THE FILMMAKERS

Combining over 25 years of filmmaking experience William Arntz, Betsy Chasse, and Mark Vicente have embarked on their most important project to date: Delivering to the world through the combined mediums of film, documentary, animation and visual effects the answers to the most asked question in the universe. “ What is it? Where do we fit in? And, why do we do what we do?”

William Arntz
Producer, Director, Screenwriter, President - Captured Light

William Arntz graduated summa cum laude in 1972 from Penn State University with a degree in Engineering Science and accepted employment as a Research Physicist with Pratt and Whitney Aircraft. There he worked on developing the first wave optics simulator for high-energy gas dynamic laser weapons (a.k.a. “Star Wars”). After two years of corporate life, William “retired,” and drove around the country. Eventually he ended up in Boston where he reunited with a longtime friend who was enrolled in the Master’s Degree film program at Boston University. Together they created, Beat the Deva, a one-hour animated film noir, which won a Cine Eagle, the Kenyon Film Festival, and received distribution on the art house circuit.

Upon completion of the film in 1980, William moved to California to pursue a film career, but found the process of moving up through the ranks daunting and less than ideal. So he moved to San Francisco, “retired”, and became a Buddhist. By the late 80’s his Buddhist teacher assigned him the task using his meditation/visualization skills to create a software product and company, which was to become a huge success. Lacking the common sense to realize what he was up against, he took $100,000 in savings, no business experience, and sat down and in 5 months wrote “AutoSys” – a distributed job scheduler. The skills must have worked, for AutoSys went on to be one of the most widely used pieces of System Management software ever written, with clients as diverse as Merrill Lynch, NASA, ILM, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and Boeing.

In 1995 William Arntz sold his company and took a year off. He then devised a second successful software company, which he sold nine months after creating it. After “retiring” for the 3rd time he became interested in uniting his 4 great interests: (1) leading edge science, (2) spiritual inquiry, (3) filmmaking and (4) computers. After realizing that with the success of his two software companies he had succeeded in bypassing the onerous task of rising through the ranks, he happily (despite still lacking common sense) embarked upon the creation of “What the #$*! Do We Know?”

Betsy Chasse
www.intentionmediainc.com

Producer, Director, Screenwriter

In 2004, Betsy was part of the creative team behind the sleeper hit, What The Bleep Do We Know?!. She is credited as Writer, Director and Producer of the movie, along with William Arntz and Mark Vicente. To date, “The Bleep” is one of the highest grossing documentaries of all time, and has shipped over 1 million DVDs in the first six months of its DVD release. Betsy was listed in Variety’s top 50 Independent Producers of 2004.

Betsy began her film production career as a Production Assistant on a low, low, low budget action picture where, on her first day, she promptly totaled her car. Fortunately, the Producer was in the car with her and could think of no other way to assist her except by promoting her to Production Coordinator (She didn’t need a car for that). After that, Betsy served as Production Coordinator on several films including, Best of the Best 2, and Robert Altman’s, The Player. Her first outing as a Production Manager came with the independent film, Public Access, directed by Bryan Singer, which won the 1995 Sundance Film Festival

Since then she has freelanced as a Production Manager and Line Producer on over 30 feature films. In 1996 Betsy started her own production company, Rampant Feline Films, which has produced several features, cable specials, and music videos.

In 2006 Betsy started her own media and publishing company, Elora Media www.eloramedia.com, which offers spiritually oriented, motivational books, videos and music for children of all ages – adults included! She is a highly sought after speaker on such subjects as spirituality, the blending of science and spirituality, and marketing to the cultural creative demographic.

Betsy lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband Gordie, and their daughter Elorathea. When not producing, directing, writing, marketing, or traveling, she can be found happily at work in her organic vegetable and flower garden.

Mark Vicente
Director, Director of Photography

Mark Vicente was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1965. With a father in Radio and a mother in the Diplomatic Service, he rarely stayed in one place for very long. As a child he traveled the world and lived in such diverse places as Portugal, Brazil, Canada, and the US. When it came to his life’s passion, he took his cue from his Grandfather who owned an advertising agency. Taking his first photograph at age 4 he soon developed a keen eye for visual storytelling. This led to his "professional" decision at age 13 that he wanted to make movies.

After finishing high school in South Africa (where he learnt that white men discovered Africa) he enrolled in Wits Drama School. There he studied Cinematography, Stage and Set design, Theater Lighting Design, Radio, Television Production and Music. But much to his horror he found himself also having to Dance, Act, and make strange primal noises in Voice Class. At the time, he stalwartly announced, "I just want to be a cinematographer!" (He was wearing tights at the time) Little did he realize that all this diverse training would serve him well in the future, as a director.

After mastering the Steadicam and working as a news-cameraman in Apartheid South Africa, he went on to shoot music videos and commercials. He got his first big break as Director of Photography on the musical, "SARAFINA " starring Whoopi Goldberg. In 1992 he got the opportunity to go to Hollywood and shoot a picture for Disney entitled, "FATHERHOOD" starring Patrick Swayze. Excited and nervous, he found himself at the age of 26 as one of the youngest Cinematographers to shoot a big budget studio picture.

He never left the United States and over the next 8 years, amassed experience shooting another 14 feature films. As exciting as it was to visually interpret stories presented to him by other directors, he found that the subject matter was sorely lacking. Driven by the conviction that tales of greatness could be as exciting and financially successful as the subjects of rape, pillage, plunder and scandal so beloved by the industry, he decided that no one else was telling the stories that he deeply cared about.

In 2000, driven by creative desperation, he decided it was time to embrace his inevitable destiny as a director. He began directing and shooting commercials and documentaries that gave voice to his rebelliousness and politically incorrect sense of humor. The Rockumentary, "WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD", produced by Linda Evans, takes to task organized religion and the lengths to which human beings will go to abuse minorities and specifically woman, in the name of God.

"What the Bleep do we Know" is his most recent project and it's success has been astounding. The audience, which Hollywood never said existed, seems to have come out in their droves in support of the film. And his dream of creating cinema to uplift and inspire, is finally coming to fruition.