Rudy Strukoff

My career in film started accidentally when I was hired by a middle school in the Capistrano Unified School District back in 2016. I had been working full-time as a guitarist and band leader for about 20 years, working in bands and playing solo in the mid-Atlantic region and later in Las Vegas. After moving to California in 2013, I decided to go back to college and get my teaching certificate because being a musician no longer paid the bills, what with iPods, iPhones and streaming services eliminating the need to own your own music collection, CD sales went to zero and I needed another cash flow stream.

I used my background as a record producer and record label owner to obtain a teaching certificate in Digital Arts, Media and Entertainment within the Career Technical Education (CTE) curriculum and was hired to teach digital arts, photography and film to middle schoolers at Bernice Ayer Middle School (BAMS) in San Clemente.

First day on the job, my principal told me I had a week and a half to produce a 10-minute film for Back To School Night which was coming up in a week and a half. Panic! The only films I had made previously were teaching films with a camera at the back of the classroom during my student teaching assignment at Corona del Mar Middle School.

But I was not without some skills. During my music career, I had become proficient with PhotoShop, Illustrator and Flash (Animate) so I thought how tough could it be to learn Final Cut Pro? So, I downloaded a $12 training module app, started filming at school and worked the training modules with the film clips that I had made and, just in the nick of time, I had produced my first film.

My skills in filmmaking developed rapidly as I had to keep 30-40 kids engaged in film projects every week. Nothing like a public school teaching job to force a person to learn and grow their skills. Whew…it was mayhem. In my second year at BAMS, I led thirty-two 7th and 8th grade boys on a year-long film project entitled DARTH VADER GOES BACK TO SCHOOL. In this film, the Star Wars universe collides with our own world due the explosion of the Death Star at the end of A NEW HOPE (Episode IV) and the simultaneous use of a Flux Capacitor by a teenager here on Earth.

The film was premiered at BAMS at the end of the school year and shown to faculty, students and parents. The film can be viewed at .

I’m teaching at a different school now, but over the past seven years I have built up my camera equipment, computers and software and I started making vacation videos and social media ads for myself and my wife, who is an oil painter. But the need to be involved somehow with music still drove my passion for the arts.

I came upon the idea of making music videos from my old recording catalog. My first was a fun little video shot in the desert entitled THE DOG IS IN THE HOUSE.

The second music video I made in 2022 was quite a bit more involved. The music video LOVE IN VAIN was recorded over two trips to New Mexico, starting at the abandoned Palm Springs Amtrak station, then working my way from Amboy, California, Winslow, and Holbrook Arizona, Tijeras, Santa Fe and Taos, NM and the Amtrak station at Lamy, New Mexico. The film has received favorable responses on the film festival circuit with several Official Selections, Nominee and Winner designations across the country and around the world.

The story has three main characters. In the present, our “hero” on the acoustic guitarist is the storyteller. Shot with vivid blue desert skies in the background, this character sings to us his sorrowful yet hopeful lament.

The sequences with the woman in red are now a memory for our hero and are shot with very low saturation to the point of being almost black and white, with only the red dress worn by our actress as the dominant color. The post-editing added the focal point aperture setting with depth of focus.

The slide guitar sequences represent a third character. Shot at sunrise at the Palm Springs Amtrak Station, this footage is dominated by yellow and gold colors and slightly out of focus. This character represents the over-confident alter-ego of our hero that believes that his charisma and guitar playing will ultimately win her back.

Two other features that dominate the film are the birds (who hated my drone for invading their airspace) and the time-lapse cloud footage. These elements added surrealism to my transitions and helped to create a dreamlike reality that allowed me to move between the three characters.

I was heavily influenced in the making of this film by the Chris Isaak music videos from the 80’s and 90’s, in particular the 1991 WICKED GAME video directed by Herb Ritts. For the suitcase shots with our actress, I was influenced by the lonely appeal and melancholia evoked by the opening Tippi Hedren sequence of Hitchcock’s 1964 release, MARNIE, and the train station goodbye between Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in 1959’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Viewers of LOVE IN VAIN may also notice the similarities to Hitchcocks, VERTIGO. Though not in an emerald-colored dress, the dreamlike memories of the woman in red putting on lipstick harken back to James Stewart’s visions of Kim Novak.

And let’s not forget the movie THE BIRDS…the angry pigeons attacking my drone created wonderful transitions away from my lady in red and represent the anger that our heroine feels which has ultimately made her want to leave her home.

I like to joke that LOVE IN VAIN could be sub-titled “What a film teacher does on his summer vacation.” I’m really proud of the film, it was truly a labor of love. Here is a quote from a YouTuber regarding the film of an old Robert Johnson song:

“What I love about Robert Johnson’s music and your video is the overpowering blues message. Modern blues gives one the impression that you must play ’em and then leave ’em. But Johnson’s background is nothing like that. Instead, this bottomlessly bleak and yet somehow hopeful lament suggests that maybe, against all odds, we all won’t just die out here in the desert. The visuals in this film bear this idea out in a brilliant and searing fashion!”

Stephen P. Dunn, Assistant Director on several Oscar winning films like Dances With Wolves and Chocolat, had this to say about my music video, LOVE IN VAIN:

“From the first shot of the needle being placed on vinyl, I loved this music video. One of the best I’ve seen. A great song, with a soulful slide guitar play against amazing shots of moving trains. Well directed, shot and acted by Rudy and company, the editing is outstanding, with its beautifully constructed cross dissolving images. A clouded distant memory of love lost.”

You can view LOVE IN VAIN and other videos on my YouTube channel @Dognacious.D

Look for two more music video releases from me this year and 2024.

Having been a school teacher first and a filmmaker second prepared me for larger projects that I hope will come to me in the future. After all, If I can keep 32 middle school boys engaged to make an 85-minute feature-length film over the course of a school year, I can tackle just about any situation.

I am currently working on a script for a limited-run TV series in the thriller genre that takes a page from the Spielberg Playbook: A boy in trouble/A boy in danger. I hope to be submitting the script to festivals by the middle of 2024.