Blood, Sweat, Tears and … ART! A millennial view on creative life and budgeting for it.
Kids have dreams. I’m talking about the “I’m going to do “x-x” when I get older..” type of dreams. You can likely remember some pretty out-there ambitions you had set for yourself from the comfortable age of ‘I-don’t-have-to-work-for-my-food-or-housing’. Now, I’m pretty sure 90% of my fellow millennials not only dreamt of being millionaires but were confident that they’d be one by age 30.
Maybe your father told you like mine told me, that you could be anything in the world. Pondering that, maybe you asked, “Dad, were you ever a movie star?” Surely, if one could be whatever they wanted to be, a movie star would be near the top of the list. “No,” he probably replied like mine did. “Because I found other things that I wanted to do.” Maybe there was more pondering. “Dad, were you ever a musician?” Some people don’t want to be movie stars but damned if they don’t want to be rock stars. “No son. I found other things I wanted to do.” Hmmmm. “Well Dad, were you ever an author? Like a published one?” “No son.” Even though you were skeptical like me, you didn’t doubt Dad’s lesson, you just couldn’t believe he’d found things he wanted to do that were better than being a movie/rock star and author. You, like me, wanted to be all 3.
So, I suppose your Dad wasn’t that suprised when you picked up a guitar in college and started recording music. Or when you sent him your first manuscript for a book you had written, or when you left your first professional job to move to Los Angeles to work in movies.
And I doubt he was too surprised when you asked for that small $5,000 loan to finish post on a film a few years later. Likewise, he probably wasn’t too caught off guard when you had to jump back into the 9–5 to survive and pay back the loan. He wasn’t… but you and I were.
I guess we forgot one important part of the formula when we were young dreamers. Although, we got to grow up and BE a musician, a filmmaker, an author, We didn’t get to BE successful at it. At least not in the universally accepted standard of the word or even a fractional facsimile thereof. We didn’t make a living as creators. We paid to be… and heavily.
Likely, it’s still frustrating to you after 5+ years back in that 9–5 lifestyle. Did we miss some hidden doorway to success? I mean, we’ve passed 30 and there ain’t a million dollars in our bank account. The satisfaction of accomplishment is nearly drowned by the seemingly unnoticed-ness of it all. The effort, the dedication, the will and the financial cost. We know where it went but what was it all for?
… And yet the hunger is still there. The hope. The creative spirit.
So, after letting the exhausted creator sleep for a few years while we slowly put the pennies in the bank, put a ring on the love’s finger and loosened the belt a few holes, WAKE IT UP. Start the whole damn process again, but this time the progress will be exponentially slower and more calculated. Work your job… give it your full attention, put aside a portion of the paycheck for “creative means”. Go home, give home your full attention and THEN… when the rest of the world goes to sleep, work for yourself.
There’s an ever growing budget and no time limit. I mean, we’re already past 30! What’s the rush? Maybe enjoy it this time around. Plus, the longer you spend in development, the more money you can set aside for the work.
Carefully choose partners to share the journey with and add ingredients to the recipe. If you want to BE a creator then you have to CREATE. No matter life’s circumstances, allotted free time, available monies or connections. You just have to find a way. YOUR WAY. Mine looks like 70 hours a week, being a leader, a producer, a boss, a financier and a cheerleader.
GOOD LUCK!
*Zach is currently working on an alternative, wakeboarding graphic novel titled “Shake The Lake”. You can download a free issue of it on the website — www.shakethelakecomic.com
His dad did tell him he could be anything in the world and he aims to be.*
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SYNOPSIS: Cal and his best friends set out to evade adult responsibility and chase the endless summer across the map. They land in Lake Victoria, Arizona, a party oasis in heart of BRO culture. With some mid-west sensibility, the crew unifies the lake’s wake scene and help save a bullied marina from snobby yacht club encroachment through staging a mammoth, end-of-season music and water sports festival against the wishes of the town’s well-to-do and a pair of hard nosed park rangers. Navigating childhood friendship, growing pains, hard work, heartbreak and new love, Cal begins to come to terms with the meaning of growing up while staying young at heart in this fish out of water comedy.
Shake The Lake developed as an idea over the course of an afternoon/evening while brothers Zach and Machi Block sat on lawn chairs, shin deep in the Colorado River near Bullhead City as the River Regatta party crowd let loose around them.
“We were drinking cold beers in the sweltering heat after vending El3vated all afternoon to the thousands of kids who were camped out waiting to float the river the next day. Brian Grubb and a handful of other pro boarders and skaters were winching down this totally awesome but sketch obstacle course and we sat in the river to keep cool in the 100 degree plus heat. We were having a blast and I was struck by this question: ‘How come there’s not a Hollywood movie for this crowd?’ There’s an action sports movie for motocross, skate, ski, snowboard.. you name it. Not only was the wakeboarding industry missing a movie, but to my knowledge there wasn’t a single piece of entertainment media created for the culture.” -ZB
Zach and Machi hashed out the story foundation, main character arcs and major set pieces on the spot.
“It was a really inspired experience because we were right there living in a plot point of our story. We started hashing out a dramatized summation of all these summers we were fortunate enough to live, spent not only growing up on the lake but then turning into young men and chasing our dreams across the country with a clothing company and hanging with amazing people. It was one of those lightning in a bottle moments and we couldn’t wait to get home and put ink to paper.” -MB
Eager to begin writing the story in screenplay form, the brothers turned their garage into a giant, walk-in storyboard, complete with wake magazine cutouts, character notes, thematic point-to-points, story beats and a collection of phrases, industry lingo and lone ideas that needed to be placed somewhere in the work. Their roommates curiously waited weeks to learn the details of the ‘secret project’ which was being worked on night and day behind closed doors. Hundreds of notecards were pinned to the walls containing dialogue, wardrobe notes, character details and all matter of brain dump. The un-worthy ideas were strewn about the floor in a crumpled up mess, occasionally to be picked up, vetted and mostly discarded again.
It took a couple weeks to hone everything but when the garage door opened and two un-shaven, blurry-eyed 20-somethings stumbled out, the core of Shake The Lake was recorded.
“I think we allowed ourselves two or three days to recoup: sleep, eat, watch a movie, and then we drove to Long Beach for the weekend and house sat for a family member and wrote the first draft of the screenplay in a single sitting. AND… it didn’t suck.” -ZB
A pitch deck was created and Shake The Lake was revised 12 times before it was optioned by a credible production studio to be developed into an indie feature film.
After years of ‘development hell’, Zach commissioned an artist to illustrate a collection of story boards and a line producer to create a budget in the hopes that those necessary deliverables would help speed up the process. Resources continued to stack up and Lev Spiro was approached to direct. A team of professional wakeboarder stuntmen and women were consulted and it looked like cameras would roll in the summer of 2013. Then… summer turned to fall, and time as it does, continued to march on.
Haunted by a conviction that the story was worth telling, Zach hired (and fired) a number of comic book artists to draw a sample of pages in the hopes a publisher would greenlight a book deal which would lead back to renewed interest in making a film.
“The process was terrifying to me because I was spending a lot of money on art and had more than one illustrator fail to hit their deadlines and disappear with my down payments. Finally, a perfect match was found in coincidentally, another sibling team. Mexican artists Diego and Andrea Lopez Mata answered my job posting on Pencil Jack and turned in a beautiful render. After being awarded the job, together they inked out the first 36 pages of the Shake The Lake Graphic Novel which became our first of four volumes. Even hitting such a major milestone I was nervous. I didn’t want to overwork them, underwork them, give too much instruction, too little instruction… I didn’t even have the confidence to speak with them face-to-face because we had this beautiful dynamic going through email. I was afraid that the language barrier and/or a missed expectation would throw a wrench in the process so for nearly 5 years we communicated through thousands of emails.
Only after we completely finished Shake The Lake in late 2019 did I video chat with these awesome people who had become my friends. It was a complicated but incredible relationship. Machi and I would compile these encyclopedias of information, character wardrobes, page layouts and I’d draw stick figures and symbols to represent my vision of a frame or page and then a couple weeks later we’d get to see a professional artist’s interpretation… it was exhilarating. “ -ZB
While working on Shake The Lake, Diego and Andrea’s father passed away. They memorialized him by adding an easter egg into the book. 10 points if you can find it!
Shake The Lake can be pre-ordered on the official website — http:www.ShakeTheLakeComic.com or purchased through the followed retailers on March 1st.
- iBooks
- Google Play Store
- Amazon KDP
- Comixology
- Kobo
If you’d like to request a review copy or digital assets to accompany a review please email northairentertainment@gmail.com Don’t forget to spread the word and “Thank You” for supporting indie works.
