The Rest of the Story

I was only eleven years old when my parents bought me a video camera for Christmas. I wanted to make movies with my friends so I could be like the older kids in my neighborhood that made movies too. The movies my friends and I made were all very similar and focused on the adventures of James Bond. Scene 1: James Bond gets a call from HQ about his new mission. Scene 2: Bond embarks on said mission. Scene 3: Bond fights evildoer and saves the world. The End. No storyboards, no script. Everything was improvised. After a while we lost interest in making movies, and my camera collected dust for years. That is, until the older kids wanted us to help them with their new movie about 1920s gangsters. My best friend Graham was cast as the mob boss and I played his right-hand man. The movie, entitled “The Grahamfather” (a mix of Graham’s name and the popular mobster movie “The Godfather”) was our best movie and the only one to generate a true sequel. Unfortunately, the sequel saw several characters get killed off as the actors that played them left the neighborhood for college and other callings in life.

Several years later, I found myself in college and feeling the need to make movies again. After watching the Grahamfather, I decided to go about making the third and final installment in the series. Failed attempts to round up the original cast, though, left me wondering if a new Grahamfather movie was even possible. It was then that I realized that not only was it possible, but the possibilities were practically endless. With a script now written and new kids in the neighborhood willing to work on the movie, all that’s left is to film it and provide my own take on “The Grahamfather”.

Word Count: 305

The Point: Sometimes picking up the pieces and reflecting on the past allows new stories to be told.

Old Memories and New Beginnings

I was only eleven years old when my parents bought me my first video camera for Christmas. It was just a basic camera, but I wanted to make movies with my friends so I could be like the older kids in my neighborhood that made movies too. Being fans of the videogame “Goldeneye 007”, the movies my friends and I made were often about James Bond saving the world from one incompetent villain after the next. After a few years of making the same movies, the older kids and I decided to go in a new direction with a movie about 1920s gangsters. It told the story of a failed assassination by a mob boss and his struggle to keep his gang together amidst threats from other gangs and defections by his own men. The movie, entitled “The Grahamfather” (after the popular mobster movie “The Godfather” and my friend Graham, who played the mob boss) was our best movie and the only one to generate a true sequel. However, the sequel saw several characters get killed off as the actors that played them left the neighborhood for college and other callings in life.

Several years later, I found myself in college and feeling the need to make movies again. After watching the Grahamfather, I decided to go about making the third and final installment in the series. However, after my attempts to round up members of the original cast provided me with only the help of my brother, I was left wondering if a new Grahamfather movie was even possible. It was then that I realized that not only was it possible, but the possibilities were practically endless. Instead of listening to the older kids from before, I was given the freedom to create a new story, introduce new characters, and give the series a proper sendoff. With a script now written and new kids in the neighborhood willing to work on the movie, all that’s left is to film it and create another chapter in the series that keeps on giving.

Word Count: 342


The Point: Sometimes picking up the pieces and reflecting on the past allows new stories to be told.

Videogames and Board Games: Separated at Birth

On the surface, videogames and board games may seem like very different kinds of entertainment. Obviously, one is played in a virtual world and the other is played in real life. In addition, Steven Johnson asserts that while board games provide clear rules on how to play and what the objective of the game is, videogames fail to do this and instead force the player to figure out the rules by themselves. However, this claim is not quite true, as board games and videogames share more similarities than one may think. For example, the game Monopoly clearly states its rules and informs players that their objective is to bankrupt the other players. This is not unlike videogames like Halo, where the objectives are laid out before the game starts. Videogames may be played through a different medium, but at their core they’re no different from board games and in many ways are simply modern adaptations on the basic strategies derived from board games.