u/Dangerdogproductions

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A few years ago I was working with a producer on a Viking film. I was excited about it for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest was that I wanted to make it while my firstborn son was still a baby so he could be part of it.

The producer convinced me to wait.

The idea was that instead of making a short, we'd hold off and pursue a feature.

So I did.

Then the deal fell apart.

The producer lost the opportunity, the project died, and I was left realizing I had almost missed my chance to create something with my son at one of the most special times in his life.

Around that same time I was reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. One day my wife came up with an idea that sparked something in me, and that idea eventually became a short film called Do I?

Instead of waiting around for another opportunity, we decided to make it ourselves.

The cast was basically my family. My wife was in it. My son starred in it before he was even a year old. My two stepchildren were involved. My brother helped. My mom and dad helped. It became less of a production and more of a family adventure.

Then came the white contacts.

A few days before shooting, I put them in to test them.

I couldn't see anything.

Not blurry vision. Not reduced vision.

Nothing.

I was completely blind.

At that point, though, I had already committed to the look. It was too important to the character, and I wasn't about to abandon the film because of it.

So I drew a complete storyboard for every shot, memorized the entire movie, and showed up on set prepared to direct while literally blind.

The whole experience was insane.

I'd already built the movie in my head, so the entire shoot became an exercise in trust, planning, and imagination. My family helped guide me around, I relied on the storyboard, and I directed the film based on the movie I had already seen in my mind.

And somehow it worked.

The funny thing is that despite how absurd the situation was, we spent most of the shoot laughing. Nobody was stressed. Nobody was treating it like some grand artistic mission. We were just having fun together and making something creative.

When we finally watched the finished film, we fell in love with it.

The Viking movie never happened.

But honestly, I'm grateful it didn't.

If that feature deal had worked out, I might never have made Do I? I might never have captured my son at that age. I might never have spent that time creating something with my wife, my kids, my brother, and my parents.

The movie I thought I wanted disappeared.

The movie I needed showed up instead.

Looking back, Do I? feels less like a film and more like a time capsule of my family at a moment that can never be recreated.

And that's worth more to me than any deal I almost had.

The film is available on the @dangerdogproductions YouTube Channel! Let me know if you have any similar stories or movies you made instead of original ideas and ended up loving!

Years ago I had this image stuck in my head after seeing a painting on Facebook or somewhere. I couldn't stop thinking about it, so I wrote a short film called The Passenger, inspired by that painting.

The problem was, I had no spaceship.

What I did have was access to a dog grooming salon.

So I convinced a few friends, none of whom had ever made a movie before, to spend a day helping me turn a dog grooming room into the inside of a space pod. We built what we could practically, then I spent weeks layering images, creating digital paintings, and compositing hallways, ship interiors, and exterior space shots together. This was years before AI tools existed, so every effect was done the hard way.

When it was finished, the film ended up playing at the Hollywood Blvd Film Festival, which was an amazing feeling. But if I'm being honest, I thought it would have a much bigger impact than it did.

We had poured so much creativity into solving impossible problems with almost no resources. I thought people would see that and get excited about it.

Most people didn't.

And that ended up being one of the best lessons filmmaking ever taught me.

The audience doesn't know how hard it was. They don't know there were only a handful of people making it. They don't know that a spaceship started life as a dog grooming room. They only experience the finished film.

For a while that was disappointing. Looking back now, it's actually my favorite part of the project.

We made something that shouldn't have existed. We solved problems with creativity instead of money. We laughed through the whole process, and every time I watch it I'm reminded of how much fun we had figuring it out.

I don't think The Passenger got the attention I imagined it would, but I still love it because it represents exactly why I make movies in the first place.

Has anyone else made a film that means a lot to you even though it never found much of an audience? I'd love to hear those stories.

See the film on Youtube @dangerdogproductions

#film #shortfilm #director #zaneluckyhampton #dangerdogproductions