It begins. Or rather, it began. Months and months ago, actually. As I mentioned in my last blog post, I had been gearing up to shoot my coming-of-age feature “Going Geek” when COVID hit, effectively blowing up all of my plans. The movie takes place on a crowded college campus. It involves D&D, fraternity life, and kissing. You kind of need to shoot a movie like that NOT in a pandemic. I admit, I felt a little deflated. Okay, I felt a LOT deflated. I was devastated. There are so many obstacles to making a feature-length movie as it is. Over the past few years I have had the obstacles of single parenthood, the absolute horror of losing a sibling, financial ruin after being laid off during my maternity leave, and now, a pandemic? It’s hard not to feel especially picked on by the universe when the blows keep coming.
I let myself feel the pain and loss, but it wasn’t long before I started scheming again. Creativity loves constraints. At least mine does. The lockdown started me thinking about isolation and the trappings of social media as we all navigated this new reality. Then I saw a short story my kid wrote:
The seed of an idea had been planted. What struck me about this is that it is usually the other way around. A person thinks they see a UFO but it turns out to be a shooting star or some other explainable phenomenon. What if that weird cloud wasn’t a cloud after all? Or the shooting star you were making a wish on suddenly stopped and came right at you... All of these thoughts gelled together with this feeling of isolation and our hyper-dependence on our online connections and personas.
“What if an influencer went on a solo hunt for UFOs? That would be filmable in a pandemic, wouldn’t it?”
Let me get one thing out of the way: I am not worried about sharing ideas with the world. To me, the notion that someone is going to “steal” your idea is a little silly. Based on that premise alone, I’m pretty confident that the movie you would make out of my “idea” would be completely different from the one I am making. In fact, I dare you. Would you go the horror route? Maybe a comedy? Go ahead and use my premise and we will compare our finished products. (Although... if you really like my premise and have the ability to make a movie, just call me. Seriously, I have already done all of the story work and am well into pre-production. It wasn’t easy, so spare yourself the trouble and just send some money over, take some credit, and call it a day.)
From that seed of an idea, a much more complex and complete story took root. I effectively stopped tending to my previous film and shifted to nurturing this one. So now, over a year later, here we are: a movie in full bloom. This is the film I wanted to make and I didn’t even know it. And it’s just the beginning.
I may be giving myself far too much work as I move forward with this project, but I have learned a lot so far. I’m sure I will learn a lot more. I’m hoping to document the process as I go.