"RUTHLESS" One of the Top Ten Finalists In The "True To John Woo" Contest Held By Myspace and Spike TV

Video:

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=11537053

If the embed doesn't work, you can click here:

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=11537053

To view it. =)

THE CAST AND CREW OF "RUTHLESS"

Hey all, I don't think I've posted this before, but if I have sorry =P

Anyway, last June I was lucky enough to be a part of a project that took a hefty time to finish, but was well worth the effort. It was for Myspace's "TRUE TO JOHN WOO" Contest which split it's categories between 10 finalists. One grand prize winner (selected by John Woo himself) and one Audience Award winner (selected by the viewers of Myspace)

We got into the top ten, got the short seen by John Woo himself, and were pushing strong for the Audience Award.

Here's John Woo's personal card we got:

Sadly, we didn't get the award and placed second, which isn't half bad considering this was my first time stunt coordinating a big project like this and using squibs and guns and all the like.

Plus, the experience overall was grueling yet wonderful. I met tons of great people and if it weren't for my great friend Shawn Bernal, I couldn't have met another great friend, Keith Gubbins, who joined Lazy Brown Productions after working with him on this project. (Both are my friends on AnD under Shawn0bi and Min Jae Ha)

Anyway, here's the video that I did action direction on and edited also. (See if you can see where I die not once, but twice!)

I hope you enjoy! Feel free to leave comments as always. =)

--Manny

Fun Facts about Ruthless:

Originally, this was supposed to be a weekend! Oh how wrong we were... It actually took up to a whole MONTH to get this done. That's that we only mostly shot with the main cast on saturday and sundays and sometimes went through straight 12 - 24hr shooting! x_X

Just about everyone in the cast is hilariously seen more than once in certain instances. I'm probably in the movie the most. I think I come up about...4 times? =P

The big shootout between glass panes that was a homage to "Hard Boiled" was actually just ONE pane used. We shot it from a two camera setup and then the remaining shots of glass falling down is actually me and sometimes the two main leads (depending which shot uses them) dumping a huge box of glass from above the frame! (I also throw paper at the main villain during one of his shots)

The editing process took about 3 days STRAIGHT. The actual length of the short is somewhere around 10 min and after getting it to its final part, we had to sadly shorten it to the length of 2 minutes and 30 seconds to fit under the submission rules. I pretty much stayed up for 3 days helping the director fine tune the action scenes and keep a consistent pace up because SO MUCH had to be cut.