Ricardo Ramos spent part of last week on location filming a short film he is hoping will be making the festival circuit in the coming months. Ramos, who attended Rancho San Justo Middle School and graduated from San Benito High School in 1999, said he took a circuitous route to becoming the director of the short film.
As a high school student he worked for video stores in town before taking a job at Premiere Cinemas.
“It was kind of foreshadowing,” he said.
“Flashing,” a short film he shot on location the week of Aug. 7, is about a fashion photographer who is struggling to balance work with his personal life.
“I had three ideas and I remember I wrote them on a napkin and we were going through them,” he said, of meeting with a friend for lunch to discuss a potential project.
They both connected on the idea of a time lapse image of a person falling from a building.
“We had the skeleton and we started putting the meat on it,” he said.
The script evolved into a story of the photographer who has a son around age 7 or 8 who gets caught up in his work to the neglect of his child and significant other. They intended the film to start with the image of the man falling from the building and then use flashbacks to tell the story of how he got there.
Ramos started out in public relations and communications as a student at San Jose State University. While he was on campus, he interned with the San Jose Sharks and also with a Spanish-language television station.
“The passion was always there for that, but I wanted to try other things to make sure there wasn’t anything else.”
After college, he interned in New York with former President Bill Clinton at his nonprofit in Harlem. From there, he moved to Sacramento where he worked in real estate.
“My dream in high school was that I wanted to have my own late night show – ‘Late Night with Ricardo,’” he said.
He had a close friend from high school who was working in Los Angeles so he decided to make the move. He started working on some television productions. Most recently he was an associate producer on “Marie,” Marie Osmond’s talk show that aired on the Hallmark Channel. He also worked on a documentary series called “Got Home Alive” and as a production assistant on “The Bachelor,” among other shows.
“Working in TV is not as glamorous as people thing,” he said. “A lot of work goes into it – a crazy amount of hours – some 18-hour days. But if you do it because you love it, it’s not necessarily a job.”
Ramos said he has some people on his crew who have worked on bigger films. He has received compliments for bringing a cross section of the crew when he was scouting for locations to shoot in Los Angeles.
“Big productions don’t do that and the audio guy might say it’s a terrible place to shoot,” he said. “Because of my production background we were really able to look ahead and have everything as planned out as possible.”
Ramos was looking forward to the five-day shoot in the days before filming, especially to a shoot at a green screen stunt studio.
“Even as an adult you walk in and it’s like a big playground, with fake swords, big rigs, crash pads and all that stuff,” he said.
The green screen studio will be used to shoot the fall from the building scene.
Despite the fun aspects of the shoot, Ramos said the story did take on a personal touch for him because his parents were divorced when he was a child. He said he hasn’t seen his father in 20 years and he wanted to connect viewers with the message of the movie – of spending time with loved ones before it is too late.
As soon as post-production is completed with the film, Ramos said he will be submitting it to film festivals.
“The plan is to give this thing wings and let it go as far as it can,” Ramos said. “We can only control it so much. It’s all in my head now how I want it to look.”
Visit a blog about the filmmaking experience online at: http://afilmmakersdiary.com.
