Big things have small beginnings

I was alone and bored in a hotel in Vientiene Laos in April of 2009. I hadn't gone there with the intention of drawing or painting so when I had the impulse to scribble down an image that kept recurring in my head I had to settle for drawing in a notebook I'd intended to use as a journal with a marker I found clunking around in the bottom of my bag from some earlier trip. The recurring image  became this scribble...

Not much to be sure and not very good but I continued to scribble for the next couple of hours anyway. When I was done for the night I had several pages of crappy drawings but I also had something more: the crappy images had fused with some vague narrative snippets that had also been taking up space in my brain and become an idea for a story.

Over the following months I continued to scribble in that notebook whenever I had ideas. I also began to write out the story separately on the computer. The scribbles, informed by the growing narrative, began to develop into more refined drawings. By early 2010 I had a completed story along with a couple of notebooks worth of graphic ideas and decided to take a crack at creating pages for what was now planned to be a graphic novel called "Labyrinth".

Cover for the planned graphic novel

The first iteration went nowhere. I had zero experience creating for this medium and it showed. I also realized that the story needed more work and set out on the first rewrite. It was during this time that the story's name changed from "Labyrinth" to "The Shadow Sea". By late 2010 I was ready to try drawing again and this time the results were far more satisfying. But once more after drawing and inking for several months I realized the story needed more work though I wasn't sure exactly what it needed. So I set the whole project on the back burner to simmer and returned to my painting.

Over the course of the next year I returned to the story several times in an effort to resolve the narrative problems and it was early in 2012 while working one night on yet another complete rewrite that the thought came to me that this story really wanted to be a film. As I said in my first post this revelation carried with it the sense of absolute truth and so I transitioned from writing a graphic novel to writing a screenplay. Incredibly, once I set out on the screenplay path the long sought after narrative solution presented itself to me as if to confirm the decision to turn the project into a film.

When the screenplay was completed in mid-2012 I began to show it around to people whose opinions I trusted and got encouraging feedback and offers to help. My friend Mark Daniels has been an invaluable sounding board, advisor and proponent of the project who also donated equipment that was used to create the first round of footage for the proof-of-concept trailer. Many others have donated their time, energy, talents and ideas to the project as it has moved through the early stages of pre-production, where it currently stands and which I'll write about in the upcoming posts.