#006 DRAGON|SUNRISE|ANARCHY

A NYC mayor who is young AF. A “girl in the chair” who falls for people too easily. A 20-something-year-old arsonist-in-the-making looking for a new place.  A troubled college student struggling with his psyche. A katana-wielding woman with a vendetta.

This is how I’d describe the main characters in what ended up being the last college-era project that I directed.

March ‘19. A short film I was writing about a talented artist trying to crossover into the US music scene had finally hit (amateur) development hell. I wasn’t ready to give up on trying to make this project work, but the semester was almost over, and it was important for me to actually see through a project that year. So I hit pause on that script and shifted my attention towards my classes, in hopes of finding new inspiration.

That lasted all but a few days, when the professor in some producing class I was taking decided to show us a couple of episodes from the web series versions of both Broad City and High Maintenance. Something about the simplicity of the former struck a chord, so I broke out the notebook.

The episode topics started flowing like crazy. I imagined a show with 4 or 5 characters, all friends, interacting with one another in different combinations, with no more than two per episode. It was simple; the episodes could be about anything, and it certainly sounded low-budget.

But then I thought — what if there was a purpose to the show?

Suddenly, that low-budget sketch series sounded shallow and uninteresting. I immediately started thinking of ideas on how to turn this into a serialized project that was funny but intentional. So naturally, I took a page out of my own book and decided to take inspiration from that TV show Arrow yet again.

Spring ‘17. My freshman year. I took an idea I came up with in high school about a loan shark who hunted people down for very small amounts of money he lent out, and turned it into an action-comedy short that was very blatantly influenced by early seasons of that show that I loved, but was frequently let down by.

So naturally, I wanted to parody / straight up imitate the show once more, this time referencing the political aspects of a later season by writing my character to (somehow) be the mayor of New York. He was originally going to (somehow) be an architect, but I thought that playing a mayor instead would be less cartoonish. I even wrote my character to have a son who was his age, a dynamic that was ridiculous as much as it was enjoyable to play.

Going back to the whole rotating cast idea, I started writing the web series in a way that each of the main characters could alternate when they’re the A-character. Everyone had their moments to “shine.” Did I personally shine as an actor? Abso-fucking-NOT-lutely. Out of the 7 characters we had, I was maybe in the Top 10. Wearing too many hats throughout this production was the EXACT reason why my acting was flat. No rehearsals due to busy schedules, a near-zero percent attempt to memorize the lines on my part, and having a thousand things running through my head were (and still are) my go-to excuses for my performance in the series.

It was the same story during post-production, too. I knew I was 100% going to edit the whole thing myself, and I already had an old friend scheduled to provide the music for it. But given my all-or-nothing approach to creativity, I decided to handle the graphics, sound design, and mixing/mastering (if you can even call it that) too. After our multi-weekend shoot in the summer, I spent the following months trying to comb through post-production. It was time-consuming, to say the least. A lot of experimentation, research, and wild ideas went into it. Everything from distorting the sound of the fan in my room to create a harrowing, thumping sound for the psychologically f*cked episode 1x04, to the quick back-and-forth cutting in 1x08 was done with the very hands that wrote (err-typed) this post.

But so was the low mix of the audio. Especially the failure to clean up the sound on the outdoor scenes better. And ESPECIALLY my neglect to cut around my awful acting throughout 1x01 and 1x06.

There was a lot of what I guess you could call inside jokes in the series, some of which were so specific that maybe three people in my close vicinity at the time woulda got. Sometimes it felt like the series had a hidden gem feel to it. Other times, it felt like one weird, self-serving project to see how much I could laugh at my own jokes.

But I do think that it was key to my own artistic journey. To literally take a project from an idea in my head and oversee virtually every step of the development, it was the most time-consuming, egregious, expensive, and content-heavy project I’ve done. It taught me how valuable an Assistant Director would have been, how vital rehearsals are (especially when you’re acting too), and how overrated filming at Riverside Park was.

After about a year of having the series posted online, entered in a few festivals, and promoted on social media, I took it down. Post-grad me had trouble reconciling the aspiring filmmaker in me with the holy shit, I actually need to make money now me, and I hit a hard pause on my pursuit of narrative work. I swapped out the comedy skits with corporate testimonials, action shorts with commercials for random brands. It really wasn’t until the last year or two, when life reminded me how precious and fun filmmaking was.

I found myself pulling up the script to that musician short again, and started writing it over from scratch (more on that in the future, I hope). Although I was ready to put the director's hat back on and finally make that short, I was out of practice. So, I pivoted towards writing something else that I could do as a warm-up to this more elaborate story.

In the six months I spent in pre-production for this new idea, I finally gave myself the chance to rewatch DRAGON|SUNRISE|ANARCHY for the first time in 5-ish years.

I almost forgot how much I enjoyed it as a whole. So much so that my nostalgic-ass started searching for the pitch deck and early Season 2 drafts I wrote back in 2020, something that was going to happen, until the pandemic hit. That season would’ve also (unfortunately) taken inspiration from that show, too, given that I was planning on establishing a multiverse for all my projects. (Half the actors in the series were friends I’d worked with in the years prior.) Even just reading the scripts for S2 had me bummed out about some of the wild bits we never produced.

I could continue roasting my inconsistent acting in the series, my subpar sound editing, or talk about how Hasan Minhaj walked by our set and we failed to recruit him for a cameo. I have no problem doing that. But I really just wanted to take the opportunity to give D|S|A some flowers. As I enter post production for my latest short, HBD, i hope ur nightmares come tru, I look back on D|S|A not just as some student project, but as a reminder of the joy and satisfaction that filmmaking brings.

…And how good my hair looked in the show. I think.