Sheriff Without a Gun

This movie is based off an Andy Griffith Episode "The Tailors in Hollywood" (a movie company makes a movie about Andy Tailor - "Sheriff without a Gun" - and he, as well as Aunt Bea, is disgusted at how they portray Andy's life). The second half of the movie is behind-the-scenes bloopers and stuff. I didn't help at all with the making of this movie - all the credit goes to my younger siblings!

Books Vs. Media

Desperate Mission

We started this movie in May, 2013.We worked the story out, picked out (and made) costumes, set up our set in the basement and filmed the first scene (which took two days to film) and, to our horror, the videos didn't work with Windows Movie Maker. That totally exploded our bubble and we dropped the project. A month later, we gave it another try.We pulled the costumes out, shortened our original story quite a bit, and filmed and edited the entire movie within five hours. We wanted to make a behind-the-scenes movie, but we never got around to it. =/

This is our attempt at an adaption from "The Longest Day" - at least the French resistance part. =) 

Nightmare

[January, 2013.] Longest movie up to that point, this is also the first time we'd used sound effects.

When I Survey

We got the crazy idea to film this movie at nine o'clock P.M. and finished filming at 12:30 (yes, we kept everyone up. =P) It took us forever to film the entire song without someone bursting into laughter (at that time of night, we all had the giggles. =)

Filmed in January, 2013, this is our first movie with our current name - Criss Cinematography.

Espionage

Espionage movie poster

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, many Soviets disguised as diplomats working for the United Nations were involved in espionage activities, buying secret military and other secret information from people who had access to those documents. The greedy accepted huge amounts of money and freely gave information, but there were others who, after being approached by red agents, reported to the FBI. 

 This is a trailer to a (imaginary) film called Espionage following four people - a Russian spy - Ian Novolov (Matthew Criss) - who just arrived in America, a young soldier who valued money over his country (Joseph Criss, and two FBI agents (M&J Criss)- who work until the spy ring has collapsed.

Behind-the-Scenes. We didn't/most likely won't make a full-length version of this movie - that part at the beginning with me asking for donations was just us goofing off. =P

This movie was made in August, 2012. It took us a couple days to film this, the longest we've taken on any movie up to that point. We made it while part of our family was in Montana and surprised them with the finished movie when they returned.

Tribute to Reagan

I made this slideshow as a tribute for our chocolate lab that was hit by a car and killed.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

 

A goofy, plot-less story, this was made September, 2010.

"The Christmas Story" - and Behind-the-Scenes Photos

Our next "Young Movie Makers" production - also made in 2010 - we collaborated with some young friends and put together a Christmas story in August. I was still new to movie making and was amazed at how much time it takes to edit a five minute movie (literally hours!). 

Here are a some behind-the-scenes pictures! We were baby-sitting these children for the day and decided to make a movie. It took us about an hour to come up with a story, then we set about making the props - Christmas decorations.

We needed to cover our very-full-of-messages marker board, in front of which would be our main scene. So we pulled out the aisle runner from my sister's wedding...

...and colored a big "Merry Christmas" on it.

Hanging up the sign

Hannah tracing gingerbread men.

We wanted to be somewhat 1800s authentic, so we used flour and water paste to glue the paper chain together.

Popcorn chain

Getting ready to film the first scene!

In the midst of hours of editing.

Creepy Crawly

This was our very first movie, made in 2010. This was when we were "The Young Movie Makers". =)

When we were younger, we enjoyed playing our made-up game called creepy crawly. We'd turn the lights out, hide, then slowly leave our hiding spots and scare each other. =) I made this movie to keep the children occupied. There's no point to the story - I was just playing around with our camera and Windows Movie Maker. We filmed the first scene over thirty times and used six AA batteries over the course of the entire movie. When I made this, I didn't know how to mute scenes, so in the sped-up scenes, those talking sound like muskrats. =P  I lost a couple shots in the process of making it, but here is most of it! Enjoy!

Welcome!

Hey, welcome to Criss Cinematography! We'll be sharing some of our home movies here. They're not that great, with poor acting, filming, etc. and some don't even make sense, but we hope to improve our skills as we make more movies. Please be patient with our silly attempts. =)

Thanks for stopping by! Encourage us by following and leaving comments! =)

The Criss kids