“I like to do things cheap and with my friends,” local filmmaker and podcaster Bob Rose told me over wings at Rocket To Venus. The fact that we were there on half-price wing night spoke to the first half of that sentence, and the raucous company we kept spoke to the second; Bob is very easy to like.

So are his movies. To date, Bob has made five stand-alone short films—Beard Chef, Poetry Betwixt Friendship, Cabinet, How to Make Friendships, and How to Make Crackers—plus video work for BitGen Gamer Fest, the Baltimore Rock Opera Society, and a myriad of professional clients. He’s a committee member of Mondo Baltimore, a monthly film appreciation series that focuses on the “dark VHS era” of films from the 1980s and 1990s, and also a member of Baltimore’s burgeoning podcast community, first with An Innocent Looking Bookstore (voted Baltimore’s Best/Most Offensive Podcast in 2013) and now with Bonus Disc, a bi-weekly show in which Bob and his friend Matt Pie rant about bad movies.

Bob’s short films are as hilarious as they are absurd and subversive. Beard Chef, for example, follows Simba Rafiki (played by comedian and Hampdenfest Speed Complaining champion John Bennett), a man who lives his life in a fake beard and chef’s hat and is basically a hoarder.

But where most portrayals of this type of character would invoke pity, mockery, or scorn, Bob makes you like him. Simba embraces what makes him strange and doesn’t let it stop him from pursuing the life he wants, which is really the same life most of us want. To poach from Modern Drunkard’s much-read profile of Andre the Giant, Simba demands to live his life in the sun.

Most absurdist film thrives on cruelty; from Monty Python to the Coen Brothers, that approach often depends on a world that is cold and hostile to the characters in it. By contrast, the territory Beard Chef explores is heavily absurd and brushes against anti-humor (i.e. this character is funny just because he exists in our world), but nothing external is purposely beating the main character down for the audience’s amusement.

This is extremely difficult to pull off, as it must balance completely invested and unironic characters with an overall self-aware tone, but Bob is so good at it that the work isn’t obvious.

Bob grew up in Baltimore County as an only child and started making videos early, using the video camera his parents bought for him to make a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse-inspired movie starring the family dog, titled B.B.’s Play Hut.

Somewhere, somehow, I hope this footage still exists.

Like almost every bored teenager in the 1990s, Bob continued making videos with his friends, mostly Jackass-style movies that were “stupid, but we thought they were hilarious and revolutionary.” Don’t judge him too harshly for this. If you owned a video camera between 1996 and 1999, this phase was damn near impossible to avoid.

It wasn’t until college that Bob started making things with plot and structure. He worked on a short, 7-episode series called Sonic Warriors, which he described as “Power Rangers with cursing,” got his A.A. degree from CCBC Essex, and found himself circulating among people who actually wanted to make things.

Bob found himself sharing their zeal, especially when YouTube and the wider availability of decent video equipment made crappy, 8mm arthouse films unacceptable. Access to better tech made Bob’s short film projects look better, and consequently made him want to learn more about the craft. For the first time, he started really paying attention to films.

What he learned from watching the efforts of Joe Dante (Gremlins, Gremlins 2, The Burbs), Steven Spielberg, and “beautiful crazy failures” like Willow and Howard The Duck, is to always be subversive and aware of yourself, never bore the audience, and always try something new.

Joe Dante’s work proved to be an inspiration on multiple levels, which Bob happily expounded upon while I tried not to spill Buffalo sauce all over my notes. Dante, he told me, “made extremely high-concept horror comedies,” in which the concepts were totally insane and delivered without restraint.

“Spielberg shows Americana corrupted,” Bob told me, whereas “Dante shows what is corrupt about Americana.”

Since Bob’s primary focus is comedy, making him stand out in a film community mostly devoted to horror, he took Dante’s more cartoonish impulses to heart, which is best exemplified by Poetry Betwixt Friendship.

If Beard Chef is a showcase of Bob’s character work, Poetry shows off his visual style. The lighting is uncomfortably overdone and almost saccharine, giving everything a hyper-realistic, rubbery quality.

Sound, too, is important in Bob’s movies. Guided by the principle of “people will forgive a bad picture, but they will never forgive bad sound,” Bob makes sure the sound effects and Foley art in his films are structured by good cues and inserted with purpose.

“If I know I’m going to cut HARD from aliens eating meat to them being naked in a shower,” he told me via email, “I use a few builds and crash/woosh sounds to overkill the viewer with feeling that a moment is about to twist. If I was gonna make a drama…it would be the same principles just much more nuanced.”

Made for the now-annual Friendsfest event at the Sidebar in January 2013, and featured on Ain’t It Cool News in March of that same year, Poetry is a thoroughly ridiculous and front-to-back funny film with aliens, wizards who can’t eat sugar, and an intimate act known as “wind washing.”

Bob is not a prolific artist (in fact, he specifically told me not to suggest that he was), but he does have outlets that other filmmakers don’t have, as evidenced by his work for BROS and other arts/community organizations. He credits this to Baltimore’s active creative community, and told me that “never before have I felt more like I’m in the right place at the right time.”

Through his association with Mondo Baltimore, he found this world of other filmmakers—Chris LaMartina, Pat Storck, Kenny Johnson, Rob Zeman, and Shawn Jones, among many others—who spoke the same film language as him, and who he’s proud to support as a friend, peer, and fan.

An example of this is LaMartina’s recent full-length film Call Girl of Cthulhu, for which Bob was an assistant editor, meaning that he arranged and synced the film’s sound, arranged footage for Chris’ final edits, and probably went without sleep for several consecutive days. Even with all that, he was still excited to see the final product.

These relationships are reciprocal, too. Bob’s friendships have gotten him work that he, by his own admission, has few credentials for beyond experience and talent. In all his time as a professional freelance video editor, Bob has never been asked for a resume, or if he went to film school.

Baltimore’s swelling population of artists who put their eccentricities to bold creative use is perhaps Bob’s biggest and most enduring inspiration, but it does pose certain challenges for him as well. He has yet to make a full-length film due to what he calls “laziness and fear.” When I pressed further, he explained that since he’s integrated himself into such a welcoming community, he doesn’t want to compromise those friendships with anything that’s less than perfect.

I’ve heard that feeling described as “masterpiece syndrome,” and a lot of artists battle with it. In a city as full of vibrant performing arts as Baltimore, with so many classically-trained artists around, the climate can be kind of intimidating. But as many local artists have told me, this is a town where good, or even just weird, ideas will be embraced in unexpected ways. Bob’s ideas are both good and weird, so when the time comes for him to make a full-length, he’ll be just fine.