Cinematographic History
The Great Suburban Robbery (2009)
In an effort to gain extra credit in History class, we decided to make our first short feature film: a recreation of The Great Train Robbery (1903), which was the first movie to premiere in public theater.
The clear issue was that we had no access to trains, horses, or cowboy costumes, so we went with what we already had: Charlie Brown, Michael Jackson, and Ron Weasley costumes.
Taylor had been selected to dance the Michael Jackson part in the yearly Thriller performance, Spencer had recently landed the lead in You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, and Anthony had a 'Team Ron Weasley' outfit because he's a goober with a mom and a vinyl machine.
The result was The Great Suburban Robbery ("suburban" here meaning the SUV, not the characteristic adjective describing an outlying residential district of a city. Although, the latter would also technically be accurate...), a one-time production that quickly needed a sequel to explain things.
Through a series of hoops we jumped in an effort to make it coherent, the story acquired a convoluted back-story, set in a complicated alternate universe with rules, timelines, and laws of physics non-existent in our own (Michael Jackson takes a bullet to the face and continues fighting).
​The story's relation to The Great Train Robbery became so muddled to the point that the heroes and villains had swapped roles, the treasure for which they battled was a daily vocabulary calendar, and animate gingerbread men were apparently the cogs of society. Despite all this, Ms. Dempewolf somehow allowed it to be shown in class - all eighteen minutes of it - and for some reason we never got any extra credit like we had hoped.
What we got instead was a universe.
VOCAB WARS (2010)
Thanks to our hodgepodge cast and convoluted backstory to explain it, The Great Suburban Robbery raised a lot of questions. Just how do Michael Jackson, Charlie Brown, and Ron Weasley exist as companions in this world? Why were they stealing this vocab calendar, and who is this Agent Malone hunting them down?
To answer these questions, but mostly to
satisfy the ego trip we were on, we got together with our other friends, got Taylor's sister Lindsay to produce it, pooled our resources, and made a sequel. The 40 minute short film that resulted was Vocab Wars Episode II: The Bandits Strike Back, and it raised more questions than it answered.
(Watch the complete saga here)
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With prophecies and oracles, mighty villains that remind us a lot of the Emperor and Darth Vader, the bandits now dubbed as "the Chosen Ones," and introducing an entourage of additional main characters including (but not limited to) Jack Sparrow, Abraham Lincoln, Lady Macbeth, and the charming Prince Charming, the second installment of Vocab Wars was an absolute mess - but we loved putting it together!
I think that's what we liked the most about making movies. It wasn't about putting together an excellent product. It wasn't about good story, good acting, and it especially wasn't about good CGI! We just had a blast spending time with friends and with each other.
​Together, we birthed a concept in our brains and saw it come to fruition. We made it work.
We even had a number of crisis situations along the way, including a complete iMovie
crash and destruction of our project three days from our deadline, corrupted footage that was salvaged with an online video converter (water marks had to be cropped out), lost audio, frozen images, and two whole scenes that were never filmed due to lost time and a premiere deadline.
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We worked non-stop for 36 hours to get everything figured out on time, and that's when we realized something about ourselves. This was the day we realized that when it came to our movie, sleep came second. Food came second. Our precious summer vacation came second. We threw our lives at this stupid video!
And even though it came out terrible, it didn't matter.
​Because we felt freakin awesome. We were super rad.
Vocab Wars Episode III:
Wrath of the Super Rad (The Lost Episode)
The summer of 2010 was spent filming and editing Vocab Wars Episode II, but there was a third episode planned that summer as well. At the time, it had a working title of Vocab Wars Episode III: The Last Crusade, and due to the fact that filming always takes way longer than you expect, production for this third installment was pushed to the following summer.
That school year was spent planning this next super production. As our screenwriter and producer, Lindsay Yorgason, had left to Virginia and was quite preoccupied with finding a life companion, Anthony, Spencer, and Taylor were left to write the script themselves. By means of class writing projects, vocab tests, and other extra-curricular endeavors, we all pooled our efforts together to construct the epic finale to our beloved saga.
But nobody told that to our cast.
We had about a third of a script written when we received word from Micah Worwood (Agent Malone), in an announcement that shocked the world, that in May of that year he would by leaving friends and family on an LDS mission to Anchorage, Alaska, where he would spend the duration of the next two years crying repentance in the frozen tundra. The Vocab Wars saga was nothing without its star super villain, and so Vocab Wars sadly came to an unexpected end.
At the time we planned to finish it someday, maybe when we had all completed our missions. But to this day, Vocab Wars has remained an incomplete, cliff-hanging epic.
​Instead, we moved on to writing musical parodies, and THAT is when the Broken Toothpicks and Chosen Ones Productions came to be.
(yup, still more!)