Back in action!
Lethal Abilities is the second official movie my brothers, cousins and I made; (I say second official movie because it was when we started to get serious about making movies. We had been filming ourselves for years: skits, plays, short stories, whatever, but it wasn’t until we had the ability to edit our movies that they really started to take shape and feel more like legitimate films.)
During our first film, Demise of the Republic (2003 & 2004), we decided to call ourselves Swemsley Film. The ‘Sw’ from my cousins Heath and Sean Sweat, and the ‘emsley’ from my brothers and I -Justin, Ryan, and Brandon Hemsley. We thought we were so cool 🙂 and we had tons of fun.
We filmed this in Idaho during the summer the next summer, 2004. We had decided to make a secret agent picture. We each picked out our own costumes as usual, grabbed all the toy guns we had, and headed down the lane to start shooting. Originally we were filming with the same camera we had used on Star Wars, a Hi8 Canon, but the poor thing was much more worn out than last summer… 
Heath wanted to do a matrix style slow mo jump into the water, so we did. The screenshot above is from that scene on our fist day of shooting. When we got home to look at the footage, the image quality just looked terribly bad and it was very glitchy, probably from worn out the playheads in a beat up camera (I remember strapping it to a 4-wheeler to film a chase, the engine vibrations and all that shaking around is likely a culprit). It was practically impossible to watch.
Sadly disappointed, we talked about what we could do. To our excitement Matt chimed in and offered to help. We were back in business. This time, we had access to a much nicer camera, courtesy of our Uncle Matt Sweat, who helped us shoot the whole movie. (Fun fact: Matt fought with the lightning saber in our Star Wars movie) This film turned out better than we could have ever imagined at that time, and all these years later, is still the original Swemsley clan collective favorite; both to watch and to make. It really was an absolute blast, not to mention it represented a significant jump in our abilities.
Now with Matt’s old eMac,Final Cut Pro for editing, and a copy of After Effects as my main weapon for visual effects, things were looking fine. I worked hard and long on the movie, soaking up knowledge wherever I could find it, and learning from my mistakes, I feel like I grew leaps and bounds in that time. Lethal Abilities turned out much more polished than Demise did, and it felt great. This movie had a variety of different special effects, though not near as many shots as Star Wars/Demise. I discovered my own technique for doing effects on moving shots, though it is primitive by todays standards, it was pretty revolutionary for our childhood movies. We even did some practical makeup effects; Heath did his own makeup for the scene when he is tied up, as well as my bullet graze wound.
