The only way you could possibly understand gulp is with the following metaphor: Imagine yourself walking down the street. Coming toward you is none other than __ (fill in the blank with the name of a celebrity you'd like to wake up next to). Just as you're about to stop them for an autograph, they grab you by the waist and begin whispering into your ear. You're asked if you wouldn't mind lying horizontally, so that they can perform beautiful acrobatics upon you. After which, they wish to donate a hospital wing in your name and make you a co-signer on their checking account.

That is kind of what it sounds like when AtomFilms and the Ford Motor Company ask if they can underwrite your next short film. You're left wondering what body part you'll have to relinquish to afford such luck.

My relationship with AtomFilms began in January, 2000 when, at Sundance, they acquired the rights to my short film, In God We Trust. Throughout the year, they sold off various ancillary rights to countries I will never visit in my lifetime. At the end of the day,

In God We Trust had a successful year, and I became one of the directors AtomFilms approached with the Ford offer. The deal was as follows: Make a short film. It must be under 10 minutes. It must feature the Ford Focus. It cannot exceed a PG rating.

The first concept I turned in centered around a mom attempting to buy marijuana while driving around in her son's Ford Focus. This brought upon an additional rule: The film must shed a positive light on the Ford Focus, and in no way involve controlled substances. As a result, I wrote gulp.

gulp is about a man who must save his fish. Our hero, Francis, has placed his saltwater fish, Gerard, in a Ziplock bag of tap water. He now has five minutes to get Gerard to salt water. How does he get from place to place? That's right, a Ford Focus! The guys back in Detroit apparently loved it.

Who can't appreciate a man who loves his fish and his car? They signed off on the idea and we were on our way.

By this time, I had been directing commercials for Tate & Partners in Santa Monica for about six months. The pace of commercial production is the only thing that could have prepared me and my two producers, Dan Dubiecki and Tim Crane, for the production of gulp. The Sundance submission deadline was one month away.

We were originally set to shoot five days out of six. However, we got rained out on one of our first days, and rescheduled to shoot two consecutive three-day weekends. This ended up being very advantageous. Due to the amount of miscellaneous car footage, we would steal driving shots between setups. While the majority of the crew lit the next shot at the location, I would grab the lead actor, Jason Carpenter, and my first AC and take the Focus for a spin through unpermitted areas. The majority of the driving shots in gulp are from these 10-minute excursions.

The lack of dialogue allowed us to use an Arri S4, which is a non-sound body. The S4 was great in the car, because of its flexibility. You can break it down to the bare bones, go handheld or shove it into a corner. In our best setup, we threw on a 14mm, shoved the camera in front of the passenger seat and pointed it back at the driver. Then the AC and I crouched down in the back with the monitor and remote, while the actor drove around West LA.

One of the complications in shooting gulp was the number of locations. The shooting of our six-minute short brought us to two homes, a pet store, a veterinary hospital, the beach and countless streets – none of this would have been possible without locations manager extraordinaire, Lynn Van Kuilenberg.

The hardest of these locations by far was the beach. First off, you've got sand and salt getting into everything, so the camera is constantly having to be cleaned. In addition, there is very little room to cheat the light. The sun is either out or not. Then there are the pedestrians. As it turns out, it's very difficult to control people on roller blades. You don't exactly want someone rolling into shot just as you slam a Focus through a barricade and into the sand. Don't get me wrong, the footage would be great, but we'd be breaking the addendum law referring to the positive light in which the Ford Focus must be shown.

The worst of the beach came when it was time to shoot in the ocean. Four of us put on wet suits and went 30 feet out to shoot Jason, the lead, as he attempted to get ocean water into the bag with the fish. I operated the camera while two grips held me from getting knocked over by the waves. It was my first AC's job to pull focus and turn the camera on and off. However, the battery connection was loose, resulting in him getting electrically shocked every time we rolled camera.

The most unique part of shooting gulp, of course, is the fish. Gerard the fish was played by four blood parrot cichlids – all of whom currently live in my apartment.

My general approach to the fish thing was that trainers were an unnecessary cost on a short film. I have worked with chicken and cow trainers on commercials and have found them indispensable, but I thought I'd be able to handle the fish. As it turns out, blood parrot cichlids are not born performers. They don't respond to verbal commands, including"If you don't turn toward camera, I will rip your fins off." They just stare and eat and huddle together like children in a bomb shelter. We spent three hours trying to get a close-up of the fish looking at camera and gulping. Three hours. We did very bad things to those fish.

The post process on gulp involved three parts. The first was accomplishing the post effects. This included all the speed ramps for the car shots and, more importantly, the computer-generated map shots, done by Dana Yee with Delirium in New York. These three shots, which resemble a camera gliding over a city map that then dissolves into a real street, were the key transitions that held the film together. Editing gulp took less than two weeks.

I worked closely with my longtime collaborator, Yanosh Cuglove.

The final music was done by P.J. Hanke, who also did the music for In God We Trust. P.J. was forced to have multiple themes that could switch every 30 seconds or so as necessary. The result is a mixture of electronica, hip-hop, salsa and '70s symphonic vomit. A truly beautiful thing.

Two final masters of gulp were delivered at the eleventh hour. One was a digital version for AtomFilms. The other, a 35mm print which was finished just in time for its Sundance premiere.

At the end of the day, I'm most proud that gulp isn't an advertisement. It's a short film propelled by the story of man and his fish. I have to thank Rob Donnell with Ford and Amanda Vieth of AtomFilms for allowing me to pursue a story rather than a six-minute product placement.

Corporate underwriting has long been been a help to those in the arts and I hope that more corporations allow independent moviemakers the freedom to tell their stories. Oh, and I also hope that Dominos backs my next film. I like pizza. MM