The Fire Monkey and the House of Broken Mirrors

After these martial arts students appeared in our Spanish Honor Society Talent Show, I was inspired to script a film that dealt with an undertone of unrest between teachers and administration and where the whole education system was headed.

The script took a few days for me to write, a week or so for my Spanish 4 Honors class to translate, three full days of filming in class, plus 7-10 days outside of class. The anime artwork/animation that was added by a senior student took a few weeks, and editing overall took more than 80 hours. We filmed at normal speed while acting slowly, wiped the sound, then sped the film up to give it that choppy feel, and dubbed ourselves back in. The music score also took some time to produce.

And then, the final piece was to add a tribute to the creator of Ask A Ninja, (see http://www.askaninja.com) We did this because, one, it felt fitting, and two because I’d really credit him as the one who took podcasting to such a level that people noticed tribalism could be profitable with low-budget productions, and when the systems of the day could no longer support his traffic, YouTube was born.