What the heck is Take Zer0?

Is it a community, a blog, an online film school? Is it spelled with an 'oh' or a zero? (hint: zero) Oh, we could go down that route and proclaim, "Take Zer0 is the hopes and dreams of everybody on planet Earth!"

Even Sean and I are stumped to give an answer. Stumped like a tree. I'm sure that question plagues me more. Or maybe it plagues us equally. With the involuntary free time we've been blessed with (i.e. we lost our jobs), I retooled the episodes and finalized the cuts to our old Halloween shorts. Yes, episodes are well on their way, and they've been retooled to be both faster to shoot and to watch. This is the internet, which is like a burly bigot: it'll tell you to go back to where you came from if you don't learn to speak its native language properly. And the internet speaks proper fast.

I made final cuts to "Thing at the End of the Hall" and Drew's "The Trick of the Treat." They're more polished, and encoded at a huge bitrate (if you're into that sorta thing). Back in Halloween, I had just a few hours to cut both by the deadline. Quality was tossed out the window of a moving car. I recently found it lying in the street (by now swept towards the gutter), picked it up, placed it in my coat pocket, and spent last week revising the two shorts, quality now back in my possession. At least a full minute has been excised from each. It was a Hallmark moment, full of an important life lesson: Less is more.

Yet in revisiting those shorts I found myself both impressed and depressed. Impressed because "Trick" was shot in three hours, all improv; and "Thing" was a last-minute germ of a story that made solid use of digital.

As to why I was let down...

Three months back I attempted something naive: to shoot a fifteen minute short inspired by The Twilight Zone...in one night, without a crew. Starring myself. Yes, through a long process, I managed to focus the camera on myself.

It was only a half-decent, half finished short film. I learned a lot; but I don't think I learned it in the easiest way possible. Yet I learned without a compromise. With each project in Take Zer0, I've come upon the revelation that we are not, in fact, teaching anything. We are demonstrating. We're not here to lecture; we don't know how.

But where would it all go from here? And what kind of content, and for whom?

I suppose for any and everybody who cares. About theory, about film, about random goals and dreams. Maybe our identity crisis is a freakishly good thing; because just like there is "no one way to make a movie" there is, likewise, "no one person to make a movie." Perhaps we shouldn't focus on just one quality.

More and more, I prefer to envision Take Zer0 as the guinea pigs of the online cinema scene. We're not quite the martyrs seen in The Lone Filmmaker; we don't quite know our target demographic like Wong Fu Productions; and we're not quite as all-seeing as IndyMogul. We're simply here to do any and everything all at once. Watch us demonstrate film theory; watch us fail; watch us succeed; watch us do it all over again until you get it yourself.

Ambition and persistence. What better model is there?

So Drew emailed me his first draft of "Father Time" (in Celtx format). That's the pilot for a webseries he wrote with a friend from Wisconsin. I am unsure if he would like the plot to be mentioned here, so I'll just say that the story is inspired from H.G. Welles' "The Sleeper Wakes." That's about the guy who falls asleep for two hundred years and wakes up in the future. Yeah, I know...Futurama twisted the formula. "Father Time" is at least way better than "Demolition Man." It's contemporary, with a sitcom approach; though it is in no way a straight-arrow comedy, with a bit of familial turmoil thrown in. I enjoyed it far more than I thought.

I wonder where he'll take the story arc.

I was inspired to open my beat-up spiral notebook, the one that I use to scribble notes for "Clip Show," my own semi-autobiographical webseries in-the-making. I ruffled through the crumpled sheets and discovered this odd little drawing I made. I can't recall if it was sketched in fun, in some coffeeshop, or if it's a genuine scene I took to heart.

And what has Sean been up to as of late? I think he's pursuing a full story for his short film, "Late Morning." He intends to cast the lead role obsessively. I think it's the real deal. According to his Twitter he purchased an album off of iTunes, as inspiration for writing. Hmmm. Could he have gotten it off AmazonMP3 for cheaper, with no copy protection, and at a higher bitrate? Yep.

S'true.

As for me, well, that drawing certainly gives me an idea...