THE KARATE KID meets TRON in Jarrett Lee Conaway’s highly polished and fast-paced, futuristic action short TURBO where teen gamers compete in a 4D fighting video game competition.
Troubled teen Hugo Park (Justin Choi) is obsessed with an interactive fighting video game known as “Super Turbo Arena” and enters a tournament in hopes of winning the big cash prize and joining a cybersports pro-team but encounters a serious challenge from the current champion Shamus (David Lehre). For help in honing his fighting moves, Hugo turns to his brother, Tobias (Ilram Choi), a former kickboxing champion now wheelchair bound.
Martial arts fighting mixed with glossy digital effects and video gaming isn’t new, nor is it typically well liked by stuffy, old school screen fighting fans like me with a bias towards unfiltered and raw stunt fighting from the ’70s and ’80s. That said, I’m going to cut up-and-coming filmmaker Jarrett Lee Conaway some slack for using these elements to produce one of the most polished, ready for prime time, action-oriented, student short films I have ever seen.
TURBO is the brainchild of Conaway who co-wrote (with Erika Cervantes), produced and directed the film for his Master of Fine Arts degree at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Conaway is clearly aiming for the big time and appears to be headed in that direction. He previously gained the attention of Steven Spielberg for another sci-fi short film called ANTHEM which led him to be selected from among 12,000 filmmakers to compete in the Fox reality TV series ON THE LOT.
Rachel Blavin and Garrett Thompson also acted as producers.
The film’s fighting action was choreographed by Ilram Choi and Conaway. Choi is a Korean-American stuntman and actor who has been working in Hollywood for the past six years on films such as CRANK, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END and J.J. Abrams’ STAR TREK where he doubled John Cho. He will next be seen onscreen in Isaac Florentine’s UNDISPUTED 3 as a fighter.
The fighting actor playing Shamus’ avatar is Jessen Noviello, an actor, model and three-time world champion martial artist schooled in a variety of styles. He will next be appearing in R. L. Scott’s upcoming ninja actioner BROKEN BLADE.
As for the mop-haired leads, Justin Chon has a reoccurring supporting role in the popular TWILIGHT film series while David Lehre, who I am proud to say, is an enterprising Michigan native who got his start in the film industry by making popular comedic short films on the internet like MYSPACE: THE MOVIE.
As for Conaway, he recently shot another short called FOOLISHING SEEKING TRUE LOVE and is planning a feature film version of TURBO in which he plans to use state of the art performance capture directing techniques he learned while studying at USC under Academy Award winning director Robert Zemeckis (BEOWULF).
To purchase TURBO, the soundtrack, related merchandise, or learn more about the film or the people involved visit www.turbothemovie.com.
Related Topics:Ilram Choi • Jarrett Lee Conaway • Turbo (2009) • Videos
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