[Originally posted at projectpedal.com]

Sorry it’s been so long since my last post, but in my defense I do have a semi-excusable reason: six days ago I began writing a “short” story covering the last five years of my life. It’s over six pages long and I’m still not done, but rather than neglect the site for another day, I just figured I would break the story up into several “chapters”. So, here it is:


There isn’t a whole lot of breaking-news to report on the progress of the film at the moment – maybe a few little things here and there, but nothing too exciting. So, instead, I thought I’d take advantage of this downtime to do something I’ve wanted to do for a long, long time on the site…

So much of this site focuses on the technical aspects of this project, on the “what, where and the when” and not enough of the “who and the why”, when that’s probably what people are most interested in – the personal side of a film, the side we most rarely get to see. I guess a good way to start is to explain how I got to this moment:

To tell the story of ‘project pedal’, I first have to tell you the story of “love at last sight”, but before I do that… I have to tell you about my senior year of graphic design school in Adrian, Michigan – that’s where everything started.

I took graphic design for two reasons, the first being; it got me out of school for three hours a day, and the second being; I loved art but hated my art teacher, Mrs. L’ – hate is a strong word to use, I simply didn’t get along with Mrs. L’, it was her teaching methods I hated. Even though this was my second year in the graphics-program, I didn’t know anyone in the class. I had procrastinated re-applying for the course my junior year and therefore; barely made the list for the evening class. It was hard to make new friends - the class only took in 20-25 students - 90% of them from the evening class the year before – everyone was all ready settled in their little clicks. The only downside to the class was the teacher, Mrs. C’, now unlike Mrs. L’, Mrs. C’ never taught or attempted to teach her students anything – and as strange and unbelievable as that might sound – it’s the truth, but this wasn’t the downside – if anything her lack of interest in her students was the class’s biggest asset, the downside was Mrs. C’s business. She ran a graphic’s sweatshop out of her classroom, forcing her students to collate thousands and thousands of pages of booklets for hours at a time; she even had a handful of brownnosers designing restaurant menus, instructional pamphlets, etc., for a grade while she brought home the money. But this is all slightly beside the point – just an interesting background detail of graphic design, which is where I met Chuck, and Chuck is the person who started it all…

One day, months into the class, I noticed Chuck sitting quietly by himself at a table in the back, hunched over a large piece of poster-board – this was strange and out of place mostly because Chuck was never quiet or by himself, he was constantly the center of attention in the class; loudly cracking jokes or spouting off quotes from the Simpson’s - when I sat down next to him I saw he was using a meter-ruler to carefully draw very thin, perfectly parallel vertical-lines on the paper, it looked as though he had been drawing straight-lines for a few days – and he was only half-way done, it reminded me of Mrs. L’s mind-numbingly boring “art” projects, I asked, “what’cha doing?”, and those were the first words I ever said to Chuck.

Out of the 30 or so computers in the class, I had managed to stumble onto one that had the animation program, Maya, installed on it. Mrs. C’ couldn’t tell me why it was there or how to use it, but for whatever reason, everyday I came in the class and went straight to that computer – slowly teaching myself the program. After three weeks of baby-steps, I knew enough to begin a short project, I choose to animate a pod-race - despite my dislike for George Lucas, but that’s a different story for a different time - I choose the pod-race mostly because I couldn’t animate movable-objects [people] and I couldn’t figure out a way to rotate tires automatically on objects. So, I limited myself to solid-floating objects, and everyone just assumed they were Star-Wars pod-racers. After weeks of animating the project, I started exporting short QuickTime clips of basic wire-frames in action, it was then that people started to take notice in what I was doing – peaking over my shoulder as I scrubbed through the timeline, and it was then that Chuck walked over and asked, “what’cha doing”. This was the second time that Chuck and I talked during the class.

After that, we started going to SubWay after graphic’s-class, or skipping school all together to water-ski at Heidi’s, a girl I was interested in from class, the three of us became inseparable almost instantly. But still there was no open-interest in film between Chuck and I, most of our time was spent fearing graduation and discussing the “rest of our lives”. Chuck was always “committed” to something new, whether it was: Catholicism, zines, squatting, homelessness, train-hoping across the country, politics, Buddhism, running, stamp-making, growing his hair out for Locks-of-Love, vegetarianism, taking a vow-of-silence, aggressive-inline-skating, starting a sticker company, etc… and it was this eccentric characteristic that I was most drawn to in the beginning – but in the end it would be this characteristic that would drive a wedge in our friendship.


This was the beginning of our friendship – the end of graphic design school – and “the rest of our lives” - which brings us to “Love at Last Sight”: