Originally posted at project pedal…

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

I thought about going into detail about the night Chuck told me he wanted to make an independent film, I thought about going into detail about the plot of “Love at Last Sight”, or sharing the story of Chuck impulsively buying a Sony Hi-8mm camcorder with his graduation money before we wrote one word of script, or explaining our run-in with the local police during our first day of ‘location-scouting’…

But the two most important points here are: one, it was this moment in my life that sparked an interest in film, maybe an interest that was there all along, maybe film was appealing to me simply because it was an artistic outlet I had yet to explore, whatever the reasons or lack thereof behind my decision, I had no idea of the long-term consequences it would have on my life and my friendship with Chuck. And two, for Chuck, this “commitment” of making a movie together was no more serious – whether he knew this or not - than “…starting a sticker company, stamp-making, or vegetarianism”, although it would take me four years to come to this realization.

But before I get ahead of myself: writing, “Love at Last Sight” was an amazing experience for me. Chuck and I survived off a steady diet of IBC root-beer and ham hot-pockets for three months, staying up every night until 5 in the morning writing, rewriting, and storyboarding. With the help of Kevin, a friend of Chuck’s family, we began working under the name, “Rolling Chair Productions”. The walls of my bedroom where plastered with pages of screenplay and sketches of scene ideas. We would walk the empty streets of my small hometown, Onsted, Michigan, with a pad and pencil, brainstorming the story and fine-tuning our punch lines. We had no idea what we were doing, and we were enjoying every last minute of it.

A year later, half of our actors and actresses had left for college; we had no money to our names – let alone our movie, and only several hours of footage under our belt. “Love at Last Sight”, slowly but surely, fell apart, I’ve always been embarrassed to think that I could have done something to save it – perhaps I was just too young to know how disappointed in myself I would later become – or perhaps I didn’t, at the time, realize how important the experience had become to me. Whatever our reasons for failing at “Love at Last Sight”, “Rolling Chair Productions” was just beginning, but before I can tell the story of Rolling Chair, I have to tell the story of my first bike trip: