Most catalogs get organized by year, or by genre, or by whichever award sounds best on a poster. This one doesn't sort cleanly that way, and it shouldn't. What holds LgN's work together isn't a category — it's a set of obsessions that keep resurfacing: memory that won't stay buried, complicity that hides in plain sight, and the gap between what people say happened and what actually did.
A war anthem written from inside the mud.
A weapons dealer whose real crime isn't the one you think.
A public-access relic that turns out to be the whole company's origin story, thirty years hidden in a box.
This is a walk through that catalog by throughline, not by résumé.
Before the beginning. LgN Productions — originally "Last good Nerve Productions" — was founded in 1993 for a single public-access documentary about Lost in Space, produced on borrowed equipment with a crew of friends. Films now on either YouTube or at the LgN Screening Room.
JZ Murdock served as its uncredited executive producer, writer, and editor.
The LIS documentary aired twice on Seattle cable in early 1994. During postproduction the tape editor at the Viacom studio on Roosevelt Street in Seattle, broke mid-post, most of the music dropped out on broadcast, and then the company went dark for over two decades for a variety of reasons, mostly personal.
When Murdock started making films again decades later, he didn't start a new company. He picked LgN back up.
Everything below is what happened after that.
The Features
Pvt. Ravel's Bolero (2022; remastered 2025) is the anchor of the catalog, and its festival run — 80-plus wins — is the reason there's now a deliberate policy of not listing all of them. A visceral anti-war meditation, it imagines composer Maurice Ravel forging the relentless rhythm of Bolero while serving as a truck driver amid the horror of World War I. Built from archival imagery, surreal overlay, and Ravel's internal reflections, it refuses the polish of a conventional documentary in favor of something rawer and harder to look away from — a tribute and a warning at once.
The film has its own footnote in history: in February 2022, a Ukrainian festival selected Murdock's horror short Gumdrop as an official selection days before the invasion began, and within a week a Russian festival nominated Bolero — an anti-war film — for Best War Film. Two governments moving toward war; two festivals, on opposite sides of it, choosing the same filmmaker's work. It's the kind of coincidence that says more than a mission statement could.
"Gumdrop," a short horror (2020) picked up 17 awards of its own, and it earns its place next to Bolero on theme, not just as a genre pairing. Sampson, a meticulous underground weapons supplier, moves product through clients using a coded word — "gumdrop" — while flashbacks from a fractured childhood bleed steadily into his present. What looks at first like a portrait of a damaged middleman turns, in its final act, into something rooted in crimes that once existed outside of fiction. It's a film about what a person can normalize when the alternative is remembering. From the short true crime story, "Gumdrop City" (2012).
The Frontier
Two of the newest additions to the catalog don't fit the fest-circuit mold of the shorts above — they're closer to experiments in how a story gets told at all.
Light Snowflakes: America's Second Orbit (2026) builds an entire immersive documentary around a single object: a rare 1962 vinyl record carrying the unedited audio of astronaut Scott Carpenter's Aurora 7 mission. Restored footage, research, and context surround that recording, educating the viewer so thoroughly that by the time the raw audio plays again at the film's end, it lands differently than it could have for anyone listening in 1962.
Travels (2025) is the outlier on purpose. An experimental short built from AI-generated stills and an AI-composed score, guided by a screenplay Murdock wrote at university in the early 1980s, it follows a woman moving through shifting, dreamlike landscapes where memory, technology, and selfhood collide. It's less a departure from the catalog's themes than a stress test of them — the same questions about identity and buried history, run through tools that didn't exist when the script was written.
World Explorers Program (2026) goes back further than any other title in the catalog — to a set of records Murdock received as a child in the 1960s, part of a monthly series that introduced kids to different countries through vinyl, printed materials, and small keepsakes. He kept them his whole life.
The film doesn't illustrate them with new footage; it turns the original audio itself into the image, using oscilloscope-generated waveforms so the sound becomes something you watch as much as hear — voice, music, and narration rendered as a moving trace across the screen. It's restraint as a formal choice: no modern imagery standing in for a childhood that arrived entirely through listening and imagination. As a kid, Murdock never knew whether these recordings captured real travel or a studio reconstruction of it; decades later, restoring them, the honest answer turned out to be both at once.
(LgN's catalog isn't limited to film — Murdock also publishes prose under LgN Press, including the award-winning Death of Heaven. That's a separate story for another day.)
Unproduced
The Teenage Bodyguard, a screenplay grounded in a true-crime basis, has picked up 17-plus awards on the strength of the page alone — proof that a script doesn't need a camera behind it to prove itself. It's the clearest evidence that LgN's throughline lives in the writing first, production second. Two producers are interested if the money can only be found. It would have been made three times with three different directors that one name producer found, but they just didn't have the right...vision.
What's Next
Three shorts are currently under consideration at Life is Short and HorrorHound TV:
Eagles & Crows, a Fable (a 4 min allegory), "Gumdrop", a short horror, and The Rapping.
Eagles & Crows is a minimalist allegory — loosely drawn from the symbolic roles of eagles and crows in Native American traditions — about a forgotten act of kindness between the two birds that calcifies, generations later, into a ritual no one remembers the reason for.
The Rapping, shot in stark black and white and built partly from real NASA InSight Mars lander audio, follows a man alone with an insistent, rhythmic sound he can't place — inside his house, or inside his head. Elements of it were later folded into Gumdrop, linking the two films into a shared psychological universe.
Alongside the submissions, a film companion book to Bolero is being considered at a UK publisher — expanding the film's found-poem approach to Ravel's war into something longer-form.
A Body of Work, Still in Progress
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
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