John Soares

John Allen Soares is an award-winning independent filmmaker, martial arts choreographer, actor and viral video star from Hughson, CA known for his short videos and webisodes on YouTube. Soares's videos are known for mixing martial arts action with quirky comedy.

Soares was born in Turlock, CA on June 22, 1981. Growing up on an almond farm, he attended Hughson High School, then spent a brief time at Modesto Junior College beginning in 1999 studying film, where he met future partners Ben Beames and Justin Spurlock. Soares won several international film festival awards for films he made as a student, including the Shocker Award for best Fantasy Short Film for "Tao of the Meteor Serpent" and Shockerfest 2007 Gorilla Software Award and Best Actor, SciFi/Fantasy for his film "Gauntlet of Sorrow."

Career

In 2001, Soares co-founded the independent film group WestHavenBrook with Beames and Spurlock. Their most notable collaboration was on the award-winning 2004 four-part short film Sockbaby, co-directed by Soares and Douglas TenNapel, which starred Soares and Cody Spurlock. Jon and Dan Heder and Doug Jones co-star in the fourth installment of the series. Sockbaby won the Channy award for best fight choreography at Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon's Channel 101.

Soares was also featured in the screen fighting episode of IndyMogul: BFX with Erik Beck.

From 2009 to 2011 John produced an episodic spoof of Japanese Super Sentai-style shows called Go Sukashi!, in association with Watanabe Entertainment and Dentsu, based on a character by Shoko Nakagawa (who introduces each segment), produced by Douglas TenNapel and co-starring Spurlock and Brooke Brodack.

Current projects

Currently, Soares is finishing the final installments of his dieselpunk action series The Danger Element (The Adventures of Battle Jitni), which he is directing as well as starring in. The series co-stars Doug Jones as Doctor Elymas. Kate "Kato" Lambert has a cameo as the voice of the car, the "Jitnimobile", and also does the costuming for actress Cassie Meder.

Viral videos

Soares also stars in a series of quirky webvideo shorts called The Vacuum Consortium, now in their third season, in which he plays Agamemnon Tiberius Vacuum, a would-be alien from "Planet 3" bent on world domination. (Other members of WestHavenBrook appear on these films as his various henchmen.) "Vacuum" has collaborated in the past with other popular internet personalities including Doctor Steel (whom he claims he "met at an awkward super villain mixer party in Burbank, California hosted by Bill Gates") and Brooke Brodack (whom he calls his nemesis, "The Brodack").