Alhambra High school filmmakers. Owners of Frugo
Productions: Bryan Quan, Allan Tran, and Le
Nguyen. Other members: Maverick Thamaratwiphak, June Li and Millie Chen.
Frugo
Productions is an amateur film production that broadcasts films to the
public with sites such as Youtube.com Filming is
a hobby they take as being a fun and enjoying thing to do. Our film
productions are low-budget. We have been filming for about 1-2 years--around May
2006.
The beginning of Frugo is actually quite a sequence of events before the owners even came up with Frugo.
On
a bright sunny day, Allan and Bryan rode their bikes around their local
neighborhood until they had arrived at Granada Park, Monterey Park.
There, they rode their bikes around admiring the location’s beauty and
eventually sat themselves down on the grass of one of the many hills
within that area. The discussion of movies soon followed, and from
there Bryan exposed his wacky plans of filming an idea he had there.
Allan had also joined with the development of the idea and they both
had become very interested in trying to do that one day. While doing
so, Allan had told Bryan that he actually has his own camcorder of his
own (his dad's) and we could actually start shooting something for the
first time. After that, they began their experimentation and explored
the features of the camcorder as well as filming itself.
On
another day, Allan, Bryan and Le had met up at Allan's house where they
shot their first "film." It was a one shot short used to test out the
camcorder and editing. From then on, the fascination of new things such
as editing and the camcorder sparked the continuation of filming their
first short film, "One of Those Days." It was edited with Window's
Movie Maker, which had been discovered on the computer and was then
posted on Youtube.com—which had been a very new site that offered space
and distribution for our video(s).
After that short, many of their
friends had joined in to create more shorts released on Youtube such
as: The Courier, The Onslaught, etc. Credited friends include: Jonathan
Ma, Phu Quach and June Li.
The name "Frugo"
as our production title is another story. The actual decision of the
name "Frugo" took many days of aimless listing and judgment. Names that
were broadcasted in some of our older works included: Squeakyx
Productions, P.M.S. Productions, F.O.A.M productions and Justice Squad
Productions. The moment of finalization came while we were showing one
of our edited films to Phu Quach. As the credits rolled at the end of
the video, Phu questioned, "Where are the frugos?" Although perplexed,
we eventually decrypted his extra-terrestrial language and figured he
meant "bloopers" (his English is not the best—Phu, if you are reading
this, we're only yanking your tail. We love your broken English.
Peace.). The word "frugo" was then used as a name because none of us
had heard of it before beside's Google's Froogle, and we really wanted
a production name we could all agree on. From then on, Frugo was the
name of our group. Thus, Frugo Productions lives to being our trademark.
