I’m in Arizona right now, spending some time with my grandparents who live in Tucson. Tomorrow we’re doing some swimming in the morning and heading out to play golf in the afternoon with my grandfather. Haven’t ever played before, so it should be pretty funny to anybody watching. Not that anyone would.

I mentioned last week about the importance of making connections through friends. I made a terrific new contact the day after Christmas. My family spent Christmas in Texas with my uncle, and one of his friends dropped by. Susie just got back from working on the new Muppets movie, “The Muppet Wizard of Oz.” Hadn’t even heard of it before now, but she did costume and creature design for it. She told me her last project before that one was a certain film about the Country Bear attraction in DisneyWorld, but we didn’t dwell for too long on that…

Anyway, we had a terrific chat. I asked her about her experiences working for Jim Henson and she asked about my movie projects. We exchanged information and I look forward to continuing the dialogue in cyberspace.

See, you never know who you’re going to meet or when you’re going to meet them. So, as Lloyd Kaufmann says over and over in his book, tell anyone who will listen about your great idea for a new movie!

Speaking about the Muppets, if you haven’t seen The Muppet Christmas Carol, you’re really missing out on what is arguably the last great Muppet movie of the 20th century. Although I did enjoy Muppet Treasure Island as well, but that could just be my Tim Curry bias talking…

Yesterday I finished meeting with one of my new clients, an artist in Kansas City named Donna Aldridge. “Donna”:http://www.aldridgestudios.com is another example of working your network. I met her through a neighbor, who came to a garage sale I was helping my parents with. As I carried her purchase to my neighbor’s car — it was an artist’s easel — I asked her about her art and told her about mine. When she heard I was a filmmaker and looking for industrial work to pay the bills, she cracked a smile and told me there were several artists in the area who were looking for someone to produce how-to videos for them to sell at workshops, art shows, etc.

So she put me in touch with Donna, and after several emails and our initial meeting I find myself in Donna’s house yet again, discussing our options for marketing her upcoming series of how-to videos that I am going to shooting and edit for her in February. The material is already there, since she’s been teaching this stuff for years, and there are several subjects she is passionate about teaching to new artists. Right now, we’re outlining and scripting the first few DVDs.

She’s well connected to a couple major international art suppliers (her specialty is pastels) and spends most of her time doing demos, workshops and classes all across the country. She also receives many requests for commissions and actively shows her work in galleries around the world. I’m excited because she has lots of original material to teach — stuff that’s not being taught in other art videos or books. An international art magazine is writing an article about her right now, and there’s also a book in the works.

She’s also well-connected and has lots of friends who will help us out. For example, a photographer friend of hers has generously agreed to help with the lighting and any other way he is able. Her daughter is a commercial artist, so they are working together to design a logo and overall look for the packaging. We are currently looking for funding to buy some necessary new equipment and pay for part of the reproduction costs. We’re all excited about this, because it has the potential to sell well. It’s good to start a project when you already have a viable marketing plan. Working with Donna is already turning out to be rewarding and educational. She’s a smart, terrific woman and a very talented artist.

And it all started at my parents’ garage sale…

People often ask me how we got started with this. For us, it all started with our first crummy movie, _Dumping Jenny_. Actually, it’s pretty entertaining, if I do say so myself. I directed it while I was in college, finishing up a degree in Journalism. I had just returned from an internship at Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, where I met lots of folks who were involved in film or TV production in some degree. One person named Rob Micai asked me what I wanted to do exactly, and I said, “I want to direct movies.” “Well, have you directed any movies?” he asked. “Uh, nope, not yet,” I replied.

In that instant, I realized that I needed to stop talking about what I wanted to do and start doing it. So I enrolled in the TV Production course the following semester and learned the basics of video production and editing. After brainstorming a story idea with my family, I wrote a few scenes and a short treatment and sent them to my high school buddy, Dakota Russell, who I remembered was a pretty good writer. He was on, and on just a few weeks of chain smoking and heavy drinking (he’s since quit smoking) churned out the masterpiece that was the Dumping Jenny script.

He’d probably dispute that.

Anyway, as it looked like it was all coming together, I started rounding up friends and guaging interest for a shoot in the summer. We did a read-through at my house and everybody loved the script. I started mentally casting then and there.

But how to get the equipment?

Hmm. First, I borrowed a broadcast-quality video camera, mic and mic cable, and fluid-head tripod from the university’s TV department. After shooting some test footage with my ragtag crew, I realized what an undertaking this was going to be. And if we were going to devote a month’s worth of evenings of our valuable summer to this, we’d better do it right.

So, credit card in hand, I marched to a store that had a generous return policy and bought a Panasonic digital camera for $500. In retrospect, I’m *so* glad we shot it digital. We shot every evening, after work, for about three weeks. After the shoot, I returned the camera to the store and got another one for editing.

I edited on iMovie (the original) after hours in the university PR office, where I worked. After some people complained that I was up all night in the office, I finished up in the office of another friend who also worked at the university.

As for music, the extremely talented rock musician “John Thomas Griffith(Griff’s personal website)”:http://www.johnthomasgriffith.net agreed to score our movie for free. I sent him timecode-printed videotapes, and he composed the score on Acid Pro while they were on the road touring. He sent me back CDRs with the tracks, instructions on where to line them up, and we kept in contact primarily through email, with the occasional phone call now and then.

For the tunes, I contacted an alumni of my fraternity, the drummer of “Silent Page(Silent Page website)”:http://www.silentpage.com, a terrific band in St. Louis. They graciously donated a few of their tunes for the film, which fit in marvelously. “Cowboy Mouth(Cowboy Mouth website)”:http://www.cowboymouth.com also allowed us to use “How Do You Tell Someone?” and “Leisure McCorkle(amazon.com)”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000077SZQ/ref=olp_product_details/002-6190660-5076014?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance (a musician produced by JTG) donated the song for the end credits.

We premiered _Dumping Jenny_ on the “Truman State University(story about me)”:http://www.truman.edu/userfiles/Alumni/TrumanReview/summer00/default.asp?page=profiles.html campus to a packed house of more than 500 people in November 2000. “Phi Mu Alpha(link to Upsilon Phi)”:http://sinfonia.truman.edu/ (my fraternity) sponsored the event, so we got the venue for free. The response was overwhelming. We were amazed that everyone laughed in all the right spots. My family and friends drove in from all over the country to support us. Silent Page came down from St. Louis and played at our open wrap party in a local bar, which allowed us to use their newly-remodeled backroom for free, as long as we brought in a lot of people. And there were a lot of people that night, as we invited everyone at the premiere. The band was great.

So there’s the crux of the story behind Dumping Jenny, our freshman effort. Because we worked our network, used whatever resources we could get our hands on, and had lots of extremely generous friends, the whole thing cost about $100 tops.

And it shows…