Not A Blog™

[…continued from Monday. The entire series starts here]

The Ultimate Boon: Our Longest Project

The TTT released Fatal Killings in the fall of 2000. The summer we spent working on it, falling as it did between our junior and senior years of high school for most of us, would be the last complete summer we had to work together. This is not something we were thinking about. As the majority of us started our senior year, no one was planning that far ahead, at least not as far as the TTT was concerned.

There was almost no gap between the time we finished Fatal and when we started thinking about what our next project was going to be. It was Graham and Dave who came up with the initial idea for From Beyond. Graham wrote:

I remember having the key conversation with Dave, over lunch at school, concerning what would eventually be From Beyond. We were tossing different funny ideas back and forth, when we finally came up with the perfect mish-mash of genres that is guaranteed an insta-laugh: a science fiction musical. We came up with the double serial killer plot to add even more unbelievable nonsense to the already-convoluted concept. Hilarity ensues.

This was pitched during our now quite regular homeroom brainstorming sessions. I thought the concept was hilarious, but I also thought it was impossible. Although we had success with the science fiction side of things (I was always prepared to do more science fiction)—the “musical” part was uncharted territory.

On the one hand, all of us were musically inclined. Aaron, Graham and Evan had formed the metal band Treachery; most of us had been in marching band, and most of us played at least one musical instrument. On the other hand, we still didn’t have editing capability, and the plots that were being thrown around to accompany this musical were epic to begin with. How much harder would it be to set scenes to music?

Through the winter, Dave wrote the script, while Evan and Graham (primarily) worked on the songs. The plot as it had been pitched was pretty ridiculous, but if anything, it got even more ridiculous once we got it down on paper. I’ll try to sum this up as succinctly as possible. Seven years before the start of the movie, Victor Teem’s wife, Veronica, was abducted by aliens. The aliens did this to study her, and by extension, the human race, for their eventual invasion. The invasion plans were rather unorthodox: the aliens planned to take over each house, one by one, until the entire world collapsed under the weight of their rule. The first house would be the Teems’. The movie takes place on the day the aliens return to Earth to start the invasion.

In addition to aliens, there were also two serial killers decending on the house. Charles (as in Charles Manson) was a bonafied serial killer. Although he acted polite and sweet-talked his way into the house, he was evil incarnate intent on killing Victor Teem and his son. (No reason is ever given for this. Like Murray Ermer, Charles just kills.) The second, Devin Clauser, initially seems to be the real serial killer, breaking into the house and singing his anthem of death. But he has a change of heart when he sees Victor and his nerdy son, Edward, having fun as a family. Realizing the value of life, he later fights the Alien King in a climactic battle to rescue Veronica and decide the fate of the Earth.

While Devin battled the Alien King on the ship, the Teems’ nerdy son, Edward, was back at their house, working on his own plan to defeat the aliens. He developed an alien-disintegrating chemical which disables the Alien King long enough to transport him back to the ship (with the alien transporter he devised). He then proceeds to email a bomb to the ship, which explodes, destroying it. Come to think of it, Edward was pretty much the movie’s Deus ex.

Somewhere along the line, we surmised the following: Veronica wouldn’t have been the only human abducted. No, the aliens were opportunists, abducting whoever was convenient at the time. When they returned to Earth, they would start snagging people left and right (although, presumably, stick to the plan of overtaking one house at a time). Fortunately, we had a bunch of people who would be perfect abductees: three years worth of characters from our movies.

The Magic Flight: Our Characters go Along for the Ride

Over the years, we developed a series of characters that were all of the following: memorable, funny, and generic enough to be useful in many different situations. Together, these things meant that we kept bringing back these characters to fill roles similar to what they had played in previous movies. If we needed a scientist, it was so much easier (and funnier, we thought), to just use David Neimkawitz rather than get someone else to play a whole new scientist character. I mean, really—how many scientists do you need? In order to get a grasp on how acute this practice had become, here’s a list of the common reoccuring characters, presented roughly in order of re-use.

David Neimkawitz played by Dave

Neimkawitz can trace his roots back to the original Inanimate. He was being interviewed as a backpack expert, but it quickly became apparent that he was a man of many disciplines. He appeared as the Godzilla expert in Godzilla, explaining to the military how he translated Godzilla’s characteristic roar. It turns out he was also the Chip Eating man in X-Files—conspiring against the government in some clandestine plot never elaborated upon. In Trek Wars he worked on the Entersurprise (and got chewed out by Captain Retard for not working hard enough). He also designed nuclear weapon schematics for Badimir in Hydro; appeared again as a backpack expert in Inanimate: Special Edition; and was on the jury in Fatal Killings. Finally, he was abducted by the aliens in From Beyond where he confirms that the bomb Edward Teem emailed to the ship was, in fact, about to explode.

The Bartender played by Aaron

The Bartender debuted as the bartender in The Crappy Restaurant sketch. This character is not particularly funny, but he was so useful that we just kept bringing him back. Aaron hated playing the character, and refused to do so for a while. The reason for this, I think, is because the bartender is such a non-character, and Aaron is such a great actor, that it just seemed like a waste of time for him. An interesting side note is: we had a sketch we never completed called Three Guys, a Girl, a House, and a Neighbor. It was a sit-com parody, and Aaron played the “Dad” character. (And not to get too far off the subject, but Neimkawitz was the neighbor.) During the course of the sketch, you also discover that the dad’s day job is the Bartender. This served to expand the character quite a bit, but we never finished it and so that bartender remains a two dimensional character in everyone’s minds but ours. Despite this, we convinced Aaron to play him a bunch more times, so either we nagged a lot, or he didn’t hate the character that much.

When we shot Trek Wars, the role was obvious: he would be the Bartender at the cantina. In Hydro, Badimir needed an illegal arms bazaar from which to purchase weapons, so, naturally, we had the bazaartender. And in Inanimate: Special Edition, he was selling backpacks on the street: the backpacktender. He also served on the jury in Fatal, and in From Beyond, when the end was nigh on the alien spaceship, he was there, too, serving up drinks.

Murray Ermer played by Dave

Ermer was probably the reoccuring character least forced to fit. He first appears in Pennsylvania Chainsaw Massacre where he is the guy doing the massacring with the chainsaw. When we were looking to do a courtroom drama later, the choice was obvious: put him on trial for killing the people in PA Chainsaw Massacre. Ermer’s mask was infinitely useful, meaning he had a pseudo-cameo in From Beyond as the drummer during Devin Clauser’s opening death-metal song—not to mention a speaking part in A New Oddity. I say “pseudo” because we used the mask in these cases, but didn’t necessarily intend the character to be Murray Ermer. But it’s funnier if you imagine that it is. He gets abducted by the aliens in From Beyond, and gets to kill one final person—William Fatnerd—before taking his own life just seconds before the alien ship explodes.

William Fatnerd played by Ted

The name “William Fatnerd” was, from what I recall, a cheesy non-pun of “William Shatner”. I’m not sure why we used that name in particular—I was never particularly fond of it myself—except that Shatner had been a host on Rescue 911, and Fatnerd was supposed to have a similar personality. Like Neimkawitz, he also made his debut in the first Inanimate, although for all intents and purposes, Doofus McAllister from Absent Minded Camera Man was the same character. Fatnerd came back for the second Inanimate, of course, and later we saw in him rare behind-the-scenes form when we was setting up to shoot the documentary When Aliens Attack in From Beyond. While shooting When Aliens Attack, the Aliens attacked, and he ended up on the ship in the same cell with Badimir and Murray Ermer, who, as I said, kills him.

These reoccuring characters had become something of a crutch; we realized this. We didn’t really want to include them in every single sketch, but it was fun, and it was easy—so easy—that it just kept happening. It didn’t take long for us to realize that From Beyond—if we finished it—would be our magnum opus, and so we used that excuse to throw all of our characters into the movie and have them get abducted by the aliens. What we didn’t consciously realize until later was that the ship blows up at the end. Somewhere in the middle of the production, it dawned on me that we were figuratively (and literally, depending on how you think about it) killing off not just our reoccuring characters, but the entire cast of characters—the entire universe—that was the TTT.

Part of that universe was, naturally, the main crew of the Entersurprise. They beam onto the alien ship to investigate (or if you prefer the real reason: because we no longer had the Entersurprise bridge set to shoot on), and immediately get captured. After Edward emails the bomb (a parody, I think, of Jeff Goldblum loading a Macintosh-written virus onto the alien computer in Independence Day), the elite bomb squad from the Bomb Squad sketch (who was visiting their friend, Victor Teem earlier in the movie when they got captured), finds the bomb, Neimkawitz confirms that it’s about to go off—and then we cut to a countdown montage where we show everyone aboard the ship lamenting the fact that they’re about to be blown up. It’s a ten-second bomb-countdown sequence that lasts almost minute (a la Broken Arrow, among others). The list of characters who make an appearance is huge. In addition to those I already mentioned, plus a few aliens, there was: Mr. Me-Young, the Two Ninjas, Balaclava Man, The Phantom of the Opera, Judge Steward Blervner and his wife, Moldy and Sculler, Blue Hat Man, Crazy Tie Man, John Hydro, and the Trooper.

The very last character to have a line before the climactic explosion was Captain Retard. He calls back to the Entersurprise and says, “Scottish! Beam us out! Make it so.” The CG shot that follows shows the Entersurprise pulling away, but still being engulfed in the ensuing explosion. It raises some interesting questions: did all the TTT characters get beamed out? Does the Entersurprise even have that sort of technology? The Trek Wars crew could barely do anything with competence—did anyone get out? Or maybe it was just Captain Retard and 2053 (Word having been killed in an earlier scene)? Perhaps all our characters from the previous four years were gone, just like that.

To be perfectly blunt, I try not to think about it. I don’t think any of us know for sure. It’s the ultimate magic flight out of the underworld that was the Alien’s spaceship—but it ends in the ultimate cliffhanger. We left a loophole to bring these characters back, but as of today, they haven’t made even a hint of an appearance. We threw off those old, reocurring characters—and this heralded major change for the TTT, even if we didn’t yet know what it would be.

The Ultimate Boon Again: I Wasn’t Done with This Section Yet

That would all happen later, after we actually finished the movie. While it was in production, there was some very real doubt that it would get done at all. Until the ball got rolling and we actually started shooting the thing, I really didn’t believe it was going to happen. Even after we were shooting, I couldn’t see everyone coming through for it. I don’t think I was unjustified in believing this because, up to this point, we had a number of failed productions.

I’m talking about these out of order, mostly because I forgot to mention them before, but also because I wasn’t sure when they happened. Additionally, I was going to devote a section to them, but I think I’m just going to mention them in passing. The thing to know about all of these is that they just didn’t get finished. I can’t say why. We just lost momentum on the project and moved on to the next one. Dave pointed out that Scarlet Ninja happened after a series of failed projects, which is why it was lighter on the crew and production requirements.

The first notable failed production I already mentioned: Three Guys, a Girl, a House, and a Neighbor. It was a fairly straight up parody of sit-coms. The “three guys” are the dad and his two sons. The plot is basically that one son accidentally kills the other, and he spends the rest of the sketch trying to cover it up. Meanwhile, two cousins are visiting (played by myself and Kathie), and they’re absolutely determined to have the dad find out in a bad way, and get the son in trouble. They don’t succeed, making this character another one of those ineffectual bad guys that I played. Also, David Neimkawitz is in there as the neighbor, but today I have absolutely no idea why he was in the sketch or what he did.

I don’t remember that we had two failed sketches in a row, so I don’t know if this one happened during the same time, or earlier or later. I actually forget entirely where it falls in the TTT’s history. The sketch was A Year and a Half in the Life of Kage. Kage was a not-too-serious prog-rock band comprised of Graham, Evan, and Aaron (before they switched over to metal and called themselves Treachery). The sketch was basically a rip-off of This is Spinal Tap. I think the jokes were original, but the set up was the same thing, namely, a mockumentary about the band. I don’t remember much more than that, so it’s possible not even the jokes were original.

The rest of the failed stuff happened after From Beyond. The one that really stings is the script I wrote for Tales from the Script. Tales was conceived as having each member of the TTT write their own script and direct their own short, so that we’d get six or seven distinctly unique sketches. Dave and I were the only two people who actually got around to writing a script, so that flew out the window pretty quickly. But Dave’s was the only one that got released. We actually shot mine (I don’t remember the name—how bad is that? I’m not sure I ever decided on a final title), but when I went to edit it, the VCR ate the tape. I’m still ticked about that. I’m fairly certain that that was the only incidence the TTT had of actual mechanical failure that completely prevented a short from being finished. The only other failed production worth mentioning at this point is Taking a Left, but that’s a story unto itself, so I’ll mention it when I get to it.

We used the same basement for From Beyond that we used for Fatal, but we knew we wanted to dress it up, however superficially. Dave and I had the idea that we wanted the alien ship to glow green, so I suggested putting colored cellophane over the fluorescent lights. One afternoon after school, we cleaned out what we could, covered the rest with a blanket (actually Dave might have done the cleaning himself), and proceeded to cover the lights with cellophane. We did one application, but it took forever and it didn’t look very green. We did another one, but that didn’t look so green either. Finally, by the time we got to the fifth or sixth application of green cellophane, we had to admit that, unfortunately, it looked a little green, but it wasn’t the effect we were going for. “Oh well,” I said as we walked out the door. “It was worth a shot.”

The next morning Dave was beside himself. “Oh man, you know the basement?” he asked.

“Yeah?” I was kind of hesitant to say anything because I thought there’d be some bad news coming, like that the cellophane melted all over the lights anyway.

“It’s really green.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, it was just that it didn’t seem that green the night before. How much greener could it have been? So I stopped by after school to take a look. Sure enough, that set was green. Monochromatically green. It turns out that as we laid down each strip of cellophane, our eyes adjusted to the green-ness to where it wasn’t very noticable. But when you went back the next day the effect hit you full force. It was so green that if you faced the other end of the set (that hadn’t been green-ified), it looked pink. The camera had no problem picking up the green-ness, and it turned out to be exactly the effect we were going for. To finish off the beat-up alien spaceship decor (complete with hot water heater), we hung a bunch of cords and pipe-insulators and other random cable from the ceiling. It gave the whole thing a sort of, “we didn’t work very hard, but we did work harder than in the past,” vibe.

But if we didn’t work very hard on the set, one thing I did work hard on was the computer graphics. Some years before I had gotten some 3D rendering software. I wasn’t very good at it in the grand scheme of things, but the fact that I could do it at all floored most people. Even though, in 2001, CG was common enough in movies, it was rarely seen being done by amateurs, much less high schoolers. And the From Beyond stuff I did wasn’t even the first CG work I had done. I did a little animated short using two of Dave’s “blobbie” characters. The blobbies were sort of like worms, so I did a parody of the intros from the computer game Worms 2, which had just come out around that time. It ran about a minute and a half, all CG. Not very good, but finished.

So I knew I could do the minimal amount of CG needed for From Beyond: a couple shots of the ship flying around, and one of it blowing up. When we started putting in all our old characters, I also made a CG Entersurprise which went in the mix. The opening credits sequence were in CG, as well.

These shots would take my old Pentium III 300mhz close to twenty hours to render. I would get home from school and work on the scene until I went to bed. Before I went to bed, I would start it rendering. If I was lucky, by the time I got home from school the next day, it would be finished. I’d review the footage, make note of any mistakes, tweak a few parameters, and try again the next day. For the climactic battle scene, I did this every day for about two weeks until I got the shot we used. A few times it would still be rendering when I got home from school, leaving me no time to work on it before bed, so I’d get up early the next morning and run down stairs to work on it and get it going again before I had to leave for school. I’m pretty sure my parents thought I was completely addicted to the computer. Suffice it to say that, as cool as the CG was, we weren’t sure we’d be able to use it unless we had access to an editor. Fortunately, the school had one.

During our junior and senior years, Dave and I were on the A/V team—but neither of us had taken any video production classes. The weird thing was that since we had done so much with the TTT, both of us knew loads more than the people who actually took the class. I had absolutely zero desire to take the video production electives (I had no room in my schedule anyway, since I was all maxed out on traditional art and AP courses)—and yet I was kind of ticked off because they had access to all this awesome equipment—equipment that I was not officially allowed to touch (except when I was doing A/V work for various events). So in his last semester in high school, Dave took the first video production class.

The biggest benefit to this was that he was allowed to use the linear editing deck that the school had. Now, he was supposed to be using it for school projects, but the guy who ran the studio was really cool and didn’t care, so long as we didn’t break anything. Since he knew us from the A/V club, he knew we were capable. In addition to all that, Dave had a study hall every day of the week—so he got what amounted to a permanent pass to go to the studio. On the days that I also had a study hall at the same time, I conspired to be there, too.

The day that we were editing our CG into From Beyond, the studio manager came in and saw the footage. After we told him what it was, he told us that there’s an awards contest every year—the Comcast Student Cable ACE Awards—and that our school wins in practically every category except one: computer graphics. Nobody in the school does computer graphics.

Still remembering the disaster that was showing Scarlet Ninja to our class, I hemmed and hawed and said I didn’t think it was that good—and even if it was good enough to get in the competition, it wasn’t something I did for the school. It was just a stupid personal project. He said that doesn’t matter as long as you’re attending the school. Plus, most of the entries in the CG category are terrible and if you enter that—referring to the alien spaceship coming out of warp speed in a flash of light—you’re a shoo-in. He ran off and got me an application.

Reluctantly, I filled out the app. There were a bunch of questions that didn’t apply, such as, “what did you take into account when integrating your footage with the rest of the production?” What was I going to write? “Nothing. I didn’t know what was coming before or after it. We needed an alien spaceship so I made one.” Instead I made up some stuff about timing, color and composition. Since the stuff I did for From Beyond only totaled about twenty five seconds, I went back to the blobbie video I had made and took the best shots from that, too, plus some other random clips I did for practice that didn’t go with anything. Altogether, it came to about a minute and a half. I wrote an excuse-sentence on the application about taking all the CG shots out of context and putting them together in one clip, which was the clip I submitted. I didn’t want to give the judges the impression that this conglomerate of random quasifuturistic shots was the project, in case anyone started asking questions about what it all meant.

A few weeks later, I got word that my work had been accepted. I got to take the afternoon off from school to go to this awards ceremony with the rest of the “cool” kids who did the morning news. It works the same way in high school as it does in the real world: the cool kids on the morning news—the talent—are the preps and cheerleaders, and they ride the backs of the people who do production work to win awards on their behalf. On the trip down there, everyone was cordial enough, but it was clear I wasn’t one of them. I was introduced to the group as, “the guy who did the CG entry this year.” The response from one of the girls was, “oh, we never win CG.”

I don’t remember much from the actual ceremony; it was loud and flashy. They showed all the entries for the CG category. The studio manager was right: they were terrible. I thought mine was terrible, too, but as I watched them, I couldn’t see how any of them came remotely close to what I had done, and I couldn’t even pick one that would have been a competitor. It wasn’t even close. I won.

I vaguely remember stumbling up to the front (I think I tripped), taking the award, saying something generic into a microphone, and then sitting down among handshakes. In those few seconds, From Beyond had become an award winning production.

We took home seven or eight awards that day, each one netting the school a $300 grant toward improving the A/V department, and a clear lucite spade. The attitude during the ride back was certainly different. The “CG guy” had proven himself, apparently, and people were willing to talk to me. One guy, who I also sort-of knew from the A/V club, told me about how he had gotten a job in a studio doing computer graphics for TV commercials, but he had never done anything like what he’d seen me do. We talked CG shop on the way back, and for the first time in my life, I seriously entertained thoughts that I, too, might have an actual video production job some day. If I could make money doing essentially the same thing that I had been doing for the past four years, that was the ultimate boon. Maybe the TTT was more than a goofy hobby after all.

But From Beyond still wasn’t done yet. Dave was editing like crazy to beat the hardest deadline of them all: graduation. Once we graduated, it was doubtful that From Beyond would ever get finished since we still didn’t have access to any other editing system, linear or not. We might have been able to come in during the summer months, but that possibility was dubious, and I didn’t want to rely on it. Better to bust this out before we had to leave.

It was near the end of May when Dave told me that he was just about done. It looked like we would hit the deadline. I had a study hall on the the day he thought he would finish, so I got a pass to join him in the editing room to be there on the momentous occasion that was completing the From Beyond master. Things were perfect.

One person I haven’t mentioned yet in the story was the evil video production teacher. She was the studio manager’s complete opposite. He was cool; she was a bitch. She must have been bipolar. She knew who I was—she was nice enough to me on the awards trip—and she also knew that wasn’t actually in any of her classes, which was still technically a prerequisite to touch anything in the studio. As Murphy’s law would have it, she came in while we were editing. And she went ballistic.

I wasn’t supposed to even be in the studio, she yelled at me, never mind that I won actual money for her, and that I knew how to use the equipment in the room better than 90% of her students. Never mind that I had been on the A/V team for two years at this point. The pass I had gotten from the studio manager was, evidently, illegal to the point of being a felony, and if I didn’t get back to my study hall I would be suspended, or worse. I don’t really remember because I just turned around and walked down the hall while she was still yelling at me. Some battles aren’t worth fighting.

But Dave was still in the editing room—he was allowed to be there because he was in the class! Ha—our ace in the hole! From Beyond was still getting done, even if I couldn’t be there to see it. Only later did I find out that after she finished shouting at me, she turned around and let him have it, too. See, this whole time she thought he was editing his final project for her class—that’s why she kept giving him passes. Dave had actually finished the pathetically easy final project in about 2.5 days—and spend the remaining thirty days editing From Beyond; he just happened to omit this fact (not unintentionally) when getting the pass from her. But he was able to convince her to let him finish working that day, since he was already there. She grudgingly agreed—and he made the final edit minutes before the last bell.

From Beyond was complete—all one hour and three minutes of it.

It was a triumph of hard work, strained relationships, and ridiculous deadlines. I didn’t speak much to the fact that it was a musical. Some of the songs were parodies of other peoples’ real songs—but a few were original. The whole performance of A Night to Remember to Forget makes it one of my favorite songs ever. At least one song was scrapped due to time concerns. (That was the Alien King’s theme. We replaced it with him singing the first note and then knocking over a table—which he was doing all the time anyway. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked and it fit the character.) And for all my tone-deafness and not memorizing lines, the song I sang in wasn’t a complete disaster. The shooting went as smoothly as it could have at that point, and like with Trek Wars, we just got together every weekend we could and pounded it out.

I wonder today why in the world we did it. Really—what did we have to gain from that? I could just have easily not made movies in high school. It would have been a lot less work. But there’s something about realizing those visuals on screen that calls me. It’s part world building, part story-telling, and part technical achievement. Today, I tell people that I wasn’t in a band in high school, like most kids. I was in a movie production crew.

After graduation, we had nothing lined up. Dave and Graham were going off to college in different cities (I was going to college in my hometown, so I didn’t leave, per se); the diaspora was eminent. There wasn’t any time to get anything done. We put the TTT on hold at this point, intending to shoot either over Christmas break, Spring break, or the next summer, whenever it worked out. We were still bolstered by the success of From Beyond and nobody had any thoughts that we’d be seeing each other less and less and, subsequently, that the TTT would find it harder to produce anything at all.

Refusal of the Return: The TTT Drifts Apart

The first thing we tried to do after From Beyond was Tales from the Script. As I mentioned earlier, Tales was supposed to be a collection of shorts, but that never actually panned out. We shot Dave’s script, A New Oddity in the late fall of 2001. We did it old school: in order, all editing done in-camera. For the most part, you can’t tell at all. It really shows how good we got at that particular niche skill. After we finished it, though, we sat on it for over a year, expecting everyone else to write scripts so we could release Tales as a complete package. For a variety of reasons—a lack of interest from people who weren’t writers to begin with, long distance communication, etc—they didn’t get written. We shot mine in the spring of 2002 but, like I said, the VCR ate the tape, and so all that remain from that shoot are memories. It wasn’t until April of 2003—approximately 18 months after we finished it—that we officially released A New Oddity as a stand alone production.

An update from the news page dated August 1, 2002 says, “Taking a Left is the newest TTT project currently underway.” Dave had finished the script in time for the summer of 2002, and it came in at a feature-length time of about one hour, twenty minutes. I was really excited about this because I had always wanted to do an actual movie-length movie. From Beyond was respectable, but feature length was prestigious, something to brag about.

On top of that, Taking a Left was relatively straightforward. It had a few fight sequences, bit of set design, and probably the best costuming we ever had, but for the most part it was just acting and dialogue. It started off with plenty of momentum and we burned through the hardest scenes before most of us went back to college. The plan was to have Dave come back from Philly on the weekends so he and I and Kathie could shoot most of their scenes. (Dave and Kathie were co-starring, and a lot of the film was just them.) But we didn’t quite get everyone else’s scenes in the can. The thing was, almost everyone we needed to shoot was still in the area, but the scheduling and commitment that we had before just didn’t happen. The TTT had begun to drift apart.

I was in denial about this, even as it was happening. Dave said to me in an email, “you just wanted to get it done,” which was true. It seemed so easy—we were so close. Just get these people together for a Saturday, shoot a couple scenes. If we kept plugging away at it the same way we did with all our other long-term projects, it would get done. But everyone’s interests had moved on to other things. It seemed that Dave and I were the only ones who had the drive on our own: the original two who wanted to shoot that Star Trek parody way back in fourth grade. Now here we were again, this time separated by distance, watching helplessly as this project crumbled around us. Our feature length film! We couldn’t pull it together. In a sense, I was refusing the call to move away from the TTT.

Master of Two Worlds: The Professional Amateur

During college I was working as a teller at a local bank branch office. One day—completely out of the blue—one of my customers pulled up to the drive-thru and asked me point blank:

“Do you make movies?”

Who was this guy? I looked at his deposit slip. He routinely brought in deposits from a law firm or something, I wasn’t exactly sure, but today he had a personal deposit. How in the world would he know about our movies? We didn’t show them to anyone! At least, I didn’t show them to anyone. His name wasn’t the name of anyone I knew who might have gotten a hold of one of our tapes. He must have been a friend’s dad or something, but darned if I knew who it was.

Stunned, I replied, “uh, yeah.”

Then he asked if I knew someone from high school. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. And then the pieces came together. He was asking about the guy I had been talking to on the way home from the Cable ACE Awards. Over the next few seconds of surreal conversation, I discovered that this guy at the drive-thru owned the studio that this other guy had worked for. The studio owner had seen my picture in his daughter’s year book. The entry next to my picture said that I had been in the A/V club—and he remembered a conversation with he had with his employee who was talking about the amazing CG work that I had done, and just connected the dots right back to the teller he saw each week at the bank.

“Would you be interested in a video editing job?”

[…to be concluded on Friday.]