The Birth of a Movie

When I was 15 years old, my friends and I made a movie called "Draconis Olim: The Secret of the Dragon's Crystal." It was a summer project that began because we had nothing better to do. We had no equipment, no money, and no concept of the sort of work that a movie required, but we didn't care - because it was fun.

 I wrote a feature-length script for the film, creating a story that, if done correctly by Hollywood, would have required a $150 million budget. Imagine, if you will, an amalgamation of X-Men, Lord of the Rings, and Eragon…ambitious, to say the least. My father lovingly informed me that I was crazy, and I'd never be able to make it. As teenagers tend to do, I ignored him completely.

Once school was out, I gathered my friends and family together and bullied them into helping me. Soon, what had started out as a just-for-fun project turned into a major production. We had a cast and crew of at least 30, with the participants' ages ranging from ten years to sixty. We sought out and found amazing filming locations, though we usually shot those illegally, without permission.  We couldn't frame a shot or remember our lines, but we all had a passion for dragons (which is really all that matters in the end).

It was a whirlwind summer of fun, fight scenes, poison ivy, popsicle-and-pink-lemonade picnics, dragon puppets, and spectacularly cheesy costumes. And by the end of it, I discovered something amazing: I suddenly knew who I was, and who I wanted to be for the rest of my life.

A filmmaker.

By the time I was 17, Draconis Olim had turned into a trilogy, with each film becoming successively more ambitious and advanced than the last. And, though our acting, editing and cinematography had improved drastically, we were still little more than kids running around in capes with a camcorder. We all went our separate ways, heading off to different colleges across the country.  And for a while, it seemed that the greatest franchise ever made would slip away into the annals of time, always fondly remembered as a "fun little project," its potential never fully realized.

Another three years passed, and I graduated college with little to show for it.  I had hardly done any movie work in school, and I found I was unhappy - I missed the way life had been during the halcyon days of Draconis Olim. So I started work on a new feature film, "Director's Cut."  I told the story of my earliest films as best as I could, detailing not only the horrors that all indie filmmakers face, but the beautiful, truly fulfilling moments, as well. And once I was done with that, I figured it was time to stop beating around the bush and do what I really wanted to do.

So I re-made Draconis Olim. Not the full-length film - we could never hope to do it justice if we tried to produce it independently - but a trailer to raise awareness (and hopefully funding) for it. Though the trailer is not yet complete, and is still in a rough cut format, it has been accepted into the International Movie Trailer Festival and is in the running for some amazing prizes. And who knows…if we attract the right attention in Hollywood, it might get optioned to be made into a real $150 million movie!

Six years after Draconis Olim was born, I look back and see how far we've come. We now have all our own professional equipment, though we still have no money. And I now have an intimate understanding of the kind of work it takes to make these projects, be they feature or trailer, comedy or science fiction. But in the end, if you love what you do and you have a drive to see your dreams come to life, then it's always worth it in the end.

Oh, and a healthy passion for dragons helps, too.