A Forty-Year Journey Arriving in a New Form
Today my experimental very short film Travels premieres on YouTube, and it comes with the strange feeling of opening a time capsule from my early life as a writer. This film began in 1984 as a one-act stage play I did in an eight person, team scriptwriting class at Western Washington University. This was one an exercise where we each had to produce a short script.
Brief aside from Terry Gilliam on 1984: " 'Brazil' came specifically from the time, from the approaching of 1984. It was looming. In fact, the original title of 'Brazil' was '1984 ½'. Fellini was one of my great gods and it was 1984, so let’s put them together. Unfortunately, that b@stard Michael Radford did a version of '1984' and he called it '1984', so I was blown."
He also leaves out the part that actually set the whole thing in motion:
Gilliam wanted to make Brazil first...and the studios said no. Too weird, too dark, too unmarketable.
So he pivoted and made Time Bandits instead, this weird little tale he had sitting in a drawer, because they would greenlight that. And when Time Bandits became a surprise international hit, suddenly the impossible happened:
The success of Time Bandits gave Gilliam the leverage to finally get Brazil approved.
That’s the irony: the film he made because he couldn’t make Brazil is the one that ultimately allowed him to make Brazil… which then turned into one of the biggest studio battles of the 1980s.
Moving along now...
It was a small, sharp piece set entirely in an office where two people push and pull overpower, authority, and personal truth. At the time, I had no idea that this little play would sit quietly in my work for decades, waiting for another life.
Over the years I had forgotten about it. When I recently uncovered it going through my old university papers, in revisiting Travels I came away thinking the same thing. There was more here than the walls of that office allowed for.
There was something psychological in it (well, this was for my creative writing minor, as I was a psychology major), it had...something wounded, something seeking meaning. I always felt the story was trying to walk somewhere, but the stage version never let it leave the room. Then again, it was a trifle, written for an in-class exercise among classmates
This new film finally lets it travel.
Travels follows a woman moving through shifting, symbolic, dreamlike landscapes. The images are generated with the support of AI tools, but the tone and the emotional direction grow directly from that original 1984 script. There is more going on than at first appears.
The environment is surreal, sometimes unsettling, somehow singularly disturbing. They're reflections of memory, identity, and the distortions we move through when our lives are under pressure. They carry humor, disorientation, reflection, and the search for self that lived beneath the surface of the original play.
The music is also AI composed, which gives the film an atmosphere that feels both modern and oddly timeless. The sound has a drifting quality that fits her movement through spaces that do not behave like the world we know. Even so, I guided every choice the way I would any traditional production. Tools may evolve, but storytelling still needs an artist steering its meaning.
I've considered doing it on camera with actors, so why not do a pre-movie of it? How? A storyboard? Sure, but... Just use AI, explore that toolset. I thought of voice actors but that was more than I wanted to get into on this iteration. So, AI actors? And there it is. As I envision it, real actors would flesh the scenario and characters out a lot more. But once I watched it, I was surprised it worked at all.
Travels is, at its core, still about the same question I asked in 1984.
What does a person do when the structures around them bend, twist, or betray them. How do we make sense of a world that feels unreal. How do we move forward when nothing lines up the way it used to. This new version steps out of realism to explore those questions in a more visual, poetic way, but the heart of the work has not changed.
I recently learned that the creator of Severance graduated from WWU twenty-three years after I did, and it made me wonder if we both picked up our shared claustrophobic streak from the same source. Probably not the university itself, or the theatre department, or even the professors we both admired. More likely it was something in the town of Bellingham. A charming place, truly. But tucked far enough up in the corner of the country that the rest of America feels like a rumor.
Dan Erickson, creator of Severance directed a student play called “Convention” at WWU (produced by the STP theatre group) that he wrote and which shows early thematic connections to his great later series.
This film stands where past and present meet. The script was written in my late twenties in the mid-80s, shaped by the world of 1984 in more ways than one. Revisited now with the tools of 2025, it becomes a story stretched across two very different eras. It was impossible to graduate in 1984 without hearing the echoes of Orwell’s book in those hallways of education, a reminder that stories can define the atmosphere of a year as much as history can.
Thank you for being part of its journey.
Thank you for watching.
The full 11-minute premiere of Travels is now up and live on YouTube.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
