by Randall Lobb

It started with a head injury.

We didn’t know about Post-Concussion Syndrome back in the good old days, but it didn’t take long for me to realize something was very wrong and I couldn’t handle the hours on set anymore.

I quit making commercials, and, wandering down Queen Street with my week’s bag of comic books, all dizzy and pointless, I ran into a girl from my floor in first year film school.

She was with 1971 Neil Young, acoustic guitar slung over his suede, fringe-sleeve shoulder. He had perfect lank hair and piercing eyes. Beside him Nancy assessed me and told me I looked bad. Real bad.

“You should be a teacher,” 1971 Neil Young said. “Summer’s off, man.”

Nancy patted my arm like I was contagious and pulled Neil to safety before I could protest.

Me a teacher? I made Super-8 movies in Grade 5! I saw Star Wars at the drive-in!

I was born to be a filmmaker. Period.

However, for the next 20 years, this natural born filmmaker was a high school teacher in rural Ontario, Canada, reading Aintitcool, Script Magazine, Wordplay and Done Deal while Final Draft was blinking impatient on my monitor.

When I wasn’t teaching or marking papers, I wrote anything for anyone: reviews, profiles, development docs, pitches, plays and promos for newspapers, magazines, school theatres, fanzines, and even a few media companies. I interviewed writers - Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Bill Pronzini, and Robert Jordan, mostly on the phone (sadly), and I wrote too many scripts that were mostly bad (even sadder).

There were close calls, trips to L.A., kind words from the right people, agents, good intentions and watershed moments that dried up one after the other, no matter how promising.

Finally, after juggling career, marriage, kids, thousands of pages and untold hours pounding on tens of computers over eight operating systems, it was time for a break from my after-school job.

Then I made a documentary.

One of my students became a photographer and went to Afghanistan as a citizen journalist, embedded himself with Canadian soldiers, and shot 80 hours of, well, everything, including an IED that hit his convoy. I tried to build a story out of it and a new friend, a self-taught post-production wizard, put it together.

Once we finished Waging Peace: Canada in Afghanistan, we were told that broadcasters were “Afghaned out” and, as a result, the doc really didn’t go anywhere.

We worked on a few more NGO-minded doc projects with similar results, but it was just enough to reboot the addiction, and I started writing again. Only now, the rules had changed.

I’d been an early adopter and advocate of online education since there was an Internet, helping to lay the groundwork for what is now virtualhighschool.com, and it was clear to me that what I saw as the future of education would be equally impactful on the entertainment industry.

My new friend with all those post-production skills became my business partner.

We came up with what I figured was a clever name (FauxPop Media) and dipped into podcasting, online video, music production, web marketing and more, struggling project by project to figure out how to tie it all together into something meaningful.

We knew that everything in the media was changing. We’d seen it coming had written and blathered on about it for years, about how and why and what it might mean, and on a small-scale, we were doing it. But we wanted more than small scale.

We saw the opportunity for us to do something awesome, but we needed to find that Goldilocks project, something that was just right.

We’d read Kevin Kelly’s influential “1,000 True Fans” post, we believed in the Long Tail, and we were absolutely certain that the only way we’d ever make things happen was to do it ourselves.

I’d spent years waiting for gatekeepers to decide if my work was good enough to send to the next gatekeepers to send to the ones after them and the ones after them. Each new gate brought new fears and new reasons to say no, spurring me to adapt like a keyboard ninja, write to build consensus, hit all the right buttons for all the key readers, to create certainty where none could be had.

Development made me a much better writer and I would go into that process again and again without complaint, but at that moment in my life, I knew the only way we could really move the needle was to do everything wrong.

So, when an obsessive young DP asked us to help him make a fan documentary on the history of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I wanted to say no.

TMNT was an existing intellectual property -- a massively popular, beloved pop culture phenomena with an impossible cluster of rights and licenses across every form of media all over the world. It was too big, too well known, too tied to giant corporate interests, too complex, too fat for our pipe and far too much to deal with as our first project in the business model I’d sketched out.

My partner said, “Cool!,” but I didn’t hear him, because I was already nodding yes, because this project was perfect.

It absolutely couldn’t be more wrong.

In November of 2008, with no rights, no contacts, and no idea where we would end up, we began production on what we assumed would be a small, fan-focused documentary designed to satisfy at least 1,000 hardcore TMNT fans, and build us a base audience and a platform on which we could grow.

We wouldn’t finish until more than five years later, working day and night to lock down an unraveling ball of loose ends and deliver a final cut to Paramount in time to hit their release schedule, which would be the same date as the deadline on the Disney script I was writing …

Next time, I’ll tell you how we did it.