Rui Lopes is a fine art photographer with a great eye for detail and an uncanny ability to find the soul of a place or a moment. He also happens to be my uncle.

One of the influences which led to the idea of taking first shot submissions from the public is my participation in the Toronto Film Challenge. The challenge being: to shoot and deliver an entire short film in 48 hours, starting without even so much as a script. At the start of the countdown the organisers assigned each crew some required seed material at random, like props that must appear or mandatory locations — a method not so different from starting with somebody else's first shot. And it reminded me that there is a paradoxical freedom in giving up a measure of control.

I would tell you that our approach to the Challenge was unusual. But that would be an understatement.

The 48-hour Toronto Film Challenge is over. We did it. We built our wooden-winged contraption and then we all piled into it at once and rolled it off a cliff. Did it fly? Or did it crash and burn? What it did most certainly was provide us with an incredibly intense, rollercoaster weekend of creativity, and although we didn't end up qualifying for any prizes due to a last-minute technical glitch that delayed our submission, that doesn't change at all what we achieved.

I've discovered that it's unsettling to roll all the innards of one's writing process out on a whiteboard for six people to contemplate. I've explained aspects of it often enough without even breaking a sweat, but when it came time set the whole thing out clinically in black and white for fellow artists, I turned out to be pretty nervous about it. I didn't think I would be. Some part of me must still fear, even after all the years spent developing my narrative ideas, that pulling aside this particular curtain will reveal me to be a shrivelled old man with a smoke machine.

I suppose it's a sort of dissection anxiety. Maybe after seeing it clearly from the inside, my writing will feel less alive in some way. But there is nothing for it now but to let it all hang out. It's required of me, by our approach to the Toronto Film Challenge.

What follows are examples of works I wrote in the earliest days of using the narrative structure to be explained in an upcoming post. I have reproduced here two poems and a story. The poems are not even close to my best: all of my later more mature poetry was lost in a hard drive crash. The first poem, 'Truth', was selected for the clarity of the narrative in it, even though I'm not very fond of it at all. The second, 'Three Hands on the Wheel', I selected as more representative of my poetry in general, and as an example of what it can be like when the narrative elements are far more submerged in the imagery. The short story, 'Mixed Company,' is a very short slice-of-life piece, and it's a good example of how subtly the narrative structure can be wielded if one wishes.

Our film challenge outfit made an auspicious debut this Sunday evening at Pauper's Pub. We managed to muster six of our ten members for this meeting. That's actually not too bad. I've seen worse. Two of the remaining four notified me in advance that they couldn't make it. The third tried very hard to be there but got delayed so long by a student film shoot that it became pointless to attend. The last seems to have dropped out of human contact since being chosen for the team.

First of all, I'm not calling our Toronto Film Challenge team a 'team' anymore, because to constantly refer to a film crew as a 'team' is to make the same verbal turn that spun a series of amateur short film screenings into a 'gala'. A philosopher once said that if you gaze too long into the gala, the gala also gazes into you. (Or something very like it.)

So our producer and I have decided what kind of an 'outfit' we will need to pull off this one shot operation. We plan to spend the entire first 24 hours of the Challenge just improvising variations with the actors in different combinations until we come up with a story that resonates for them. To make this method work, we have reduced the off-camera crew to a bare bones life-support system for as large a troupe of improv-trained actors as possible. Any function that can be dumped to make way for an actor, has been dumped. Which is why it shouldn't reflect negatively on anyone that we couldn't fit their skills into this narrow trench. We have omitted from the outfit an awful lot of talent in music and animation (neither of which we could afford as priorities), and a lot of acting talent too (but with just a little bit less experience improvising on camera). I wish I didn't have to leave out anyone, and I really appreciate the way each of you 'future networking opportunities' volunteered a commitment without even knowing if it could be accepted.

In the waning days of the last millenium, a few of us got together to rehearse for a script written and directed by Sean Lewis. Shot on location, the rehearsals ranged through the city streets between our loft apartment and our writing office, and they were each recorded in a single take—one shot, every time.

There is no final version, but the progress in performance and camerawork in just five complete runthroughs is a small taste of what we could achieve in the course of dozens of iterations over the 48 hours of the coming Toronto Film Challenge. See the previous post below for details.

When you're 25 years old, you have a secret (or not so secret) theory of what you might become, and where, and how. It's a naive theory, no doubt, but it has all the seductive power of the self-made myth. Your suspicions about yourself brim over, begging to be confirmed--and you have no evidence that they won't be confirmed. All you've got is a long swath of time and desire to imagine and seek out opportunities to be tested.

When you're 35 years old, things have changed. You've already tabled most of your spare time as a bargaining chip to try to negotiate your way into a serious relationship as well as something resembling a career. And it was worth it. Because you just aren't so interested anymore in spending much time thinking about the Theory of You. You tell yourself that you can't afford to navel-gaze, but that's not it. The hypothesis itself has changed. It's been falsified, at least in part, by your relentlessly unhypothetical life. And you don't necessarily feel all that good about it.

Well you should, because a 25-year-old's idea of who they will be is boldly, enthusiastically wrong. They will fire themselves off with great speed and intensity and it will all look very cool, but they won't have a clue what they're aiming at. Collateral damage abounds in those years, and friendly fire is a real problem. But you've been through this hail of random bullets and you're still standing. And in the future, you will choose your targets more carefully.

But what if there were an opportunity for you to have it both ways? To combine the benefits of experience with the urgency of innocence? I think there might just be such an opportunity in the 48-hour Toronto Film Challenge, and I invite you to join the 'die hard' team of creatives we're assembling for the attempt if you're still interested after reading how and why we're doing it.