Key Takeaways
- Blood On The Turntables is a Minnesota-born film created through trust, grief, and community resolve, without traditional budget or industry support.
- The film explores the darker undercurrents of the music industry, including ambition, corruption, and loyalty, without being didactic.
- Minnesota is presented as a living character, with neighborhoods, streets, and cultural narratives that are essential to the story.
- The absence of a budget forced clarity and collaboration, with cast and crew working together as a family to bring the film to life.
- The film offers permission and evidence to aspiring filmmakers from underserved backgrounds, showing that a movie can be made without waiting to be chosen and that community can replace capital.
Introduction to Blood On The Turntables
In March, a trailer for a movie appeared online in Minnesota, but there was a problem – the movie did not yet exist. DJ Pat Boom, the creator of the film, had announced the project without any studio backing, funding, or distribution deal. This bold and risky decision would come to define Blood On The Turntables, a film created not through institutional support but through trust, grief, and community resolve. Produced under BoomzBeatz Multimedia, the project unfolded with no traditional budget, no industry safety net, and no guarantee that the film would ever be completed.
A Film Carried by Loss
For DJ Boom, the film is inseparable from grief. The loss of his son in 2022 reshaped not only his life but his creative urgency. The film did not emerge as an escape from grief but as a vessel for it. Each late night, each rescheduled shoot, each moment of exhaustion carried the weight of a promise being kept. That emotional gravity did not belong to Boom alone, but quietly shaped the tone of the entire production. Rachel Marie Gillen, a cast member and key creative collaborator, felt the project absorb the memory of those lost along the way, including her own grief and the loss of her close friends Sandy and Scott.
Telling the Truth Without Preaching
Blood On The Turntables explores the darker undercurrents of the music industry, including ambition, corruption, and loyalty tested by power and proximity. Yet the film resists becoming didactic, instead inviting the audience into lived moments. Tension builds through character, consequences unfold naturally, and humor punctuates the heaviness. The result is a film that feels human, allowing laughter to coexist with unease. Cast members recognized themselves in the story, with Porsha describing the film as a warning disguised as entertainment. The film asks viewers to look closer at contracts, promises, and the cost of ignoring instinct.
Minnesota as a Living Character
Unlike films that use the Midwest as a generic stand-in, Blood On The Turntables insists on Minnesota as itself. Neighborhoods are named, streets are familiar, and the setting is not ornamental but essential. DJ Boom wants Minnesota to take pride in being Minnesota again, highlighting the rich cultural narrative of the state’s Black community. The film presents Minnesota not as a backdrop but as a participant, a place of creativity and conflict, of ambition and restraint, of voices long present but rarely amplified. Robbin Piinkii Loyde feels that reclamation deeply, saying that the film is "our city, our movement, our movie."
No Budget, No Ego
The absence of a budget forced clarity and collaboration, with cast and crew working together as a family to bring the film to life. There was no room for ego, no hierarchy to hide behind. Scheduling was a constant challenge, locations fell through, and everyone involved carried full lives outside the production. Yet the work continued, with the philosophy of "we’re family" translating directly onto the screen. Performances were shaped collaboratively, scenes were adjusted through dialogue rather than demand, and the environment was rigorous but affirming.
The Moment It Became Real
The cast points to a long table scene charged with tension and symbolism as the moment when the film transformed from idea into inevitability. Behind the camera, Gillen remembers the trust required before proof existed. Earlier still, the moment that sealed the film’s fate was a trailer filmed in a liquor store, quick, unpolished, and unavoidable. By announcing the film publicly, the team committed themselves to its completion, and the promise now belonged not only to them but to the community watching.
Building Access by Hand
Today, Blood On The Turntables streams on Boomz TV and digital platforms, its reach extending beyond screens into conversations among aspiring filmmakers. The film offers permission and evidence to creators from underserved backgrounds, showing that a movie can be made without waiting to be chosen, and that community can replace capital. By the time Blood On The Turntables reached audiences, it had become something rare – proof that access, not talent, is often the real barrier, and that access, when institutions fail to provide it, can still be built by hand. DJ Boom wants to start a wave of movie makers in Minnesota, and the film is a testament to the talent and creativity that already exists in the state.
