an iPhone. Like, that's all you need. Just write something, film it, and put it out there. Like, you put it out there and you get feedback from people, get feedback from your friends, get feedback from your family, get feedback from people you don't even know. Show it to them if they want to see it. Say, hey, you want to see a free movie? Watch this, and then take that criticism and use it to alter what you did and make another one, and then make another one and just keep going at it. And eventually, something you'll you'll master the craft and get you to the point where you can make good stuff and you'll get noticed. All right. Well, I think that that's a wrap. That's a wrap. All right, cool. Thank you for being on the hook with us, Josh. We're very welcome. Thank you very much for having me. I had a great time. This is great. Awesome. Awesome. If you're creative and listening to this, we want your story. The messy one, the real one, the one you don't usually have the opportunity to share. I'm Johnny. I'm Jess. You're on the hook. Make sure to follow us on social media at Johnny and Jess on TikTok, and you can find the hook with Johnny and Jess on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. To stay up to date on new episodes, featured artists, and what's coming next.