Once Upon a Holocron, part 1

Martin and I go way back. We met in gym class at Mt. Lebanon Senior High School during our junior year. We were the only two dorks in the class that wouldn’t take their shirts off in the pool. Though that was not the trait that would carry us into a lasting friendship, it was at least enough to give us a reason to talk. It didn’t take long to find out that both of us were raging Star Wars nerds shared a passion for Star Wars. This was after the Original Trilogy had been re-released and shortly before Episode 1: The Phantom Menace premiered, so it was easy to tell who all the other Star Wars fanatics were as it was difficult for them to contain their excitement.

We eventually started hanging out (when I wasn’t grounded due to bad grades) and quickly grew to be good friends. One night during our senior year, we went to go see our brothers perform in the Evening Theater Company’s rendition of Our Town. I can’t say that I really remember the play specifically, but I do remember expressing to Martin during the intermission that I had gotten the performance bug, and that I thought that we should choreograph a sword fight. I can’t remember now whether or not I had mentioned lightsabers specifically at the time, but it wasn’t long before Martin had convinced me that we could shoot the fight and add the lightsaber blades in afterwards using a program called Photoshop. With no experience in fight choreography or special effects, we decided that this was a good idea.

Fast forward through some love blindness and the hellacious experience that was Bye Bye Birdie, and we arrive at the end of the school year, close to our graduation. I was in a sci-fi literature class and our final project was pretty much to just create some sort of sci-fi work. Martin, our friend Kaye (who had bought into the whole fight scene thing that now had more story to it, and also happened to be in this sci-fi class as well) and I decided to use this opportunity to actually film this thing that we’d been working on for months. Holy crap, it was bad! I don’t remember whether it was Martin or I that came up with the script that we shot, but it actually ended with me trying to dramatically say the line “I couldn’t kill my own brother.” with a straight face. The fight scene wasn’t so bad. The costumes could have used some work, though. I was in a black t-shirt and jeans. The shirt had an image of Darth Maul with his double-edged lightsaber and some probe droids on the front, and the words “JEDI DO NOT CONCERN ME” on the back. Martin was in his Neo Maximus outfit. It was a dark grey trench coat with the sleeves and a majority of the lower half cut off. 7-inch-long vertical slits were cut 3 inches apart into what remained of the coat below the waist, creating the appearance of the garment that Maximus wore in the arena in Gladiator. If memory serves me correctly, there were washers dangling from the bottom of every strip, too. It was awesome. In the end, Kaye and I both got awesome grades for that project, creatively titled The Loq Drodn Project, and the characters Dregr Jarrat, Tyna Chik and Loq Drodn were all finally brought to life for the first time.

Soon after that, we all graduated. Fate of the Academy, as The Loq Drodn Project had come to be known, was in a precarious spot. We didn’t have a script, or even a concrete story, but we wanted to see something come of our efforts before I moved to Austin, Texas in a month and a half. We decided that we would do what we could  to film a movie trailer for a film that would never be… or, at least wouldn’t be before I moved. We both enlisted the aid of our mothers to help us fabricate better costumes. Martin’s ended up better than mine. I looked like I was going to prom in a cool cape.  He had Jedi Robes, though they closely resembled what you might expect to see Moses parting large bodies of water in.

We spent a whole day filming out in the woods. Martin was quite  the trooper. We were out there filming just a couple days after he  had undergone surgery to have one of his organs removed. Yes, we filmed Martin roaming the woods like a yeti in Moses robes while sticks and branches poked at his yet-unhealed stitches, and that was the easy part. He did all of our fight scenes, too. Our  brothers were there as well. Mark donned his brother Martin’s Neo Maximus coat while my brother, Daniel wore a tan bathrobe with the sleeves rolled up. This was quite a classy effort. We did the best we could and had a fun time. No dialogue this time, just action shots.

I departed Pittsburgh soon after with all of my stuff. Retrospectively, I feel ashamed that I all but abandoned the project that Martin and I poured so much time and energy into for the past year. I was too shaken to feel that way at the time, though. It’s not that I was frightened, but it was a new way of living after that. I had a job working at an ER. I had a car that allowed me the freedom to go where I wanted to go, when I wanted to go there. I had spending money. Most of all, though, I was living with my Dad, who I had only visited since the age of 2. The fan film was definitely still on my mind, but I didn’t work on it very much for the first year that I lived in Austin.

This is the end of side A. The story continues on side B of this cassette.

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