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We’re Making A Movie!

Yup, it’s a real life feature length movie. Greenlit!

An early draft picture of the main character.

For the last year my team and I have been putting together the script for a low-budget fantasy/horror film and it is now being put into pre-production.

Yes, it’s very exciting.

So how did we get here…

How Did It Happen?

It started a year ago, at the HorrorHound Convention in Minneapolis. My team and I were down there for our short film “Crumbs”, which was going have it’s USA premiere. We watched some awesome movies, but even better was meeting the other filmmakers.

Cody Nelson, Jessey Nelson, and Me – the Team

We were excited because we had been asked to be on a panel.

Yeah, our first panel.

A chance to share our knowledge and experience to a crowd of people who had no idea who we were! We couldn’t wait. Which is when we learned some troubling information…

  1. Almost every other filmmaker we’d met was ALSO on the panel. There was going to be upwards 15 people at that table.
  2. The panel was scheduled at the exact same time as Crumbs USA premiere.
  3. Which meant that all our new director friends would have to choose between watching a short film or basking in the fame and glory of an indie filmmakers panel.

We were the only ones at our premiere.

Well, technically, a few staff people from the convention were there too. We did a Q&A after and our only audience members were the two people who set up the microphone. They asked surprisingly good questions though.

Then we found out that one other filmmaker had been standing at the back. A director from Montreal who had a feature in the convention with his brother. He congratulated us and expressed interest in working together in the future. We said we’d love to.

A few weeks later we had a call… and the brothers said they wanted to take a chance on us.

The budget would be small, but “If you can make Crumbs with next to nothing, we can’t wait to see what you’ll do with this.”

And so it began. We started on the script that day.

The brothers gave us complete freedom, and it took us a while to nail down a story we were all excited about, but I think we landed on something very fun, scary, and funny.

Jessey and Cody are going to be co-directing, whereas I’m the main writer. We broke down the original plot and characters, but it’s changed a lot since then, which is the way these things go.

Officially, the script has gone through three entire rewrites (from the first page) and it’ll need more edits going forward, but we meet soon to officially start pre-production. Each rewrite took me a month or two, which means that a lot of last year was spent on this project. There is still a lot that could stop this film, but I’m optimistic that it’ll come together. We’ve got a passionate team and a really cool story.

An early draft of the possible villain.

I’ll share more as this story progresses – can’t wait to for everyone to experience what we’ve been working on!

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