Biography

Raymond Steers is a maverick who has always loved the movies. His early acting and directing experiences include a mildly traumatic turn as the Friar in a 5th-grade production of Romeo and Juliet, a super-8 film about fish reproduction that he made in the 8th grade, and playing the 'Skateboard Guy' in Mr. Holland's Opus. After graduating from high school two years early, he embarked on a string of adventures: from being the youngest student at a prestigious audio engineering school in Ohio; to working at the company that invented videotape recording; to renting videos to a barefoot Meg Ryan in LA; to getting kicked out of Los Altos Community College thanks to an overly-heated debate involving Carl Lewis and tachyon particles. He still maintains that if Carl Lewis' body were made entirely of tachyon particles, the runner might not be observed to start his race at the beginning and go straight through to the end.

Loving the movies as he does, Ray eventually found himself thinking it would be great to star in a really cool film about science and conspiracy, but rather than try to convince someone else to make such a film and cast him in it, he decided to make it himself. Thus was Sum of the Parts born. Ray wrote most of the script on a laptop in the back of Mary's Club on Burnside and Broadway in downtown Portland, Oregon. "It's dark there and has great murals all around depicting weird sailors and chicks with fruit hats", is how he describes this ideal writer's venue.

Ray approached the movie-making process with the same maverick spirit that drove him to write the script, and he gathered an intrepid band of actors and crew who shared his inventive drive. If no one made the equipment he needed, Ray built it. If there was a minor but completely unplanned car crash that happened to occur in the middle of shooting a scene, actors and crew rolled with it. It made for an exciting set. Once Ray started editing, he created new techniques to manipulate the film and images. Throughout, he has been driven to make something exciting, new, and excellent. He considers himself extremely lucky to have met the many amazing cast and crew-members who coalesced around this project, and is grateful for their talent and dedication. He looks forward to making more movies with them in the future.

Sum of the Parts is Ray Steers' first film.

- IMDb mini biography by: Melody Bates