This short would be our first completed movie. It was shot after we had started The Devil's Playground the first time. I was in a film production class taught by Gray Frederickson, one of the producers of The Godfather. The purpose of the class was to teach about scheduling and touch upon financing. The finals in the class was to either take a final exam or to complete a short film. I chose to make the film. Most people in the class bunched into groups, many wanting to mooch off other students to get an easy grade. I wanted to do it by myself.

I had no camera, so I had to find someone to help. Coty Cox proved to be that person. He let me use his camera and I gave him a cameo role in the story. I sat down on a Wednesday night and wrote the screenplay. It centered around a self-absorbed director shooting a ridiculous scene of his movie when out of nowhere a redneck idiot shows up and disrupts the entire scene.

I then cast Rob right off the bat to the role as the director. I cast Brandon in his first Starving Dogs role as the main player in the short, Bubba the redneck. I then got the waitress from the bar I worked at and her husband to play the actors in the fake film shoot. They had no experience, so I think they were perfect since the fake film is so ridiculous and over the top anyway.

The day came to shoot the movie and it was amazing. It was sunny, and things - for the first time in a long time - worked out right. Everyone showed up on time. The weather gave us no problems. We went to the park to shoot the movie and I cast Coty as the AD for the fake film and a friend named Richard as an extra in a flash of brilliance Rob and I had at the time of the shoot.

We had a wheelchair to shoot the opening dolly shot. We got the idea to have Rob (the director) sit in the wheelchair while directing. We then cast Richard as his male nurse, basically there just to push Rob to the actors to talk and pull him back to shoot his scenes. We then added improvisation for Rob where he pretty much lambasted Richard, yelling for him to "Push - Push" and to "Pull - Pull." This was all Rob.

The two "actors" were played by Holli Jennings and Chris Jennings. They were not real great, but they worked out good as the actors in the movie. Some people point to them and tell us that they were not good actors, not knowing that was the point to begin with.

Brandon Rush was perfect.

We shot the entire shoot that afternoon and I went home to edit. I learned a lot from that movie. The wind was not noticeable, but when I came home to edit, it messed up the scenes because it sounded so different when we changed directions. This was before we got the shotgun mic. There were also a couple of continuity errors, but I tried to fix it.

We showed the short on the last day of class. Everyone laughed at the right places. They laughed at the jokes. We came up with an idea at the end of the film to have an added scene after the credits finished rolling. It was an idea we came up with at the shoot and when it was shown, everyone laughed and cheered for our little movie.

It had problems. We tried to enter it in a local competition but it was passed on. But it was our first effort and it is something I am proud of. We finished a short and that is something no one can take from us.

It was the beginning.