Originally, I wanted to be a novelist. I was heavily inspired by Star Wars, and in junior high I set off to write a space opera. I wanted to be the George Lucas of literature.
The problem that I faced was, like a lot of beginning writers, I had no life experience to inject into my stories. The space opera that I came up with was a simple Star Wars knockoff - because that was all I had seen at that age. I shelfed that project and came back to it down the road, but in trying to convert it into an original idea, I ended up sacrificing the story in favor of creating the visuals. At the time, I embraced fantasy because I figured it was a great output to express my creative consciousness. But as I started to actually read more fantasy, I steadily realized that the most memorable fiction came from writers who had some basis in reality. And frankly, my stories read more like screenplays.
I would write science fiction stories that described in great detail what a planet looked like, how a spaceship worked, where an alien came from, and even what kind of sounds the reader should be experiencing. I left very little to the imagination, because in my mind I was directing a scene the way I wanted the reader to experience it. But I didn't know a lot about crafting a story.
In high school, I began watching films on a regular basis, and started paying attention to the craft of storytelling. The one film that ignited my interest in filmmaking was Kevin Smith's Clerks, an independent film he had written and directed about two convenience store clerks who sit around dissecting pop culture and assaulting the customers. In the age of Star Wars, filmmaking seemed like an elite trade that only the well-connected got in to. Clerks made it feel more possible. With the right equipment, perhaps even a budget, anyone could make a movie.
I enrolled in video production, where I met my close friend Dan Adkins. We had similar tastes in movies, and loved going around school taping things. We were amused whenever our videos had an audience - even if that audience consisted of two or three people. Whenever we could, we tried sneaking our videos into the opening announcements in the morning.
I also enrolled in a creative writing class, where I wrote Short Future. It was a personal story, and almost biographical, as the central character was based on me. It was set fifty years in the future, to give it a somewhat fictional setting, and all the characters had unpronounceable names. For my final project, I was allowed to translate my story into a ten-minute video. This was the first time that I tried using the medium to actually tell a story.
This was the birth of LennSKI Entertainment.
The Making of Short Future
The story called for a flying car, but I didn't have a special effects background. I intercut footage from Back to the Future Part II to try and create the effect.
Dan was unavailable, so I got one of my classmates to play the part of Khristoffian, Leon's brutally honest sidekick. For three days, we shot footage of crowded hallways, a scene in the cafeteria, and culminated in a live classroom.
In the original story my character, Leon, develops a crush on a fellow classmate and approaches her in the cafeteria. During filming, I couldn't find a girl who wanted to play my love interest, so in the final film I came up with something that derived from the original idea. I intercut footage from Private Parts of a half-naked woman walking across the screen, and kept cutting back and forth between my reaction and the woman. This turned out to be a controversial scene - so much so that when it came up in the initial classroom screening, my teacher threatened to shut it off.
The most difficult part of the shoot was during the last two days, when I shot the final scene in a live classroom. I shot it over two days, and on the second day, no one remembered to wear the same outfits from the day before. The scene has no continuity whatsoever. I also didn't come prepared. There wasn't a script to memorize. I ad libbed the entire scene. One of the reasons the scene appears so shaky is because while I was shooting footage with one hand, I was trying to read from the story in the other.
My classmates knew me for writing stories that were somewhat personal, and I think they picked up on the parallels I was making between Leon and myself. The theme of the story is isolation, and it follows a character who feels removed from the in-crowd. It was a general feeling that I had at the time about my situation in high school, and some of the students might have felt uncomfortable while we were shooting.
I edited the film in one night, using two VCRs. Because I didn't have editing software, I dubbed the footage onto a VHS tape. I also came up with a unique way to do visual titles. Using a word processor, I developed a technique to space out text and scroll to the appropriate title card when it was time. Then I simply sat to the side of the camera while it was recording and used the mouse to scroll down the screen.
Aftermath
The final project was, and still is, entertaining to watch, but it borders on non-narrative storytelling. I don't think most people would understand it if they were to watch it. I learned while making it that telling a story visually is a complicated thing to achieve, especially when working from a bunch of raw video footage. The message I was trying to convey was that people's perceptions change depending on the person speaking, and while certain scenes get that across, the project still looks like an amateur student video more than it does a movie. However, I consider it a nice little gem to revisit every once and a while, and it's definitely responsible for jump-starting LennSKI films.