Robert had a guitar, a turtle, and a ethnic stage pass in the easy-come easy-go Mexican culture. Kevin Smith had a convenience store.  Oren Peli had a house. I was home for the summer before my last year at college, I had a friend whose little brother could act and the rolling plains of Stanley, NM. So I smithed my story it out of metal scraps from the junk pile. It’s eclectic, baby.

The story is a post apocalyptic Huckleberry Finn. Todd is a 11 year old boy who lives in an “after the Event” desert. He hunts, forages, hides from the bad guys, and has the time of his life. He loves it. No rules, no responsibilities, no obligations. Think Lord of the Flies populated by a Lost Boy from Never-land. His isolationism is challenged by the appearance of a young girl trying to rejoin her family. The story revolves around his choice to either rejoin society or remain a lone-wolf. It was to be a web series, with five episodes each fifteen minutes long. I would film it one episode at a time, allotting two weekends per episode, and it would be done in no time.

That’s the pitch I gave while sitting in a Mac-infested coffee shop. The man sitting across from me liked it. He, as I, was trapped in the hell between “film student” and “filmmaker.”  Nothing much came of the conversation, but on the drive home, something he mentioned surfaced in my mind. “You know, allot of people make graphic novels of their scripts to help pitch it and raise money.” It hit me with the speed of frozen honey. “Why not?” thought I, “it would sure be easier than doing it for real! And I wont have to work with children or their parents or with people at all.” Here was my chance to express my artistic side in a new medium, to fulfill myself by fashioning storytelling experience by my own skill and gumption.

So I set out in search of someone to do it for me.

I say “began shooting,” because that was how we began, departing from the tired convention of first writing a script.  That’s how you rolled in the Golden Age, the haze of all our yesterdays, when the way to make movies was by making them. My talented friends and I were the warriors of the VHS-C; where editing consisted of pushing record and pause at the right time, soundtracks were synced by turning the radio up, and the discovery of static jumps cuts opened a realm of “disappearing thing” possibilities. For my talented friends and I, it was a time of possibility, creativity, and awful short-films. We helped each other, fought, made up, fought again, then helped each other again. It was a joy.

Time brought the mini-dv, the microphone, and the editing bay in the bedroom. It also brought summer jobs, highschool graduation, and college; heartbreak, rivalry, division, and reconciliation.  Time makes you grow up. But it also turns your hot projects into yesterdays dream. I woke up in college with several hours of un-edited footage that covered about a third of the book; my passion project had become a beached whale. I made a choice to finish what I began, and turned to my greatest atribute: my skill of having talented friends. We finished it. It debuted at a school film festival to mixed reviews and anti-climactic emotions. But after 5 years, obstacle after ordeal after trial, and a lot of growing up, the thing was done. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G91e3VFQwao

Now I have a new project, the kind I have never tried before, and have every reason to fail. But it will get done, because that’s who I am.  I am the man with talented friends.

And I’d like to tell you about it.