Seanchai is the title of the film we’ve been working on since March. It’s actually pronounced shen-icky and is the Gaelic word for storyteller.
And, most importantly, it’s almost done! We’ve reached the final stretch of editing. After this it’s submissions to film festivals (followed, no doubt, by crushing rejection. I know filmmakers are supposed to have a thick skin, but said rejections will likely reduce me to a blubbering mess).
In any case, I thought it would be an appropriate time to share how this film actually happened. It’s a story that stretches way beyond last March. It’s also a very long story so I thought it best to divide it into parts.
Welcome to part one!
It all started just under a year ago, when I half-heartedly applied to go to the Slamdance film festival with Real Ideas Studio, a program I had been with previously. I wasn’t all too keen on heading to Utah for 10 days, but I thought it would be a good opportunity and as my prospects for travel at that point were lacking, at least it was an excuse to get out of the country for a few days.
Unfortunately, due to lack of interest in the program, the Slamdance program was cancelled. Totally unexpectedly, I was seriously upset by this. How was it that so many of my friends could be off having the times of their lives halfway around the world, and I couldn’t even go to Utah??
As I was explaining this to my school friends, Jer and Alex, over breakfast after filming the local zombie walk, someone floated the suggestion of going to the festival ourselves.
Note: Normally this would be the kind of idea that everyone at the table agrees to, but no one has the true intention of actually following up on. Someone makes the suggestion, everyone agrees with exclamations of “oh! That would be such fun! Let’s do that!” And the idea rests, never to be dredged up again. Not so, in this case.
(I should also mention that Jer and Alex have this ability to take a truly insane idea and run with it until I’m convinced that it’s actually a good idea.)
So the idea of going to the festival ourselves was planted, and sat insidiously in the backs of our minds for the next month, when, in class one night, it was brought up again.
Jer: “So, are we going to Slamdance?”
Me: “Sure….How are we gonna get there?”
Alex: “I don’t know…drive? It’s not that far. And it will be cheap.”
And that was it. Those five short sentences were the extent of our discussion on the pros and cons of driving more than halfway across the continent in the dead of winter.
I don’t know what made me do it. But ignoring the best intentioned advice from my parents, friends and (justifiably) concerned boyfriend, I started to plan a cross-country trip with two guys I had more-or-less just met, to go film a film festival we didn't know much about in a place we had never been.
Brilliant.
Needless to say, the date of our departure rolled around rather quickly, and after promising said concerned friends, family and boyfriend that I would keep in touch regularly to assure them that I was not dead on the side of the road somewhere in rural Nebraska, we left for Utah. 
This is what 36 hours of driving looks like.
I started the journey squished in the back of Alex’s Subaru Outback, trying to find room amidst the military issue blankets, camera case and mysteriously large, heavy bag (I was later assured that this was, in fact, Jeremy’s satchel).
About halfway to Toronto, I realized that I didn’t really have a good grasp of where we were going.
Me: “Can I see the map?”
Jer: *Looks in glove compartment* “Where’s the map?”
Alex: “We don’t have one. I plotted our trip on my iPhone”
Me: "..."We crossed the border at Detroit and experienced only the tiniest of glitches when the border guard did not believe that we were travelling for pleasure, given the large amount of professional looking film equipment we packed with us. This resulted in having the car thoroughly searched at the border. Once we got everything back together, we were again on our way.
We continued to drive, pausing only to consume some terrible diner food somewhere close to Flint, Michigan.
After the boys had taken a post-dinner run around the parking lot, we continued driving. As we headed further into the US, the weather took a turn for the slightly less-than-awesome. This was late January, after all. But we pressed on.
Eventually we started to notice car after car in the ditch on the side of the road. There were also several transport trucks that had gone off the road, some facing the entirely wrong direction.
We were slightly puzzled by this, seeing as how not one of us had noticed that the weather was particularly bad. You have to be from Ottawa to understand this. But we have an incredibly high tolerance for shitty weather. So, chalking up the cars-in-ditch situation to American’s not knowing how to drive in the winter, we kept driving.
Eventually, we pulled over at a highway truck stop, just after crossing the border into Nebraska. And this wasn't one of those cushy truck stops, with washrooms, food and light.
No.
This was a desolate stretch of road, somewhat offset from the main highway, the purpose of which was to provide tired truck drivers with a place to pull over for an hour or two.
To this day I don’t know what possessed me to agree to stop there. Perhaps it was a combination of exhaustion and really terrible food, but I didn’t even bat an eyelash when Alex pulled off the road at around 3:30 am.
I should have been frightened of a great number of things that night. These included:
-Being squashed and horribly mangled by a gigantic transport truck, driven by a sleepy truck driver unable to see our car in the darkness
-Being attacked by rogue Nebraska cowboys (this particular danger was brought to my attention after the fact)
-Freezing to death.
Yes, in the middle of January, we slept on the side of the road, in a car, with nothing but slightly warm-ish blankets to save us from dying a slow, ice cube-ish death.
Through a combination of luck and neuroses, I woke up the next morning relatively unscathed.
And our journey continued on.
Now, I mentioned above we had just entered Nebraska when we pulled over. There is nothing in Nebraska. Seriously. It is flat, and because it was January, the entire state was a white-ish-brown-ish-grey colour. There are no distinguishing features in the entire state. So we drove. Through a horrid vortex of white-ish-brown-ish-grey flatness and finally emerged into the glory of Wyoming.
At this point, Wyoming seemed like a gift. Blue sky! Slight topographical variety!!
Little did we know that Wyoming had it’s own surprises in store for us.
I'll stop here because, as I said, it's a very very long story. And Wyoming really does deserve a post of its own.
