This Isn't Another Useless Acting Class
Actors Tank is a workshop were we meet to build movies together from the ground up.
I’m not an acting teacher—but if I ran a class, my ulterior motive would be pretty simple: who am I making a film with next month?
Which, full disclosure, is exactly what I’m doing.
I’m a guerrilla filmmaker running an audition/rehearsal process that feels like the spirits of Stella Adler and John Cassavetes are hanging out in the room—and if Judy Weston or David Mamet were sitting in the back, they might just be nodding along as they watch. Well… that’s probably just wishful thinking.
Guerrilla filmmaking is a low-budget, DIY approach to making movies that relies on no/minimal crews, real locations, and often shooting without permits. It’s fast, raw, and resourceful—filmmakers use whatever they have, embrace the chaos, and focus on capturing something real, outside the rules of traditional film production.Actors Tank is a workshop position to build films.
It’s the on-boarding arm of a new kind of renegade studio system: Super Dream Indie.
We don’t rehearse for imaginary auditions.
We don’t sit around waiting for “that call”
We build films from the ground up—with actors and storytelling leading the charge.
All I want is to make movies every day—with people who want it just as much.
We meet every Wednesday at Hangar 13 in Slabtown, North Portland, to rehearse, shoot, and create the kind of work that doesn’t ask permission.
It’s gritty. It’s fast. It’s flawed. It feels real and the stakes are clear.
Hangar 13 is a new creative hub in Downtown Portland that gives space to creatives to explore projects as a community. Visit the Substack here. They used to say:
Theater belongs to the actor. Film belongs to the director.
But that mindset? That’s pre-now. Pre-AI world.
We live in wild times.
AI can now crank out concepts that rival anything on the AFI Top 100.
It can write lyrics in the voice of a young Bob Dylan—maybe better than Dylan himself. It can create visuals based on your cues and the tools are only getting better each passing minute.
You need a pitch deck? It'll build you a perfect one in five minutes.
Something that used to take you months. Months of sweating, begging, borrowing—pulling all-nighters with an experienced line producer just to make it look halfway legit—done. Faster than your coffee order. But what’s the point of a pitch deck if there’s no marketplace to speak of, for your small, personal film?
And here’s the kicker:
You think you’re the only one who figured that out?
Guess again.
Everybody’s got the tool now.
And the competition?
Yeah—it just got fiercer. Even the wannabes look like pros, and the pros with years of hard-earned experience? They’re starting to look like Luddites.
Content creators broke the game.
Smashed the board. Rewrote the rules.
Now you’ve got three choices:
Make films for the streamers. Speak fluent algorithm. Let their data whisper your next move.
Reverse-engineer yesterday’s hit. Slap on a new cast. Pray the charts like it.
Or—you create something original. No map. No model. Just a gut feeling and a fire in your chest.
That’s what we picked. Number 3. Every damn time.
Actors Tank is like a reset button housed in a Quonset hut. A new mobile squadroom for indie filmmaking—with the power of LLMs at our fingertips and over 100 years of cinematic processes and results to draw from.
And you know what AI can’t do?
It can’t walk into a room and wake people up.
Can’t get them on their feet, off the script, alive in the moment.
It can’t shape the mess into meaning.
Can’t smell the sweat in a no-budget shoot or find rhythm in the chaos.
It can’t make you laugh, choke up, go quiet, or stare out the window thinking about a line you just heard.
And it sure as hell can’t build the next Easy Rider of the 2020s with one OSMO Pocket 3, a few wild ideas, and a couple of people who believe in something bigger than themselves—visionaries who gather and harness raw, untamed resources to shape a shooting script born from the real world, not a writers' room.
That’s what we’re doing.
One Wednesday at a time.
At the Tank.
Making films, for me, has never been about chasing success or making a lot of money. It’s a lifestyle—something I do when I need to get out of the house and make something with other people.
Some call it the art life.
David Lynch once said the art life was drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I’d say, sure—and—it’s also about getting off your screen, feeling the weather, overcoming roadblocks, and finding joy in assembling a gang with a plan, going out into the world, contending with whatever’s out there, and somehow getting away with the footage.
That feeling of making movies? Priceless.
If you’re a pro actor or curious, open session happening next weds. Get in the Tank:
https://www.backstage.com/casting/adult-daycare-2936835/