Whirlwind Pt. 1 The script

“Wearing the whirlwind movie costume while discussing Italian neo-realism and Malta Goya.”

<<costumes made by mother and I>>

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Making movies is the hardest art form one can pursue. First you must spend hours perfecting the craft of screenwriting. A movie script is the least fun and creative form of creative writing yet it is the hardest discipline to master in the filmmaking pantheon. A well train screenwriter may take a year to create a feature length film.

I wrote for a 30 minute project.

My first script for Whirlwind was a story about two brothers on an ice desert launching rockets in a society that has banned air travel due to pollution issues. I had the concept while staring blankly at my sealing asking myself what it would be like if outer space never existed and the morning sky took its place.

I finished my script. I wrote the whole thing with the rule in mind. However, I wasn’t an experienced screenwriter at the time. And even less so I was not an experienced professional writer.

I was a 19 year old stargazer with many dreams, and many muses. When you’re 19 life is a pharrel music video directed by Tim Burton. My head was in the clouds but I did not smoke marijuana so I was deeply offended when my professor had said in the middle of class “he’s probably just high” when I expressed my film concept. And humiliated when I was laughed out of class by a room full of my peers when blocked my scenes with hired for class presentation at my college. After that day I never returned to class. I did everything I could to attain what some would describe as a Good film script.

I pressed on despite their critical assessments because I’m a man of wonder first, and practicality second.

World building in fiction is incredibly tricky...

Let’s move back in time for a bit.

As a seven year old, I drew and wrote my own comic books and even made the action figures to accompany them. I had toys but was more interested in removing the rubber off of a pen or acquiring the twist wire off a bread bag to hand make an action figure than most things. I come from a generation of Toonami and dial up where technology was just advanced enough to keep wonder alive while simultaneously still grounded enough to still be understood by a civilian. The late 90s- early 2000s could be considered as the equinox of technological advancement. Things like the miniatures made for the original Star Wars films were always in the back of my mind when molding clay for the worlds in my comics. Even making the character cards for each person in the story.

I knew I had to return to that. I knew that for my movie to be all that it could be I would have to return to that space.

In the pursuit of life I think people grow tunnel visioned and lose sight of what shaped their world view.

So I watched numerous documentaries on the great sci fi movies of the past. Stars Wars, Close Encounters, 2001. I needed to understand what made these filmmakers great.

...It is possible that maybe at the time, I took the project too seriously. My college had an air of competition amongst classmates comparable to the FIFA World Cup. There were students who made 30,000 dollar feature films with 25 student volunteers. Some renting anamorphic lenses used on interstellar. We weren’t making movies we were justifying the legitimacy of our careers. A great movie to us was what Facebook was to a computer science major. A great movie could be the difference between selling popcorn for AMC, to selling movies for AMC. Every professor tries to keep things realistic for us. It’s a tough industry only 3% ever make it to the big leagues. The issue however is that hearing that kind of disillusionment at 19 isn’t fair warning it’s a taunt towards excelling. It’s like being dared to prove them wrong. Like the possibility of living your life in a movie rental store in a modest setting was utter defeat.

Words like Sundance, Tribeca, and Cannes were the holy trinity. To construct a series of images that could some how evoke awe in the hearts of anyone guarding the gates of this cinematic Valhalla was victory.

First we just need, a good script.

After 20 rewrites I realized that in the scriptwriting universe no one is ever truly done writing. I would sit at the school library with my laptop for hours racking my brain for ideas that would dance the line between cost effective film production and story telling brilliance. I owe a lot of my good script to the good people around me at the time who took the time and patience to read through the story and edited the project with me. I often remember those days as my happiest. One cannot succeed in solipsism. So together with my loved ones we created a great script. I was at the time so narrow in the process I would wear the same clothes for weeks. The project took precedence over my own well being because I knew that hard work always pays off in the end. The pressure was double for me as it wasn’t just about proving something to peers or family but really myself. The belief that I had value as an individual, that my years of dreaming as a rugrat making art no matter how amateur, had some purpose. As a child I would draw 30-40 images a day to somehow learn how to draw as life like as my heroes. Rembrandt, Goya, Hayao Miyazaki.

Years of learning, of watching, of seeing great artists make strides in their work. Wishing that one day I would have an opportunity to prove myself to those vanguards, to walk the path of those I admire.