It's kind of a good thing / bad thing scenario being Joseph Hahn. On the good thing side, Hahn is best known as the DJ for hugely successful band Linkin Park and there are worse things in life than traveling the world and making buckets of cash for playing music. Also a good thing is that the buckets of cash and influence as a member of the band has allowed Hahn to pursue his other major interest, that being film making. He got his start shooting videos for his own band and has moved on to shooting for other acts and now is taking his first step into the fiction word with an impressive short film titled The Seed. The bad thing about Joseph Hahn? Being a famous and well financed musician means he could well have a hard time convincing people that he's serious about this whole film thing, which would be a shame because he's quite good.

While it has many of the hallmarks you'd expect from a video director turned fiction director - the slick shooting style, the rapid fire editing, the musical appearances by his bandmates - Hahn shows that he's got the conceptual goods to back up the style. The Seed is the story of a seemingly homeless man who is actually caught in the center of a shadowy military action. It may appear to outsiders that he is fighting phantoms - throwing punches at empty space and talking to people who aren't there - but the hero of the piece is actually a traumatized military officer who has been made the subject of an experiment in cloaking technology. He can both hide himself through the use of this technology and also see others using it. And, oh yes, there are others. He may have been the first but there are more out there, all of them battling it out to control the technology. Think about it: soldiers that can't be seen. Exclusive properties that are simply invisible to all but the privileged few. How much would the technology be worth on the open market?

Fans of the Ghost in the Shell franchise will immediately recognize the central device - this sort of cloaking technology is heavily featured in the series - but Hahn takes it in some different directions. The script of The Seed is a little under written as it stands but the seeds - if you'll pardon the pun - of some stellar ideas are embedded in there. What he's done is found a simple device that allows him to dive into issues of class warfare, the politics of military technology and a host of other issues while wrapping it all up in a slickly produced, martial arts heavy package. There are rumblings that this may be further developed into a feature length film and I hope they pursue that possibility, there's lots of good stuff here worth exploring more.

The Seed is currently available on iTunes.