Take Your Dream

Story, story, story - we drive it into our soul so we don’t deviate from a good one when we see it. I’ve been writing screenplays for 30 years and it’s all about story. On the making of Take Your Dream, incredibly dramatic days and unseen moments of adventure unfolded right before our eyes. I was frantic trying to get my head out of what I knew about writing good story and get my heart into what was occurring right before my eyes. “I didn’t write that,” I would say. “But damn, I wish I had!”

“No one will make your dreams come true. Life is not a fairytale. If you want it, you have to take it.”

My first experience as a director was in high school. Some friends and I borrowed the school’s broadcast camera and headed out to a nearby lake in Colorado to shoot a war scene for a film I had scripted. At the end of the day we wanted to see what we had shot, but didn’t have any equipment to preview the tape. We drove to a nearby mall where there was an electronics and television store, walked in and handed the salesman the tape and asked if he could play it for us. He put the tape into a machine and turned our film onto what was to be the first big screen box televisions. I was hooked! Just look what we had done with a few smoke bombs, ketchup and gear purchased from a local army surplus store. I was a filmmaker...and in big trouble.

During one of the shots the camera panned across the sky and directly into the sunlight, which apparently wasn’t real good for those types of lenses back then. It left a shadow like crack on the lens.

I barely graduated from high school because I found it difficult to be in a classroom. Most of my time was spent in the movie theaters without my parent’s knowledge. Movies were cheap back in those days and I loved to sit for hours and hours and watch them. Give me a story with hope or redemption and you’ll have my attention.
E W Helmick, Director