(back)

New enterprise for young area filmmaker

By Mike Price

For most who look up at the “A” perched atop Tempe Butte, they see merely an uninspiring symbol for Arizona State. When Kyrene Corridor native Zach Yoshioka looks at the mountain, he sees bright, white letters that spell H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D.

Yoshioka, who graduated from Corona del Sol in 1999, is about to embark on his ninth cinematic production since he founded his film production company, Ballistic Entertainment.

The film will follow a 16-year-old girl being pursued by “several sets of thieves and gangsters” who are after a minidisk hidden inside the girl. Yoshioka describes it as a “rat race-type dark comedy” that will begin shooting in February.

Auditions for parts will take place from 8 a.m. to noon Jan. 10 and 11 at Tempe Cinemas.

The crew hopes to release the film, which is currently untitled, either in late April or the first week of May.

The upcoming production is not the only thing that has been keeping Yoshioka busy. Recently, Ballistic Entertainment has been working with several local and national rock bands to produce music videos.

Most notably, Yoshioka recently finished directing a video for the local rap-rock group Bionic Jive, whose members traveled last year on the Anger Management Tour with nationally-recognized acts like Eminem and Papa Roach. Other recent big projects have involved filming live performance videos for local acts Authority Zero and Los Angeles-based rockers Adema.

Since the seventh grade, films have been the nucleus of the 22-year-old’s life and career. What began with a love for Aliens quickly evolved into a passion for cinematography.

“Watching Aliens led me to watch all of the Jim Cameron films, such as Terminator and The Abyss,” Yoshioka said. “I was then inspired by all of the Oliver Stone films like Platoon and JFK.”

Yoshioka’s cinematic enthusiasm finally boiled over in 1998 when he wrote and directed a live action short film entitled The Party, which was a top-10 runner-up in a small film contest sponsored by Teen People Magazine that he entered.

From this point on, the brakes were off for Yoshioka,. He founded his own production team composed mostly of like-minded friends of Yoshioka. The team, including both cast and crew, is unpaid. All profits made by ticket sales go right back into production.

The young director and his crew began turning out films and entering them in local film festivals.

The films were low-budget and most of the actors were friends of Yoshioka. Scriptwriting, editing, set-design and costumes were all done in-house. Filming took place locally, often at the houses of cast members. But despite the rough-around-the-edges characteristics of Yoshioka’s films, he began to develop a following among his peers as well as many in the Tempe arts community.

It was also about this time that Yoshioka became jaded with the festival circuit.

“At that point, I was just sick of film festivals and I just wanted to get as many people as I could to see my stuff,” Yoshioka said.

He decided to invest more time and money into his projects and try to get them played for a larger audience. His next two films released in 2002, Urban Pressure and Premonition, played to sold-out crowds at Tempe Cinemas. Between the two, almost 1,000 tickets were sold.

Yoshioka’s biggest box-office success came earlier this year with Synthetic Truth, which sold more than 600 tickets. The growing ticket sales parallel the growth of Yoshioka and Ballistic Entertainment.

“So many people have caught on to us in the last year or so,” Yoshioka said. “We got sponsored by Trash City Beads, and the press and radio have been really supportive of our goals. The Edge 103.9 brought their van out to our last premiere to help promote us and KTAR 620 did an on-air interview with us. We’ve just been really fortunate to have so many reporters, DJs and sponsors want to help us in achieving our dreams.”

Yoshioka is also fortunate to have such a supportive team of filmmakers working with him.

“Our crew is like a band,” Yoshioka said. “It used to change a lot, project by project, but in the last two years or so, it has pretty much been the same people. We all are really comfortable with each other because we’ve produced so many films together.”

Yoshioka is careful not to see at himself as the boss of his crew, though, and instead would like to be viewed as just another member of the team.

“I’d like to say that nobody sees anybody as above or below each other,” Yoshioka said. “Everyone is an equal in Ballistic Entertainment.”

The crew seems to appreciate not only Yoshioka’s commitment to equality, but also his industrious work ethic.

“He's a really great guy,” said Christi Wilson, a writer and producer for Ballistic. “He's very driven and very talented.”

Ballistic Entertainment’s prolific nature and commitment to the local scene have elevated their respect in the Valley.

“I think that the Tempe arts community responds so positively to my films because we’re so young,” Yoshioka said. “There aren’t a lot of filmmakers out there making feature films back to back, year after year, especially at our age.  It’s cool because we’re just out there doing what we love and we’re fortunate enough to have lots of people enjoy our stories as much as we do.”

Yoshioka’s near-future plans are consumed with this latest project, but as far as the future of Ballistic Entertainment is concerned, he is hopeful but uncertain.

“This is a really crazy time for us,” Yoshioka said. “Most of us are on the verge of graduating college right now and the decision to relocate to Los Angeles is something that we’re considering. But in the end, all we want to do is make movies. Hopefully in five years, the company will be a major player in Hollywood, but who knows?”

Wilson, who has been onboard with Ballistic for four years, shares Yoshioka’s enthusiasm for the group’s outlook.

“I think Ballistic has a very bright future,” Wilson said. “I think with the right exposure, we could go to Hollywood.”

Yoshioka acknowledges that while the focus now is simply making movies and sharing them with audiences, the crew is young and their futures are far from set in stone.

“In the last six years, I’ve proven to myself that I can make movies,” Yoshioka said. “It’s what makes me happy. Sure, the ultimate goal would be to make movies for a living, but if it never happens, I’m still going to put out as many movies as I can, until I have nothing left to say.”

No matter what happens, Yoshioka is adamant about making movies for his fans and says that fans are what matter most to him.

“Making movies is just pure fun—you get to create your own world through a vision that you created in your mind,” Yoshioka said. “I love sitting in the dark theater and watching 400-plus people go nuts for a movie that me and my crew made. It just makes you want to do it all over again and again.”

(back)