Making Dilated

Dilated Trailer from BLT on Vimeo.

Brian L. Tan "BLT" Director & Exec Producer, talks about Dilated:

Dilated is basically a Michael Bay action film produced at a student level. In order to achieve the highest production value possible, we rented Humvees through our armoring/props company Indie Arms, and found Five Star Military Vehicles, who help provide all sorts of cool military hardware for the movie industry. We also filmed at the LA River, shut down a street, got approval to use an abandoned hospital in Downtown LA, and even used the same camera crane car company Bay used for Transformers. Through lots of begging and borrowing, we managed to keep our costs low by being an all-volunteer cast/crew and had a lot of vendors help us out for free or at a very low rate just because they loved the sheer ambition of the film.

Through it all, we shot Dilated for less than $10,000 and although it is far from the perfect production, we take pride in its audacity, boldness, and unapologetic take on the action genre. Hopefully it'll challenge other aspiring action filmmakers to get out there and do the same. As a group of UCLA students that hope to eventually come day become successful commercial directors and producers, Dilated is perhaps the first step towards our eventual goal of producing big budget features on an international, global level in the very near future.