All right, we'll even with ya.

Hamster Wheel Productions is a small production company. I only used the plural term "We" because it sounds more professional. Truth of the matter is, Hamster Wheel Productions is nothing more than an email address, a website, and a P.O. Box that doubles as a personal mail box. We have one employee, Me, and from time to time some temps that work for free because they're really good friends.

So why bother?

Well, this gets into my personal history a little, so bear with me. As a Fairhaven student at Western Washington University, I had an Interdisiplinary Concentration of Independent Moviemaking. As a perk as a Fairhaven student, I could take these things called ISPs (Independent Study Projects) which I decided early on, would be making student movies. Although all works were original, I was afraid that someone would be distributing copies of my movies, or using photos of my actors without my permission. Hamster Wheel Productions had to exist so that we could "own" all rights to the product we created.

The goofy name actually makes references to two things. The obvious first is that the company was born in Bellingham, and residents of this city are called Bellinghamsters. The other reason is more of a story.

During the production of my first student movie, The Confidence Game, we were doing so much in so little time. We were shooting a 90 something page feature length movie and editing it in one quarter. That's a two hour movie in three months, and the only production people were me and Jonathan Vann, my DP and Sound guy at the time. It was a lot of work, and I was worried that we would miss something on our shooting schedule.

I expressed this concern candidly to Eliza Gauger and between the both of us, we decided that if we completely forget a scene that bridges the story, we would simply stick in an image of a hamster running on a wheel with the subtitle, "Missing Scene Here." That idea stuck and I decided by the end of The Confidence Game that it would be the name of the company.

I'm not certain, but Authorship could possibly be the last official project of H.W.P. because I graduated March 2001. I Although Authorship was funded in part by AsianAmericanFilm.com, I doubt I could get any funds to support any further project. And besides, I do need to begin searching for a career in writing, therefore limiting my time to embark on big projects with actors who do not get paid. Who knows. But meanwhile, Authorship is still in preproduction, so stay tuned!