All Aces Media. Beat Down Boogie. One and the same, essentially. The model is similar to Miramax Films and Dimension Films, or Twentieth Century Fox and Fox Searchlight, or Paramount Pictures and Paramount Vantage. Miramax handled mainstream fare, Dimension the genre fare. Fox and Paramount handled mainstream, Fox Searchlight and Paramount Vantage the arthouse slate. Both functioned successfully under the same auspices, and so it is with All Aces Media/Beat Down Boogie, Greensboro’s own filmmaking force.
The All Aces Media team (Blake Faucette and Andy Coon) and the Beat Down Boogie team (Faucette, Micah Moore and Rick Burnett) are among the most prolific filmmak ers in the region. They‘ve made dozens of music videos, toiled on a variety of independent short and feature films made in the region, produced their own web series, offered assistance to new and established local filmmakers when needed, and earned a well-deserved reputation as a creative trust to be reckoned with.
They’ve done it not with hype or self-aggrandizement, but with hard work that gets results, and that’s the most persuasive hype of all.
All Aces Media’s most noteworthy endeavor to date is the acclaimed web series “Often Awesome: The Series,” which chronicles musician/filmmaker Tim LaFollette’s ongoing struggle against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The series, which has been previously covered in YES! Weekly, has been praised for its unflinching look at LaFollette’s condition and both the courage and humor he exhibits in the face of so devastating an illness. Viewer reaction has been nothing short of spectacular, and viewership has steadily increased with each installment.
“Often Awesome” was unlike anything that the filmmakers had ever done before, which was a major reason they wanted to do it.
“Just the opportunity to do something completely different from what we’d done before was awesome, no pun intended,” Faucette said.
Beat Down Boogie’s latest endeavor is “Modern War Gear Solid,” a futuristic, actionpacked, often satirical sci-fi web series that showcases the filmmakers’ ability to create digital special effects that rival even those of multi-million-dollar Hollywood movies. It too has become popular with viewers — and growing more popular with each installment.
“The audience reaction for ‘Modern War Gear Solid’ has been really overwhelming,” said Moore. “Our Beat Down Boogie channel will have 2 million views soon, and our series has been subtitled in over 12 languages thanks to our awesome fans. We love being in direct contact with our audience, and sharing tutorials with other DIY filmmakers.
“I’m really fortunate to work with Blake and Andy,” he added. “We’re pretty strict when it comes to ethics and reliability, so our crew is pretty tight. Every few years we find someone that lives up to our expectations. Rick is our newest partner; he’s challenged us to be better technical filmmakers.”
The members of All Aces Media/Beat Down Boogie are known by almost every independent filmmaker in the Piedmont Triad region and many throughout the state. They’ve worked with many of them, even on projects of other filmmakers’ conception (including Vault of Darkness 3-D, Hellphone and Children of the Hunt).
In some circles, they’re perceived as being under the radar, if for no other reason than none of their projects has qualified for the state’s tax incentives for filmmakers.
“We hope one day to do something that does qualify for tax incentives,” Faucette jokingly boasted.
But there’s no doubt that they’re on the map — and that they put themselves there by sheer dint of hard work, creativity, enthusiasm and talent. Their reputation precedes them.
In a very, very good way.
Indeed, this group of filmmakers is so well-known, and so well-regarded, among the region’s artistic community that several current and past YES! Weekly staffers have encountered them, individually or collectively, many times in the past, in one capacity or another, on a number of their projects.
The seeds of All Aces Media/Beat Down Boogie were sown at College Hill Video, which Faucette opened in the 1990s and which immediately became a favorite of film buffs (including this writer), comic-book fans and aspiring filmmakers in the region.
Nestled against the UNCG campus, College Hill Video was the area’s repository for rare and obscure comic books, magazines, movies and CDs.
That’s where Faucette, Moore, Coon, Coon’s brother Sean (founder of the dotmatrix project, on which they’ve also worked), Burnett, Jesse Knight, Ray Wood, Rudy Chu and other friends discussed the comic books they liked (and didn’t), the films they liked (and didn’t), and what they would do to make them better… if ever given the chance, of course. Ultimately, of course, they created that chance for themselves.
“It ended up being a hangout for creative people,” Faucette said. “I met most of the people I’ve worked with there. The ideas just flowed.” Occasionally after hours, a few beers did, too.
Customers were frequent and friendly, but sometimes “we’d get annoyed when someone wanted to buy something,” Faucette recalled with a laugh. “‘Hey, man — we’re busy talking here. We’ll be with you in a minute.’” Their love of Asian action films gave birth to the feature film Dogs of Chinatown (the subject of a YES! Weekly cover story in 2007), and they even had the first green screen in the region. It was only a matter of time before the production business began to overshadow the retail business. Some mourned the closing of College Hill Video, but demand for their production services had made it impractical, and perhaps impossible, to keep both going.
Now, more than a decade later, they’ve come full circle, having been contracted to produce several promotional videos for UNCG (“right back there we started,” Faucette quipped). The private sector has also taken notice, as they’ve produced commercials for Little John’s Tattoo and Smithfield’s Chicken ‘N Bar-B-Q, and are currently in negotiations with other businesses to produce their commercials, too.
Their music videos also run the gamut, and include a variety of established and up-and-coming artists, including Vanisher, Killwhitneydead, God Forbid, Decoration Ghost, Beloved, Valient Thorr, Jessica Ridley, Andrew WK, Blatant Disarray and Branford Marsalis among the many bands and performers they’ve worked with. Whether it’s heavy metal, rock ‘n’ roll, jazz or country, no genre is too daunting.
After all, reasoned Faucette, “it really doesn’t matter what kind of music I like.” Each one is a new challenge to be tackled and surmounted. Besides, he and the other members of the team enjoy interacting with creative people, exchanging ideas and concepts.
Even when a band breaks up, “it’s great for us,” Faucette said, because those members who form new bands are likely to collaborate with them again.
Artist and musician Justin Reich was an intern at Forsaken Recordings in Greensboro, for which the filmmakers had produced many live music videos. He and Faucette got to talking — again, that creative connection — and Reich wound up as the still photographer for Dogs of Chinatown. He also designed the theatrical poster and has recently worked closely with Moore and Burnett in creating the design for the “Modern War Gear Solid” posters.
“From there they asked me to do several more things throughout the years which have fostered some awesome working relationships I keep to this day,” he said.
Reich has himself become a director of music videos, and he cites Faucette as a major inspiration. In fact, he noted, “[Blake] was co-director/camera operator and technical advisor on a music video I just shot last week.”
For Coon, the joy “is in working with other talented filmmakers and learning from them, and making lasting professional and personal relationships,” he said. “Success to me is working with the people that you love — yes, I said it — and seeing an impact on the community from your work. ‘Often Awesome’ is an amazing opportunity that Blake and I are able to work on and help bring eyes to this awful disease. It is rewarding to my soul and I’m truly grateful for it.
“We like to refer each other to our strengths,” he added. “Blake is the musicvideo guy, Micah is the visual story guy, I’m the corporate/documentary guy and tech geek. But I have no ego issues doing sound or lighting, especially working with these guys. I love how open it is with ideas. We really work well together and respect each other’s opinions. I’m amazed at how fast we shoot and get the final product out, and make it look so good.”
Others are amazed, too. Fellow filmmaker Dustin Keene, of Keene Innovations, calls them “beyond a great production company… they have a great heart for what they do and it shows when you see their work.”
There’s a distinct sense of camaraderie and cooperation among the independent film contingent in the Piedmont Triad region. Making money is, of course, an important consideration, but the area’s filmmakers tend to perceive each other as competition only in a very general way.
It’s competition “only in the sense that, the marketplace being what it is, there are only so many jobs to go around,” said Keene, “and that’s too bad. Things get in the way.”
There have been many lean periods, when projects weren’t going forward and filmmakers were scrambling for the next thing.
Happily, these days seem to be more fertile.
Like many interviewed for this story, Keene expressed a sincere appreciation for what the All Aces Media/Beat Down Boogie filmmakers do. He’s worked with them (usually individually) in the past, and he hopes to collaborate further in the future.
When the idea for “Often Awesome” first came up, for example, Keene considered it himself. “Tim LaFollette and I go way, way back — he and I are great friends and we love each other — but I just couldn’t get my head around it,” he admitted.
When he first heard that All Aces Media were going to do it, he was surprised. Not because he didn’t think they were capable, he said, “but because it was something so unlike anything they’d done before.”
And then he saw the results. Words like incredible, fantastic and, yes, awesome, come up when Keene discusses the series. “They brought something to it I couldn’t have,” he said, “because I was too close.”
The filmmakers don’t necessarily go out of their way to promote what they do. A good product, they believe, is the best promotion. And the way to create a good product is by working hard and forging lasting relationships.
“I think we have a lot of possibilities and goodwill,” Moore said. “In Greensboro, Blake and Andy are spearheading a really meaningful documentary series in ‘Often Awesome.’ They’ve become really formidable in non-fiction content. Rick is working on raising the quality bar for DIY filmmaking, and I’m managing Beat Down Boogie, promoting guerrilla filmmaking and reinterpreting pop culture with our audience. We have a lot of tentacles out there, and are ready to
help each other whenever and wherever we’re needed.
“We do everything,” he continued, “whatever needs to be done. Sometimes we get to focus on our strengths. For me, it’s cinematography. Other times, we have to teach ourselves tasks that don’t come naturally. Learning to do something right is better than relying on someone else to do it. For ‘Modern War Gear Solid,’ I worked every crew position except 3-D Animation, and Rick and Blake worked a couple dozen crew roles each.”
“We definitely want to do more,” Faucette said. In the beginning, “it was fun to dabble in it, and we’ve tried to turn it from a hobby into something financially successful for all of us. This has become more than just an actual business — it’s cool, too.”
Faucette is currently exploring the option of licensing and merchandising products based on their projects: T-shirts, posters, but tons,
DVDs, CDs and so on. Moore also says that they may well “dust off” the script for their proposed Beat Down Boogie feature film, which was put on the back burner after an unsatisfactory distribution deal with Dogs of Chinatown. (They’re currently in the process of regaining the rights, after which they intend to distribute it themselves.)
That unsatisfactory distribution deal was enough to make Moore consider throwing in the towel, but he couldn’t stay away for very long. It was Burnett, he said, who helped convince him to return to the filmmaking fold.
“Now I just follow my instincts and have fun, and it seems that’s leading us to our biggest opportunities ever,” he said. “Making films is hard; it’s life-consuming. I’m not interested in something taking up all my time and making me miserable. It has to be fun. That’s my rule now. Operating outside the traditional film industry has been a fun and rewarding experience.”
That sentiment is echoed by the other members of All Aces Media/Beat Down Boogie.
“Sometimes, I don’t really understand the scope of what we’ve done here,” said Coon, “until I sit back and watch it on the computer. It’s pretty incredible, the things we’ve accomplished so far.”
Dustin Keene agreed. “They go out and they do it,” he said, punching his fist in emphasis. “They work hard. They’re honest, good guys. They don’t make excuses. We all make mistakes, of course — that’s part of the business — but they don’t make the same mistake twice. If you’re smart you learn from your mistakes. Well, they learn. Every step they take is a step forward. You begin to wonder: ‘What can’t they do?’” Make no mistake, he laughed, “I’m pretty freakin’ proud of the work I do and the work I’ve done… but I have no hesitation in saying that they do damned good work.”
That’s not envy, Keene said, it’s unvarnished admiration. “I’m proud of them, and I’m proud to be working in the same community as they are,” he said. “It speaks very well of this community, of this region, that they’re here.”
For more information about All Aces Media and Beat Down Boogie, including numerous examples of their work, check out allacesmedia.com or www.beatdownboogie. com.
