Language of the Soul: How Story Became the Means by Which We Transform

By Dominick Domingo

As individuals, we are products of the stories we’ve been exposed to. Collectively, humanity is the sum of its history. More potent than persuasion by far, storytelling changes minds by touching hearts. Contemporary buzzwords like Story and Narrative permeate popular culture, from the literary arena through cinema to social media, branding, advertising, political campaigning and propaganda. But why are we truly driven to tell stories in the first place, and how has story become the means by which we transform? WORD and IMAGE, The Language of the Soul explores and the mechanics of catharsis, the Creative Process, the Artist’s Journey, the transformative power of narrative and what it is to be a born storyteller, with a call to action to embrace the power of STORY in our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781716519062

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LANGUAGE of the SOUL

How Storytelling Became the Means by Which We Transform

By

Dominick R. Domingo

Citation of

Author’s Published Works

Domingo, D (2021, June). The Distance Between Stars. My Heart To Yours. Ed. Tiffany Curry. Seattle, WA: Jazz House Publications, 2021. Trade paperback, EPub

Domingo, D (2018, March). The Art of Creating the Perfect Portfolio. Animation Magazine, 10-13.

Domingo, Dominick. The Distance Between Stars. Mischief Corner Books Quarterly Volume 7.Ed. Sandra Stixrude. Newark, DE: Mischief Corner Books, 2016. Trade paperback, EPub

Domingo, Dominick. The Royal Trinity Kingsport, TN: Twilight Times/Paladin Timeless, Dec., 2016. Trade paperback, EPub

Domingo, Dominick. The Nameless Prince Kingsport, TN: Twilight Times/Paladin Timeless, July, 2012. Trade paperback, EPub

Domingo, Dominick. Talk About Embarrassant.Be There Now.Ed.Julie Rand. Downer’s Grove, ILL: Dream Of Things, Nov. 2012. 13-24. Print.

Domingo, Dominick. L’Epiphanie. Travelers’ Tales. Issue 5. Ed. Larry Habegger. Palo Alto, CA: Solas House, July 2014. EPub.

Domingo, Dominick. Outpost. Mischief Corner Books Quarterly Volume 4. Ed. Sandra Stixrude. Newark, DE: Mischief Corner Books, 2015. Trade paperback, EPub

Outpost. Screenplay by Dominick R. Domingo. Dir. Dominick R. Domingo. TLA Releasing, 2009. Theatrical, DVD.

The Legend of Mary Worth. Original screenplay Dominick R. Domingo. 2nd Unit dir. Dominick R. Domingo. Lion’s Gate, 2009. DVD.

Writing Awards and Accolades

Traveler’s Tales Sixth Annual Solas Award 2012: Bronze award in Funny Travel category for L’Epiphanie

Traveler’s Tales Eighth Annual Solas Award 2014: Gold award in Funny Travel category for L’Epiphanie

Writer’s Digest 89th Annual Writing Competition 2020: Honorable Mention for

Cirque

CRAFT Literary Elements Contest 2020, Conflict: Short List for The Salt

Flats

Copyright © 2022 by Dominick R. Domingo

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

First Printing: 2022

ISBN 978-1-716-51906-2

Joshua and Sage Press 2832 St. George St. L.A., Ca. 90027

www.dominickdomingo.com

INTRODUCTION

Everyone’s got a story.

I can’t count the times I’ve heard the sentiment—from magazine shows highlighting the ‘everyman on the street’ to reality show interstitials extoling contestants’ virtues, from the mouth of my own mother, who will shoot the breeze for an hour, if you let her, with every lone fisherman in a folding lawn chair along New Jersey’s Passaic River.  A great documentary is said to have an emotional ‘hook’ at its core—a universal story that speaks of the human condition. Even those feel-good human interest stories on the news, meant to balance the horrors of the preceding news hour—uplifting images of firemen rescuing kittens from the boughs of trees—all key into our innate human wiring for story. Our intrinsic appetite for metaphor.

As a filmmaker passionate about the power of cinema to transform—engaging not just intellect or emotion but all the senses, I’ve traditionally gravitated toward narrative over documentary. However, I quickly learned, when seeking funding for my independent films, that most grants go to documentary. As a two-time finalist for the Roy Dean Film Grant, I sat in on countless pitching and coaching sessions on selling a passion project in documentary format. What I learned is this: any agenda, however well shrouded in the guise of unbiased reporting, is secondary to our human compulsion to identify. To bond through our shared humanity.

This is the very definition of story.

The word story is thrown around incessantly in contemporary pop culture, especially in social media circles. The word has become synonymous with brand building and content creation.  Along with terms like creativity, The Law of Attraction and Manifestation, the word story has arguably lost its nuance, if not its potency. These days, a great deal of lip service is given to telling one’s story. One is shamed for not finding his or her ‘authentic voice’ and contributing it to the collective. This is hardly an exaggeration. The fact that traditionally impractical institutions like art and story have taken the front seat as cultural values represents enormous evolution—the shift from a preoccupation with base survival needs to higher concerns. The problem is, nine times out of ten, the virtues of ‘story’ are being hijacked from their innate role in culture. In the same way self-help gurus and life coaches use Law of Attraction principles to promise the manifestation of a yacht over that of contentment, harmony, wellbeing or inner peace, the mechanics of ‘story’ are being regularly appropriated. Rather than extoling their power to lend aesthetic richness to life, to shift paradigms or usher mankind toward human potential, talking heads usurp them as propaganda tools. In lieu of opening hearts and minds, advertisers dangle the carrot of story as a means to open pocketbooks. If not the almighty dollar, the desired outcome is political persuasion, otherwise known as power mongering. In a tribal context, the biochemical mechanics of storytelling served propagation as bonding and affinity. In contemporary culture, rather than being founded in inspiration and contributing to the transformation of the collective, they are more apt to feed consumerism and little more.

I may be in the minority, but I distinguish between story as transformation and story as commerce or propaganda. The power of story to provide catharsis for the individual and the tribe at large has been wired into us from day one. Far from masquerading as a work of art or a literary masterpiece, this book seeks to preserve the innate power of storytelling in its purest form. To explain my zeal, let me start at the beginning:

I was a weird kid—let’s be honest. At the age of six, I stood with my grandmother on the brink of a cliff overlooking the Owens River Valley. The vast, barren desert stretched out before us, dissolving into infinity at some indiscernible distance. My mind had been grappling with the concept of eternity. Living forever, like the Bible promised, seemed daunting to me. More than that, the prospect threatened to be boring, at best. Whatever would I do to bide the time?

I’d finally gotten up the guts to ask the existential question that had been bouncing around in my tiny six-year-old skull.

Grandma, what would there be if we were not here?

In retrospect, I’m not even sure what it meant. Did the we refer to her and I, humanity, or consciousness itself? On some level, I must have innately grasped that the universe only exists, arguably, through the lens of an observer with sense organs and a brain to interpret the stimuli they took in. But Gram was not big on heady conversation. Her hand squeezed tighter around mine and her reply was guileless:

Just try not to think about it, sweetie. Try not to think about it…

It said so much about my grandmother and her generation, I later understood. No one who lived through the Spanish Flu, the dust bowl and the Great Depression could be bothered with the big questions.

Around the time I started kindergarten, I found myself already pressured by the adults around me. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my stock answer was: Winnie the Pooh. My identification with the pudgy bear would only later reveal itself. In young adulthood, on discovering a book titled The Tao of Pooh, I would understand that Pooh’s Zen disposition was what made us kindred spirits. Or more accurately, that by declaring my unconventional career goal I’d been aspiring to all that Pooh embodied. I’d lie in the grass at Burbank’s Creative Arts Center—the hippie haven where my earth mama made clay pinch pots interlaced with macramé and her mentor, Claude, sculpted nothing but dragons and fortune cookies—and contemplate. Sprawled on the lawn, watching tiny molecules drifting from the nothingness of space to settle on spongy grass, I knew I was not alone in pondering existence. Claude surely had similar thoughts bouncing around his imaginative skull. I half suspected his dragons had been inspired by a song that was getting much airplay on mainstream radio at the time: Puff the Magic Dragon. More likely, Claude had been doing a little puffing of his own. The man’s beard was bushier than any I’d yet seen in my six years, and he sported earrings in both ears. Claude was friendly with Ted, the Parks and Rec gymnastics coach who went home to Jesse, the male ballet instructor. The nature of their relationship was never explained.

My Zen disposition extended to home life. Whether watching Growing Rocks take shape in a fishbowl (too slow for my taste, frankly) or gazing into murky waters watching Sea Monkeys materialize from crystals, I found myself reflecting on the abstract. Were those sea monkeys sentient, aware of their own being? Oh, it was a given that they, too had fallen victim to false advertising, little more than crescent-shaped specks the size of small fingernail clippings. They swam lazy circles in the dim beacon of my flashlight with its dying batteries, while the ones depicted on the packaging drove tiny cars and shopped, donning tiaras. Despite their fingernail-like appearance, I keyed into their awareness—awakened the moment they transformed from crystal to fingernail. That as-yet mysterious electrical charge that made life of biological soup eons ago. Yup, I thought too deeply than any six-year-old rightly should. And yet, doing so was not a burden. It was an effortless inclination that made life rich. My relationship with the noosphere was seamless; I was a fish breathing invisible water, unaware of its existence, no different than those sea monkeys or the lazy, fraudulent Growing Rocks.

Flash forward thirty or so years: midway through my stint in animation, I realize everything I’ve ever drawn, painted or written—all of my personal works—were meant to illuminate what I saw that others did not. Like Horton in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, I saw entire worlds on tiny clover blossoms when no one else in my world seemed to. While working at Disney, I’d continued creating personal work and writing every chance I got. In an unexamined way, my creations shed light on the metaphysical level of life, the subtext in every moment. Sometimes, in my writing, what I illuminated was psychological subtext—the subconscious neuroses or petty defense mechanisms that led to tragedy, or other times, the collective intelligence we call fate moving molecules and mountains despite a character’s free will. Still other times, it was the historical baggage or preconceived notions a character unknowingly brought to an interaction that became self-fulfilling prophecy or the energetic, vibrational undercurrent of a moment when suspended. All the stories I’d told, with word or image, centered on waking people up. Inspiring them—or conversely, jolting them into looking at—well, anything but the surface of things. In 2021, ‘getting woke’ is the mantra of the day. If only folks were more practiced at it; I’ve preached seeing through the matrix of social conditioning, or the spell/dream illusion, as Deepak Choprah and native Americans might call it, with every breath. In my twenties, hubris compelled me to view those who lived unexamined lives as ‘sleepwalkers.’ Growing up in a milieu of alcoholism and dysfunction, denial was par for the course, and I resented it. The blinders I saw all around me were distasteful; in my heart I knew that even the sleepwalkers had lucid moments in which the spiritual journey revealed itself. I knew that when they ignored its call, it only knocked harder to get their attention. I knew that pride and ego compelled many to put off spiritual work until their deathbed, when redemption was inevitably put on the fast track. Most people seemed to get good with God just before final curtain.

My tolerance for dysfunction was dysfunctionally low. The biproduct was that I championed, in myself and others, the respect for life and oneself that drove him to strive for potential. If there was a spiritual journey, I saw it as the challenge to take the opportunities for growth laid in one’s path. And yet, no matter how admirable my glittering generalities, my view of life was based in spite for all that had threatened me as a child—made me feel unsafe. At over-half-a-century, I no longer see things in such stark terms. Somewhere in my thirties, I began to understand that we were all growing and learning the same spiritual and emotional lessons as one another, due to our shared humanity—despite any appearance to the contrary. It was simply hard to recognize; we were all on unique schedules, the transformative lessons in a different order. Some people were lucid about the journey, possessing the meta-self that compels one to examine and share any wisdom acquired along the way. Others were tighter-lipped, out of admirable humility. But we were all, I decided, growing and transforming as long as we remained above ground. The journey simply looked different on different folks. Regardless of my evolving views on the spiritual journey, one thing became clear: I had a vested interest in getting people woke, long before it was the trendy thing to do. In the same way I delighted when those Sea Monkeys unfroze their spiny, microscopic selves from a crystalline state and began swimming lazy circles, I thrilled to the fantasy others and the world had the capacity to become the best version of themselves.

My epiphany about the nature of my work was a defining moment, no doubt. I’d taken my first oil painting class at the age of seven at the same Creative Arts Center where Claude sculpted his dragons. I was given a typewriter for Christmas at the age of nine and told it should last me through college. The stern warning was relayed by my parents from no one other than Santa, of course. As it turned out, Santa had been doing a little fantasizing of his own; the typewriter would be lucky to last through the following summer, let alone college. I quickly lost the ‘E’ key when it popped off and plunged into the vortex where stray socks are held. Given that ‘E’ is a popular vowel difficult to avoid, I continued pecking away at the sharp prong exposed in the key’s absence, until I developed a stubborn but useful callus. There were so many things to write about—Pacific Tide Pools, the Endangered Panda—all accompanied by highly-rendered illustrations, of course. And a question-and-answer segment that Mr. Wilkins made sure to assign to the class. Needless to say, my intellectual curiosity and burgeoning creativity did not win me friends.

Suffice it to say my writing and image-making evolved hand in hand. And in the spirit of Renaissance men everywhere (or Jacks of all Trades, as the case may be) I was voted president of the Vocal Music program at my high school. We competed regionally in the Southern California show choir circuit, and I was awarded a scholarship to study with renowned vocal coach Seth Riggs. Having my hands in so many cookie jars was likely some naïve version of considering myself an artist with ‘various modes of expression.’ The upside to having been raised with so much chaos and dysfunction was the immeasurable creativity it birthed. To my parents’ credit, they encouraged it. Neighborhood kids would come from blocks around to play with clay or make plaster molds and cast Halloween masks in liquid latex. It was not only okay to spill glue on our dining table; it was encouraged. My mother owned a costume shop for much of my adolescence, which meant our living room was always crowded with sculpted foam rubber walk-around costumes for the Ice Capades or the entire cast of the latest community theater production she was costuming.

It was the sheer looming of graduation and impending adulthood that led me to set my sights on Art Center College of Design. Though it’s the nature of teenagers to think, on average, no more than thirty minutes ahead, somehow the pressure got in—that same pressure I’d rebelled against by declaring I wanted to be nothing less than Winnie the Pooh when I grew up. As luck would have it, Art Center would turn out to be one of the top design schools in the world. I characterize it as a stroke of luck for one reason: I did not investigate a single other art school. A friend had been given a scholarship to the college’s Saturday High program and invited me along.  A fire was lit for both of us, and not just because we got to draw naked bodies all summer. We felt we’d glimpsed a potential future that did not involve flipping burgers in paper hats. We were both inspired to meet with financial aid counselors and an admissions counselor. Bringing my parents to campus for those meetings somehow made the prospect of attending the college real, within reach. As did my acceptance some time later, a small miracle in itself. After Saturday High, while motoring through my general education, I’d taken the odd ‘Drawing 101’ course in junior college. The portfolio I submitted had been comprised of cobbled-together figure drawings and a few bad illustrations inspired by Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man.

Midway through my Illustration program, I interned at Disney Feature Animation. It was summer of 1990, which meant Rescuers Down Under was in production and The Little Mermaid was the last animated film released. Beauty and the Beast was in early development. The internship was general; we interns learned the fundamentals of traditional animation as well as all aspects of the production pipeline. Despite its wide scope, the internship preened us for the entry-level position of Inbetweener. As the production position tasked with helping animators generate the needed 24 frames per second to flesh out their key poses, the Inbetweening position was the track to becoming a character animator.

I scored well during the internship and was offered a job. Though some considered me crazy, I chose to go back to Art Center to finish up my degree program. Conventional wisdom held that a degree was little more than a ‘piece of paper’ with little currency in the field of entertainment. But my completion issues demanded I go back and finish what I’d started. When I finally graduated, despite what I’d been naively promised by the internship directors, the job was not simply waiting for me. On the contrary, it took some hustling to get back into Disney: repeated phone calls to my animation mentor and my inbetweening mentor and the Internship directors themselves. I’d scored well during my internship, which reflected well on the program and the ‘Artist Development’ department that ran it. This meant they had a vested interest in championing me during review board sessions—the weekly lunchtime gatherings during which portfolios were reviewed by the key players on whatever film was currently in production. Together, they weeded through the work of the twenty or so applicants that made the cut, having been whittled by Artist Development from the hundreds of portfolios Disney receives weekly from the world over. After one of these sessions, I was given a background painting test, with a week to complete it. It entailed executing a ‘master copy’ of a production background from the film ‘Bambi,’ matching hue, value, saturation and technique as one would on production, while maintaining onscreen continuity. The stars aligned; there just happened to be a budget for a trainee on an upcoming production. The Backgrounds Supervisor and Art Director with the power to hire me just happened to be in the room that day; they could just as easily have stepped out for lunch. Flash forward: I had five dollars in my pocket the day I received the call to come in and start work as a Background Painter on a tiny film to become known as Lion King.

I worked at Disney Feature Animation for eleven years, on Lion King, Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Little Match Girl and One by One. The normal production cycle of an animated feature (minus development, pre-production and post-production) was eighteen months. But in the case of Lion King, I was brought on eighteen months early, during pre-production, to train. I kept my nose to the grindstone during training; I knew no different. I’d just burned the candle at both ends for three years enduring Art Center’s program, one of the most rigorous and demanding in the nation among private schools. I’d been the only one in my class to continue working and paying rent throughout graduation (out of necessity) and still managed to be one of two to graduate with distinction. The thing is, it didn’t feel like work, or drudgery. It felt energizing. The work was inspired. And though I didn’t know it at the time, the universe conspired with me in the pursuit of my ‘personal legend’ as Paul Coelho would call it in The Alchemist. I’d learn his terminology much later in life, along with a recognition of all the forces that had worked in my favor.

About eight years into my eleven-year stint at the mouse, Tarzan was greenlit. Just as I had on Lion King, I hopped on Tarzan in pre-production, eighteen months before full production began, to help develop the look of it. I was one of two artists to help develop the alpha release of the groundbreaking Deep Canvass technology that gave the film its immersive look. On Lion King, I’d been blessed with a mentor who walked on water, in my eyes. I respected him as an artist, a gentleman, a leader and a human being. My effusiveness has not waned over the years; I count it a blessing to have hit the ground running in this way. It was this same gentleman who requested me for his team years later when Tarzan was green lit for pre-production. There were many highlights over my eleven years at Disney Feature Animation. Among them rank moments like when Elton John first sat down to the piano to pitch the songs he’d crafted for Lion King. It was the first time the directors were hearing them, along with the small crew that had assembled. Needless to say, the film became one of the top-grossing films of all time and a global phenomenon. Eventually, the songs were published as sheet music. I’ll never forget returning to my high school for a spring concert, the very high school where I’d been Vocal Music president. A true full-circle moment occurred on hearing a medley of Lion King’s songs being performed by the very show choir I’d led to victory in the competition circuit years before.

During my eleven years at Disney Feature Animation, there were too many highlights—too many fond memories—to count. There was the thrill of seeing that huge orange disc of a sun rise over the Savannah for the first time in a real theater once Lion King was released. There was the time I brought my parents to the Pocahontas premier in Central Park because my mom had never visited New York; the night before the screening, I brought my cousin, Veronica, from Jersey, to the dinner in Radio City Music Hall’s Rainbow Room. When our meal came, my cousin swiftly seated herself next to Roy and Patty Disney, not knowing any better. The couple have both since passed, but the picture of them with my cousin hangs on a refrigerator, to this day, in the Jersey countryside.

During production on Tarzan, I spent several months working out of our Paris studio, lodged in an opulent apartment Disney kept for such purposes on the fringe of Place Des Vosges. Most prescient to the spirit of this book, I was surrounded by artistic geniuses and master storytellers all day, every day. I sat in on every story meeting in which Lion King sequences were pitched to Jeffery Katzenberg. And then later, of course, when sequences were pitched by story artists to Michael Eisner. I was privy to every note the two ‘powers that be’ disseminated, and the discussions that ensued among directors and story artists after their departure. I listened to the likes of Stephen Schwartz, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman finessing lyrics to support the ever-evolving stories being bounced back and forth between writers and storyboard artists.

This experience formed the foundation of my current understanding of story—the western storytelling convention that informs screenwriting for cinema. Listening to the rationale of Creative Executives, directors and the board artists themselves provided a myriad of perspectives. And seeing how all the discourse played out with regard to critical reception and box office proceeds taught me about the element of randomness. This book will address the intersection between art and commerce. The two are not mutually exclusive; Lion King represents the rare intersection in which literary value and artistic integrity are the very reason for the universality that translates into box office gold.

Just as important as what I learned about western storytelling structure was the visual storytelling that was my contribution to these films. The technique, the craft and the conceptual basis of art direction I was honing was being folded into the mix of what made me an artist. Unexamined, I was beginning to see both word and image as the means by which we stir the soul.

I left Disney over twenty years ago. Traditionally animated (or 2D) films were going by the wayside. Though many of the decisions on the part of corporate Disney have proven shortsighted, at the time, executives attributed the success of certain CG films to the medium and not the message. To the fact that they were digital and not traditional. The truth is, the films’ critical and box office success had nothing to do with the medium in which a particular story was being told—only with the story itself. In any case, suffice it to say that the axe fell. Hundreds of artists were laid off in a single day in LA, the Florida studio was shut down entirely, and eventually, the Paris studio. In advance of the decimation, many artists were given the option of making the transition to digital technology by taking classes at my Alma Mater, Art Center. Instead, however, many chose to jump ship. The mentor whom I mentioned earlier that trained me for Lion King chose to pursue the gallery painting he’d dabbled in but never had the time to fully realize. He now shows in Tahiti and his home of Hawaii.

I chose to accept a ‘mutual separation’ agreement in order to benefit from a nice severance package and begin telling my own stories. Long story short, during a year-long sabbatical written into my final contract, I’d written a screenplay about a broken heart I’d recently endured. Writing it had been cathartic, to say the least. Long before learning screenwriting by osmosis at Disney, I’d taken plenty of Creative Writing classes during my general education; writing was still in my blood. Even so, I was green as a screenwriter when I tackled that first extremely personal feature script. Whatever I lacked in craft was made up for by the truth my feature screenplay spoke. When I hosted a reading of the manuscript with Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’s Chad Allen and other professional actors, the consensus was the story that had poured out of me was more raw and poignant than most scripts they were normally handed.

But the sabbatical came to an end and I returned to Disney for the final year-long option of my contract. For the duration of it, I found myself champing at the bit to make the film I’d written. I’d watched two fellow Disney artists take the plunge into independent live action filmmaking as auteurs, so I had a model for the risk I was about to take. During that final year, the writing on the wall foreshadowed the falling of the axe. The universe was telling me something; I made the decision to take the plunge.

I’d begun teaching two years earlier at my Alma Mater, Art Center, at the outset of my year-long sabbatical. I’d purchased a home, so I had a mortgage to pay. Since my sabbatical was unpaid, I figured I’d need some bread-and-butter money during my year off in order to keep a roof over my head. I’d also reached a point where I wanted to pass the baton and ‘give back.’ At that point, I was nine or so years into my eleven years at Disney, but it had taken that long to feel I had something to offer as an educator. I’d continued to learn and grow and perfect my craft on the job; I’m not sure I’d ever feel I’d become the best background painter or visual development artist I could be. Still, with sixteen nieces and nephews but no children of my own, teaching would be my way of being bigger than myself.

When I left Disney, I kept the teaching gig but not the house. I put it on the market in order to take the coming risk with a lower overhead. I immediately attended New York Film Academy (ironically, here in LA) to learn the craft of filmmaking. After completion, I did what every last book on independent filmmaking says not to do: I spent my own money to finance my first short film. The investment was well thought out; this would be my real film school. Learning craft practically, in the trenches, meant it would really stick. The short film was to be a learning experience, beyond being a story I was passionate about putting out into the world for art’s sake alone. Further, being shot on 35 mm with high production values, it would serve as my calling card—the reel that would lead to the making of the feature film I’d written. The story was about the anatomy of heartbreak, a subject I felt was too rarely spoken of. The feature was titled Giving In, and it still tugged at me. Financing the short film that was to be my calling card was not completely delusional; the student film that had been my thesis project at New York Film Academy had made it into several festivals. I’d dipped my toe in the water, and for good or bad, been encouraged.

The self-financed film destined to be my calling card was titled The Passerby. It did well in the festival circuit, winning several awards. It forged many fond memories and lasting relationships—I remain good friends with many of its actors and crew members, to this day. But it did not immediately lead to the financing of Giving In, my feature. In