Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (6 page)

I told him we’d take that room. “Oh, hell no!” Veronique said. “No way—I’m not going in that room!”

I laughed. Fine. So we took a different room. In the middle of the night, we awoke to hear banging on the wall. We were completely freaked out. “Is that a ghost? Is it a ghost?!” Veronique asked. She was really scared.

We heard more knocks on the wall, then what sounded like a mattress squeaking, then some other sounds that made it obvious that we were listening either to two ghosts having sex or to two living people getting freaky.

Those walls were thin! I had two pillows over my ears trying to drown out the sound. Veronique and I laughed about it, but we didn’t sleep much. The next morning I went out of the room and saw this old guy coming out of the room next to us. He was outside washing his clothes in a bucket of water. How freakin’ weird is that? I jumped back into the room and said to Veronique, “You’ll never guess who that was! It’s some creepy old guy.”

We left that morning and started driving back to Vegas. As Virginia City started to fill my rearview mirror, I thought about how full the place was with history and ghost stories. I knew I would go back there again someday.

College was a great time for me. I was making connections all over the place—with people and with locations. The more I threw myself into film, the more I found my passion. Even the faculty started to notice.

As a senior at UNLV I became really good friends with the head of the film department, Professor Francisco Menendez. At the time he wanted me to help him on a new movie he was producing. His last movie had been bought by Showtime, so I
was psyched to be working on his new film,
Primo
.

I was the high-definition camera technician for Menendez’s movie. No one really knew how to use a high-definition camera, as it was fairly new at the time. But I was a step ahead of the game. The camera came with an attached remote control, and I was the only one who knew how to operate the thing because of the equipment training I’d had in Los Angeles. I taught everyone else. This was a real film with actors, trailers, and a budget. I knew I was going somewhere in this business right there. I even got to appear in the movie.

Menendez took a look at me on one of the days when I guess I looked a little mafioso, and he said to me, “Hey, you want to play the Russian Mafia guy really quick? Our guy didn’t show up.” I was like, “Hell, yeah, I do!” I ran to makeup, called Veronique and asked her to bring some of my suits over, and slicked back my hair. I had makeup give me a scar near my eye so it looked like I had been cut before. I basically created my own character right there. Spoiler alert: I die… quickly, in the movie. I get shot. If you ever get the chance to get shot in a movie—do it!

I had two roles on this production: camera technician and cast member. I loved being able to do it all. I knew it was just an early step. I wanted to be the guy with the ideas, the guy creating, directing, and seeing it come together.

I was taking on every project I could around this time. I worked as a production assistant, or PA, on another horror film. That’s where I learned that being a PA sucks—it’s like being a slave. But you should always respect the PAs, because someday they’ll be somebody.

D
uring the winter of my senior year, I had an idea for a film project. I knew I’d need some help with this one.

I called my friend Aaron Goodwin and told him I needed to make a proposal video. “What kind of proposal?” Aaron asked.

“A wedding proposal,” I told him.

The idea was a movie where I’d be traveling across the world trying to find Veronique. I would find her picture on the ground and go looking for her since I’m lost without her.

It came out really cool. We did a time-lapse effect so images fly by. We used the Vegas Strip for a lot of this because it has the New York skyline, the Eiffel Tower, the Venetian—we could walk a few blocks and make it look like we were all over the world. In a matter of minutes we could go from the Venice canals to the desert outside of town.

Toward the end I showed footage in front of a fountain in Paris because I knew Veronique had always wanted to go there. The video ends with a shot of the fountain and just holds there… because the video was only part of the proposal.

I’d completely edited together the mini-DV tape and I planned to give it to her on Christmas Day 2003. I had to cue the music perfectly so that when the music was playing in front of the fountain it was loud and built up, but then it would come down so you could hear me talk over it as I stepped in front of the television in person.

I wrapped up the mini-DV cassette in a toilet paper roll, so it looked weird. When Veronique opened it Christmas Day, she thought it was sweet that I’d made her a movie—she knew I didn’t have a lot of money. So I made her go and watch it alone in a room. I’d had the camera already set up and everything. She thought it was really weird that she had to watch it alone, but she agreed to do it, and I went upstairs.

I timed everything perfectly so that I would come down the stairs and get on one knee in front of the television at the fountain scene at the end. By the time I got to my knee, the music had slowly lowered to background music. “Veronique, will you marry me?” I asked.

I had worked construction jobs and a ton of video jobs to save up enough money to buy a ring. My aunt worked for a jewelry store back in Nashua, so she’d helped me design it. I’d spent everything I had and had to borrow the other half of the money to pay for it. I was sweating and nervous, but I had no doubts I wanted to marry her.

Veronique said yes. I was so happy. I couldn’t imagine
not
being married to Veronique.

We finished our senior year at UNLV engaged. The plan was to get married September 25, 2004.

After graduation, Veronique and I started working and then moved into an apartment in Las Vegas across the street from a
basketball court. I was doing video production work on anything I could get my hands on. I filmed and edited a ton of weddings. I was working on commercials too, and I even built my own computer for editing video projects.

I wasn’t making a lot of money yet, but I was getting by. Veronique was working as an event coordinator for the Ritz-Carlton in Las Vegas. Between our two incomes we were living a good life for a young couple right out of college.

Since Veronique was working at the Ritz, she was able to recommend me for a lot of wedding videos. I was working for a company that paid me two hundred dollars to film the wedding and another two hundred dollars to edit it—not a lot of
money for the job even back then, but it was steady. Because Veronique worked at this fancy hotel, we were able to hold our wedding there for almost half price.

Producing wedding videos may sound like the least exciting job in the film business, but it’s a way learn a lot. Plus, so many weddings come through Vegas. I took each job as a new challenge to do something creative, to bring something new to the video. I was learning and I wouldn’t take back that experience for anything.

When it came time for my own wedding, I asked Aaron to film it, and then I would do the editing myself. When Aaron got married, I did the same for him. I knew he’d do a great job with my wedding because I’d brought him on jobs before, when I was filming larger weddings that needed more than one camera. Next, Veronique and I needed to find the right music.

Not a lot of people know this, but I was a DJ in middle school to earn extra money. I DJ’d and had my band, Dysfunctional Family—I was a legend in my own mind!

I’d worked and saved so I could buy speakers, music, and everything else I’d needed as a kid. Music has always been a huge part of my life. At our wedding, I knew I wanted someone great in charge of it.

We had originally picked a DJ recommended by the Ritz, but I decided to look instead for someone cool with better music. I went online and one Web site popped up right away: Vegas Voltage. Veronique and I met with a Vegas Voltage DJ over drinks. It turned out the guy had gone to film school too and was really into movies. We liked him and hired him for our wedding. His name was Zak Bagans.

Zak and I kept in touch after Veronique and I got married.
We worked to get each other jobs at weddings, with him as DJ and me as videographer. The wedding videos were going well for me. I started a company called Artisan Wedding Videos, but it wasn’t enough to make a living. Needing another job, I started working at CompUSA selling computers, which I saw as an opportunity too. I witnessed some real characters there. Everyone from the customers to my coworkers were giving me inspiration and story ideas. But the money wasn’t great. I wanted to fund and pursue my own film projects, and that was going to take more money.

I was writing my own scripts for movies in my spare time. I had even produced my own feature film,
Malevolence
, during my senior year at UNLV. The film was about the Robaldo family—that old high school story revisited—but this time it had a budget and more know-how. It’s funny how stories from your past come up again and again. I spent everything I had just to blow up a car in the desert. I told everyone involved, “Do this project and I’ll get it screened.” I didn’t know how, but I knew I would do it. I was determined to see my work on the big screen.

When the project was done, I’d pushed and pulled to get it screened at the CineVegas Film Festival in 2004.

Malevolence
had some weird moments in it. The film, which was partially experimental, followed a character who owed the Robaldo family a hundred thousand dollars. You saw the nightmare he went through knowing he had twenty-four hours to pay it back but no way to get the money. He knew (and the audience knew) he was going to die. Putting the movie together taught me a lot about visual storytelling—what to leave in and what to take out. There are great stories all around us. If you’re going to be a creative person, you need to find a story that speaks to
your gut and capture it. From that point, it’s a game of finesse. You want to be visually interesting, you need to move the story along at all costs, and you need to make sure your audience gets what it wants.

Details are important, but too many slow you down. Action is important, but too much takes away from the story. Characters are critical—you need to have feelings for them (whether you love them or hate them), or the story falls flat. Teachers tell you this stuff in film school, but you can’t really learn it until you actually make a movie.

Making
Malevolence
also taught me about budgeting—money, time, resources. I had friends helping me for free, people who needed to get paid, and only so many hours of daylight.

Filmmaking is a creative rush. I agonize over the edits. Do I have the right shots? From the right angles? Editing film is one of those things that seems like it’s never finished. But the more you do it, the better you get. Editing makes you a better camera operator, and vice versa. Being a camera operator makes you better when you’re on-screen talent because you know what your camera operator needs to get.

At the time, this film was my biggest accomplishment in video production—I had practically forgotten about those high school projects for local access TV. I felt like I’d made it—I’d got the thing screened at CineVegas. I couldn’t stop smiling as I watched my work on the big screen. Now I look at this film as just another step in my career. I wanted more. I knew I could do things better.

I called Zak to talk about how to get some of my video production ideas off the ground. Zak was really business savvy and had ideas. I was sick of scraping by. I thought Zak and I could work on
bigger projects, so when he wasn’t DJ’ing we started filming some wedding videos together. And we were becoming cool friends.

Working together on video production, Zak and I were able to take on more work and bring in more money. When Zak came on board, we knew we wanted to do more than just wedding videos, so we started Four Reel Production Company. We were going to produce films, commercials, and other projects.

At the
Ocean’s 11
film premiere in Vegas, we were on the red carpet filming everything. We had been hired by a video production house to film all the actors so the footage could be used for film promos and news spots around the country. We were one of many hired-gun production companies there, but it felt like the big leagues to us. We also did some big corporate videos, as well as the presentation video when Siegfried and Roy
were honored by the American Heart Association. Overall we’d started to do some cool stuff and were making decent money, but we knew we ultimately wanted to do our own projects.