In addition to writing about films for Blogcritics, I make my own films. You can check out my past work at my website Respect! Films. I’ve done a whole bunch of shorts, but last summer, I started thinking about a bigger project, a story that would be feature length or longer. Over the past six months or so, I’ve been working on turning the idea into a reality, and I’m currently about a month away from the launch of the first episode of The Third Age. This column will take you behind the scenes of the project’s creation, from inception to realization, and follow it as episodes start to go live and I try to promote the series.

It would probably be more interesting to hear all this after you’ve seen the first couple of episodes and have an idea of what the series is about. However, I’m going to do my best to tell the behind the scenes story of The Third Age to date, without spoiling major plot points.

People say that every story begins with an idea, a spark of inspiration. I don’t know if that’s how it works for me; there’s usually not a spark, there’s a coalescence of images and moments in my brain. The first thing I saw on this project was a closeup on a woman’s face emerging in a series of brilliant flashbulbs. She was an operative from another dimension fighting for freedom, bringing change to our world. But, what world did she live in, and what brought her here? These are questions that floated around in my brain for a while, until I presented the idea to my friends Jordan Rennert and Steve Deluca.

We’ve known each other for years, and have worked on a number of films together. Hit up my website for a full history of our past work. We went to high school together, and there, we always wanted to do film projects, but rarely wound up doing anything. However, Jordan and I have done a whole bunch of projects over the past five years or so, and now that we had both graduated, we had the opportunity to take on something bigger and more expansive than was possible before.

During the summer, we’d sit out on Steve’s porch and talk about ideas. It was a non-linear conceptual discussion that frequently strayed from the story into various aspects of our own lives, our memories, and also the then airing TV series, John From Cincinnati. Though it’s less overt now than it was then, the DNA of John is ingrained on this project; it feels like a work that takes place in the same universe as Milch’s series.

What I loved about Milch’s series was the fact that he has all manner of crazy sci-fi concepts in the work, but doesn’t treat it as sci-fi — it’s just something that happens to people. Even as a huge fan of the genre, I can understand why people have issue with sci-fi. There’s frequently a distance from real emotion, an emphasis on cool concepts and action over characters. John is a very character-centered show, and I’m hoping that The Third Age will feel the same way. Our structuring point in terms of the narrative isn’t so much a plot as it is the various character arcs, following these peoples’ lives and finding interesting ways for them to interact with each other.