What follows is the first in what will be a collection of what I'll just simply call "Film Testimonials". More or less, they are just forays into the past film work I have done up to this point. I will be posting these off and on and in chronological order. While I won't be doing one on every single piece of film work I've done, I'll be doing them on most. It's a way to show out there my transition from doing film for fun into becoming who I am now. Even in only a few years I've faced many strenuous situations and adversity trying to become a successful filmmaker. It comes with the territory in work like this so if you're interested in this field and facing troubles or doubts about it don't tuck your head between your legs and run away. My first entry here is for a film I worked on almost five years ago and I was an inept wreck as far as my legitimacy working on film. The hardest part is the beginning... and thus, such is where I will start.
My love of film spans back to 1997 when my father borrowed an old VHS camera from a friend. It was back when VHS was still somewhat common and my father filmed me briefly, maybe for thirty seconds, but after sitting down, watching and seeing myself on the television I became hooked. There was just something amazing about it all to me, that I could also be on television with all those famous celebrities. But my first legitimate foray into make a legitimate film would not happen until over a decade later. In this period between 1997 and 2009 I had my share of cheap VHS, Hi-8 and cheap digital cameras and continued to make little movies, but they were always just projects for fun that I shot alone or shot with friends. They was never much pre-preparation but I always enjoyed it. In that regard I never educated myself much into the field of film. Everything done was just for fun so it was never taken that serious.
It was during this time that I started writing some screenplays, transitioning from story writing into script writing. I hardly even knew the structure of screenwriting at the time, but nevertheless during May, June and July of 2006 I put together a 95-page script that came as a result of some deep self-reflection. On Easter of that year I started attending church after my mother had made efforts to get me to come. Amidst her efforts she made mention of a girl that had started attending there whom I might find an interest in. I met her on Easter, not speaking with her much, but she asked me to her prom a few days later. I should have seen the red flags but I had been single for some three years and was a little desperate for companionship. I later found out why she asked me, someone she didn’t go to school with, to her prom. It’s because nobody who went to school with her wanted to go with her. It was an off-and-on connection we had ending with a prom that went about as horribly as one could go.
After that prom experience I did my best to disassociate from that girl, but in being single for so long as well as being rather naive, I kept being bothered with a lack of understanding as to how someone could be so hurtful to someone she hardly knew who had done nothing but stand by her side. As I was pondering her disrespectful and reactively insecure nature, I began to channel that into a male character that sparked this screenplay. Originally I titled it Life and Women, as a way of using a common titling concept of the time in which two seemingly different things would be connected by an ‘and’. That interest faded and around the time I started shooting on it I altered the title to Second Chances.
The film followed a young man named Mike Rinearson, who was the envy of every guy he knew. He had the distinction of dating lots of women without having one of them break up with him. The film thus opens with his current girlfriend, Rachel, breaking up with him. The focus was to take this self-centered young guy and put him through an unfelt experience that would force him to break down before he could build himself up. The first half of the film thus follows his self-destructive efforts to deal with the break up. In the middle he meets a girl named Leah who is the prototype of a perfect woman; beautiful, intelligent, expressive, funny, and so on. At a time in his life where he is feeling as vulnerable as he ever has, discovering he is not God’s gift to women, Mike finds himself honestly falling for Leah but being overcome by a sense that he was never good enough for her. He thus had to experience what he made so many other girls before him experience who felt like they weren’t good enough when he hooked up with them and then dropped them. As would become a common theme in my work, the ending is not all neatly wrapped up with a bow. Mike finally expresses himself to Leah, honestly letting his feelings out and there is sense of belief that the two will end up together, although it is not set in stone.
I learned more about film doing this project than any other piece of work I have ever done (sensible considering it was my first serious film). Now this was written during 2006 and I had decided to play the lead, because why not? I shot the few scenes I had scripted that only required Mike’s character and then I just stopped. I had no idea how to put a real film together and, to be honest, I was kind of a chicken about reaching out and asking for others to act in the piece. The script was just stored away, assumed to never be done. Then I was accepted to the University of Portland’s English program at the start of 2009 and with the presumption that my future would ultimately become all work and no play I pondered what to do with those final months of freedom before school started in the fall. I decided to make a movie. I pulled out and dusted off the script and learned a bunch of lessons.
My first meeting with a possible talent was a complete disaster. I was still coming out of my shell and there I was sitting in beautiful surroundings with an actress who was too gorgeous for my mind to handle. And since this film was still being done more or less for fun I wasn’t taking the technical aspects too seriously I was totally unprepared for the questions she asked. After the meeting she said she’d love to be in the film and then later that evening I received an email in which she kindly passed because, in a nice way of putting it, she felt the project would be too much of an undertaking for me to work out well. It was a courteous way of telling me I didn’t look like I knew what the hell I was doing, and I didn’t. This was an ongoing thing. My communications skills just weren’t there for these one-on-one encounters and I didn’t grasp the fact that these were skilled actors, used to these kinds of meetings and knowing what was what. So practically every meeting I had with these people was subpar. It became unnerving after a while. I would find myself there early asking myself, “Well how are you gonna screw this one up?” And after many of them I would reiterate to myself what a train wreck it had been.
Even the people that agreed to hop on it didn’t work out so great with because I didn’t know how to make a serious film or anything beyond just fooling around with my friends. So the shoots for some small roles I casted were often awkward as I could tell the talent I was working with was suspicious as to my real talent. And there I was playing the lead role, directing and shooting with no crew! Again, it was just for fun. It was just so I could tell everyone I made a legitimate movie. At the time I thought I would leave for college and leave film behind. Obviously I had no clue who I was at the time. So it was one awkward shoot after another with me just picking acceptable angles for the camera, propping it on a tripod and letting it run. And I was using those old MiniDV cameras. For one shoot I had my own MinIDV camera and two cameras belonging to my friends that I just set up at random angled. I even had to set one up on a wide guardrail because I only had two tripods. But it worked... somehow.
It got to be early July, college was less than two months away and I hadn’t got a whole lot done. Meetings came and went with little success as far as the larger roles were concerned. I’d bring someone on and then lose them. By this time I was at a make or break point and I gave it one more shot when I talked over the Leah role with a young actress whom I’d never met and had no clue of her talent level. When I told her it would only be a couple days of shooting she agreed to do it and was totally cool with the setup (or the fact that I had no crew). So the project was saved at the final hour, in a way (considering the fact that I never finished the film). The actress I worked with as Leah’s character was an actress who, as far as I know, still works in the Portland area named Alicia Rose. And she still, to this day, in my humble opinion, is the greatest acting talent I have ever had the fortune to work with. And to think, it was on my first film when I had no clue what I was doing. Working with her was fortunately very fluent and almost carefree in a way and, despite the films many shortcomings, we got through our scenes together.
Still in all, when the time for school came up I only had the film about 80% of the way done. I figured I’d still finish it but doing a full-time college schedule at a private University 20 miles from your home while working a steady job 30-35 hours a week made this effort next to impossible. Trying to cast the role of Rachel was a nightmare as I went through, I believe, some twelve actresses, losing them all for some reason or another. That and just the transition of life, along with the fact that this was never intended to be a serious project in the first place, led to it never being completed. I left University of Portland when I realized it wasn’t worth the $32,000+ a year in tuition (but at the same time I wouldn’t trade that year there for anything) and settled into half-baked plans on whether to go into work in film or, honestly, work in the field of criminology. But again, being naive I did not think you had to put in years of study and work in law enforcement to make it in the field of criminology (yes, I was that clueless once upon a time). Once I found that out I said audios to that dream. I can still remember, it was the start of spring 2011 and I was sitting at my laptop less than an hour away from classes opening for the fall. Even then I was still pondering what I wanted to do and literally in those last ten minutes I flipped a coin in my mind and went with going into the digital media/communications program at my old college. Literally it was in those final minutes that I made that choice. And now I couldn’t be happier with the decision I made. Now I’m finally going somewhere in my film career and it’s interesting to note that my first legitimate film production is one that never got finished.
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