Nov. 30 - written by Christopher Rohan

#1: My Story

I grew up on a virtual frontier. The 80s and 90s were many things, but to a boy like me they were filled with the flashing lights of a TV screen, triangular facial features, and the world-changing transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional renderings of all my favorite heroes. There is a part of me that is slightly embarrassed to share that, because another part of growing up in my generation was that gamers were not popular in the slightest. In addition, gamers were always told they were wasting their time and rotting their brains. I’ll be honest, as an adult, I get what they were saying. We’re not granted knowledge of what if, but I do wonder what my brain would be like today if I hadn’t stared at a screen so much.

If you threw a book in front of me in my adolescence, I would have groaned at how much work it was. I may have been undiagnosed attention deficit, and still today, but I made and I make due. I would spend countless hours over those years (sorry mom) walking, running, and battling through grand, sweeping countrysides. As I grew older, the worlds and characters only became more epic in scale and detail. At that point, I was in completely.

In addition, I was a movie lover. Whenever I could I was watching all of the worst 90s classics that exist. I wont mention any names, but, my goodness, there was a lot of junk. More than that, I also watched a fair share of good films, but if they were too serious I had a hard time with them. The original Star Wars Trilogy (before they had episode numbers, by the way) completely swept me away. Luke Skywalker, regardless of any rendering of that character, is and will always be my favorite Jedi. He is altogether beyond all the rest. When the prequels were announced I was in middle school and I felt like my life was complete, until episode two’s title was released. I loathed that title. However, the first novel length book I ever read, as far as I can remember, was the novelization of “The Phantom Menace”. I loved every word, though it still wasn’t enough to compel me to read anything else. It just shows how in love I was with the galaxy far, far away.

It wasn’t until a man—a New Zealander man, you may know him—named Peter Jackson came along and poured every bit of his soul, his wits, his friends, and his studio’s money into making the ever-honored Lord of the Rings film trilogy that my love began to change.

I watched the first of the three, “Fellowship” as everyone refers to it, and that one watching changed everything. It came out the Christmas of my junior year in high school. After it went to DVD, I bought it and watched it once a week. It didn’t take long before a friend at school mentioned reading the books and I realized that I just wanted to know more about these characters and this world. I read them within a couple months, and yes, I am bragging about that. You may think it unimpressive, but that just means that you didn’t know the kid I was before. My new record for reading the trilogy currently sits at three and a half weeks and that’s just because I always have a difficult time with second books. I believe I read “Return of the King” in two days. Boom.

Regardless, those movies changed my trajectory. Out of high school, the only path that made any sense was video game development, so that’s what I started doing. The trouble was how dissatisfied I felt doing it. I found myself exploring filmmaking on the side with a good friend of mine. At first, being the youngest child in my family, I was convinced that I should be center stage, and I wanted to be an actor. 

I had never done it before, but I watched a lot of “Inside the Actor Studio”, and I thought,  “How hard could it be?” It’s hard. Now, one might think that the most difficult part is all the technical stuff, researching your character, understanding them, memorizing lines, practicing voice and prescience, but no. The most difficult part is letting go of your fear. One of the most beneficial things I took away from my time studying acting was a proper perspective of nervousness, but I’ll save that lesson for another time.

However, it didn’t take long before I realized that, while acting was fine, I really wanted to direct and produce. I loved the work of seeing the whole story come together, from figuring out how to make a scene work with no budget, to scouting locations, and helping actors discover the depth of interconnectedness they had with their character. I loved all of it, but it all came to an end very early in our endeavors.

What really broke up the band was simple time and money, which is lame. Two guys just out of high school, working full time jobs and only being able to shoot at night means everything is dark and brooding. Every scene would have to be shot under a street lamp or interior incandescence. A non-existent budget makes for creative filmmakers, however, and, honestly, I think we could have done something noteworthy.

I would learn here my love for writing. Screenwriting is wild. There is no filler. Every word  is essential to what is on screen. There is no fluff. The reason being that, while the writer has a lot to say in the movement of the characters and scene, the director steps in along with the cinematographer and the actors—sometimes these are the same people, like in our meager productions—and they all have a say in the artistic expression. It is very difficult to create a feature film by yourself, and everyone has to be on board with the direction of the project, otherwise the work will suffer. I may return to screenwriting at some point. It’s fun and I love the way a good movie stirs the soul. We’ll see.

Now, I am a lover of context. It might just be reactionary due to our culture’s tendancy to separate a word from its sentence and a sentence from its paragraph to make it say whatever we’d prefer it say, for good or ill, but I often sit in moments of introspection and wonder at my journey. When I was young this just sat as a great discontent weighing on my chest, but due to physiology having its way, may chest grew stronger and my brain developed the ability to see in the abstract. I started to see beyond simple delineations to the bigger picture.

It was in this space that I discovered what I loved most about all these things: Story. Video games pulled me into another world and I got to adventure as a hero called to a grand quest. Movies pulled at my heart and helped me to see the world through the eyes of another. Books enraptured me completely. Have you ever wept at the closing of a book? You can live a life with these characters and the end comes and grief is all that’s left. It feels like you’ve lost a friend. Everything inside of you craves more, but I wonder, in demanding more do we cause it to be stretched too far until it’s just a shadow of what is was, like Bilbo.

I love that The Lord of the Rings ends with the parting of friends. Tolkien just understood the depth and significance of story. In Frodo, Bilbo, and Gandalf saying goodbye we not only say goodbye ourselves, but we also walk away feeling as though we have friends in Sam, Merry, and Pippin to comfort us. 

It comes to it, I love story and always have. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Everything I know about people is that everyone does. We may differ on how we prefer to experience a story, but we all love it. I write it. I am a storyteller.