Memory lane: The episode 1 funding miracle

I think it probably takes a lot of faith to make any movie, but especially if you've never made one before.

Back in early 2003, Ken, Aaron and I were sitting around a table in Ruby's Diner in Pasadena at lunch. We decided to stop talking about it and actually pull the trigger on making our movie. We put together a rough budget, and set about raising funds. In a perfect world, we'd wait until we had all of our funding before moving forward. But because it is necessary to put a number of wheels in motion in the hopes that something will actually come of all of it, you sort of just have to plunge in and hope that it all comes together at roughly the right time.

We sought funding from a number of different sources. We had a good start that came via a friend of Aaron's up in Salt Lake City, where Aaron was living most of the time now. But we knew we needed more -- much more. It is a delicate matter discussing funding with family and friends. Certainly out of my comfort zone, but sometimes, when you know it is important, you go outside your comfort zone. And you ask. We put together an investors kit as best we could, but any savvy investor would look at what we were trying to do (make a movie that was somewhere between a short and a feature -- a musical based on a scripture story, no less), who was trying to do it (three inexperienced guys with little more than passion for a project), and probably run the other way.

But many of the people we approached were like-minded. They wanted to actually get involved in making something of good report. So investments came in small amounts. Sometimes $1000, sometimes a couple thousand, occasionally a little more. It takes awhile to raise funds this way, but it was the only way we it was coming.

Still, there comes a point when your scheduled shooting date is looming and you know you don't have enough money to fund the production and you realize that to start the production without enough to finish it would be throwing all the money down the drain. So we set a go/no-go date. This was the date that the money had to be in or we would pull the plug.

On that date, we had two people come forward seemingly out of nowhere with funds. One was an investment of $9,000. The other was an investment from my mother-in-law for $3,000. Both were unexpected. At that stage, we didn't actually know how short we were in being fully funded for the production effort. I think that was because we knew we were so far shy of our mark that we didn't want to know exactly how far. But I remember when we received these two checks, Ken dug in to figure out where we stood. It turns out he calculated that we were precisely $12,000 short until that day -- the precise amount that had come in.

It was one of those miracles that I didn't even realize at the time, but a couple days later, it hit me how amazing the timing was. And it further convinced me that we were participants in something larger than just ourselves, and I felt blessed, as I still do, to be able to be part of this effort.

A couple of weeks later, we began shooting our first Liken movie, which would become "I Will Go and Do," which would later become "Nephi and Laban."