Momentum is a critical component of any creative endeavour. Without it, your project is doomed to languish before completion.
I lost my momentum.
After returning from London, it took me weeks before I got around to editing together the exterior scenes we shot. I’m not sure if it was general apathy towards the project or just working around my pre-existing schedule, but it took until almost Christmas before I had anything to show Chris and Bobcat.
The biggest issue to tackle in the edit was the scene transitions. As written and shot, the movement of my character, Ted, through the bar door would carry us from one scene to the other. However, when shooting the exteriors we didn’t have access to open the door all night, so we had to shoot around the actual entrance except for the last scene.
Added to the complication was the dialogue — it was designed to start on one side and finish in a new context on the other. By shooting the scenes 9 months apart, we lost the connective tissue to really sell that idea.
The most significant change to the film was made fairly early on - we removed an entire scene.
Originally the film started with the exterior of me banging my head against the wall, went inside for Christmas, then returned to the exterior for Halloween. This lacked punch, as the opening scene had far less production value than the interior, so by dropping the Halloween scene, we could start in the inside, go out to the head bashing scene, and return for New Year’s. It took some work around to get the transitions to smooth out, but it works substantially better and gets us into the film in a faster and funnier way; in hindsight it should always have started in the bar first.
Once we finally had a decent rough cut, the real problems started to emerge.
When shooting any film, weather and time are your greatest enemies. If they both turn against you, you’re screwed - so you better have a backup plan.
We didn’t.
Bobcat arrived on the island a few days before Chris. He worked his producer magic and secured us an amazing location - a bar with a fantastic interior, as well as an entrance to an isolated alley which was perfect for our needs. Additionally, we made a deal with the owners to cook lunch for our crew as part of the location fee - food is an essential part of any production, particularly on volunteer shoots.
As with most things, it started with an idea. Actually, it started with an event — she left. The girl I was in love with just up and moved to another city and I was in emotional turmoil. I didn't know how to process it, but I needed to write.
Lucky for me, my writing partner Christopher M. Hernandez knew exactly what I was going through. As gentlemen of a similar disposition, we had both been in situation where we'd been placed — or willingly walked in to — the dreaded "Friend Zone" (something we would later refer to as being "an emotional Teddy Bear"). So we gathered our collective experiences and started to type.
The numbness in my arms was the first indication something was wrong.
Throughout my life I'd find myself sleeping on my stomach, arms tucked under my body for warmth – something I no doubt learned in the Canadian winters when I was too lazy to get another blanket – but when I began to awake without being able to feel my upper limbs, I became concerned. After a few months of hoping it would go away, I finally resigned myself to seeing a doctor and got the news: my blood pressure was high and I was severely overweight.
Since I was a child I've battled with my weight. Always on the heavier side, I fluctuated between highs and lows, but I had never let it get overly bad. In fact, I thought I was doing quite well. When I had first moved back to Victoria after film school, I was the slimmest that I could recall. However, that was 5 years previous, and in the interim I had slowly piled on the pounds to finally reaching nearly 300 lbs.
In hindsight, I knew I was getting bigger. My purposefully loose clothes had gotten decidedly less loose, and I had all but stopped looking in reflective surfaces – I actively avoided the full length mirror in my room. Until the tingling started, I never let myself acknowledge the problem, and now I had to.
It was mid-2009 when my former film school instructor David Mills reached out and asked if I'd be interested in co-writing a web series set at the school I had attended.
The idea was to bring current and former students together; the current students tackling the crew/production side of things while the graduates would form the cast and creative roles. I'm not sure why he asked me to co-write, but more significantly, I'm not sure why he asked me to co-write with Christopher M Hernandez - we had never really met.
Chris had started at the school the week after I graduated. We shared mutual friends, but since he only just arrived in Victoria before starting classes and I left Victoria right after graduating, our paths didn't cross. Over the next year we'd be at the same event only a handful of times, but likely said less than 20 words to each other. Why we were asked to write together was beyond me.
David had constructed the series outline, and it was up to Chris and I to flesh out his ideas into eight 5-minute webisodes. The basics were all there; our former acting teacher Pat Phillips would be be the school's headmaster, Chris would play a dual role as an actor and portray one of the student along with George Waters & Marina Miller, and yet-to-be-cast were two other students, the school's custodian and receptionist.
Over the next few months Chris (who was living in Oregon) and I (who had returned to Victoria) would collaborate remotely, emailing drafts back and forth and video chatting to spit-ball ideas. We would take things that had happened to us during our respective film school experiences and exaggerate them. David had remarkably few notes - even when Chris and I deviated from his bible.
By December '09 we'd completed the eight scripts and Dylan Jackson, Jessica Henke, Bobbi Charlton and Pam Barkhouse had joined the cast as the two students, custodian, and receptionist respectively. Plans were made to start shooting in January for an April release.
When we gathered for the table read the week before production, I didn't really know what to expect. Up until that point, I had directed, produced and cast all the projects I had written, so to be removed from those decisions was a new experience for me. However, as always, hearing your words come to life is truly one of the greatest things in the world. Even better is hearing jokes work, and fixing them in the room when they don't.
When the episodes went live in April/May, they didn't exactly set the internet on fire but they were received warmly by those who saw them. Watching the episodes years later, it's hard not to see the little things we could have written better, but its also fantastic to still laugh at some of the jokes — the "Chris/Not Chris" signs always get me.
After the release, David asked Chris and I if we would convert the existing episodes into a pilot script. Nothing ever came from it, but it was fun to further explore these characters now that we had actually shot something with them. We knew the voices, we saw dynamics form between the actors and could play up what worked and change what didn't. It was my first experience in episodic writing, and I loved it.
For two guys who didn't know each other beforehand, Chris and I became great friends throughout the process of making Discovery Street. We've worked together many times since, always remotely because after 5 years, we've still never lived in the same city. It's safe to say Chris is the best friend I have whom I've only met in real life a dozen or so times.
I'm immensely proud of what everyone accomplished with this little web series. A huge shout out to all involved, you're all wonderful people and you did a great job. Plus an especially big thanks to David Mills for putting the whole thing on, and for taking two random bearded dudes and asking them to write together.
