What do you do when your dream costs too much? You get creative!
Greetings! My name is Loren Rosser, and I'm a Gen Xer in my early 50s. I've wanted to make movies since I was a little kid. I was in elementary school in the late '70s and early '80s, when video cameras were super expensive metal boxes, and phones were heavy things that sat on desks or hung on walls. So, I used a clunky tape recorder to tell my stories. I'd hit the record button and voice hundreds of different characters along with my friends, accompanied by dramatic music and sound effects.
In seventh grade, I received the best Christmas present ever! One I never even asked for because it was so darn expensive. A video camera! Yeah, you know that thing on your phone that you use to record videos to post on social media of your dog biting his own butt? Believe it or not, those things used to cost over a thousand dollars and were used for far more sophisticated purposes, like recording grandma taking thirty-five minutes to open her birthday present and then forcing everyone to spend the second half of the party huddled around the TV watching grandma taking thirty-five minutes to open her birthday present...again. Oh, the joys of the days before social media, when your friend group was trapped in your living room and could not escape from watching your videos.
My uncle had a black and white video camera and had just upgraded to a fancy color one. So he sold his old camera to my parents for a bargain price. I had no idea. Like I said, it wasn't even on my radar. But, kudos to my Dad for recognizing a gift in me as he watched me running around with my tape recorder. That video camera birthed a moviemaker.
Friends of mine and I shot sci-fi movies in my garage, complete with spaceships made out of cardboard flying on threads in front of our own paintings of starry skies. We lit the ships on fire when they were shot down. We shot action movies using cap guns and plastic swords. We made comedy/horror movies about Koosh balls attacking people and even a historical drama about President James K. Polk, using actual quotes from his life. (I should've won the Academy Award for my portrayal of the Secretary of Defense sporting a white beard of cotton balls stuck to my face. It took us 37 takes to get through that scene without laughing. It still holds the record for the most takes I've ever shot.) My dream was to be the next Steven Spielberg.
It's funny how life has a way of happening and taking you down different roads than you thought you'd travel. Long story short, I ended up going into television instead of film. I've been in the field for nearly thirty years, operating the equipment for news production, running commercial breaks, shooting commercials, and now managing the crew. I even taught audio-video, photography, and animation to high school students for five of those years. I have no complaints about working in that field. It's a good career. But my dream to make movies never died.
I came really close to completing my first movie with a team of friends back in 2012. I wrote my first feature-length screenplay and teamed up with a film school grad friend of mine to direct it. But sadly, we couldn't secure the funding to complete the movie.
Recognizing I still had a thing or two to learn about the art of movie producing, I returned to school and completed a Masters in Film and Video Producing. Man, am I glad I did! I learned volumes and I applied what I learned to writing my second screenplay called Talentless, a comedy I am still determined to make. I had the screenplay professionally evaluated and it received glowing scores. So I set out to make the movie but once again ran into the challenge of securing the finances to do it. Talentless is not an expensive movie, costing only about $300k to complete. In the world of moviemaking, that's dirt cheap! But in the real world, where we all live, that's the price of a house in the Midwest!
I spent weeks pondering how to come up with the money to make Talentless. The problem is it costs money to make a movie but investors don't want to give you the money until you've already proven you can make a movie. It's kind of that old catch-22; you need experience to get a job but you need a job to get experience. That's when it hit me. I'm going about this movie thing all wrong. Instead of writing a screenplay and then trying to come up with the money to get it made, I should take stock of what resources I already have. How much money can I realistically raise myself and through donations from friends? What equipment do I already have? What tasks can I do myself? Who do I know who would be willing to help with the production? Who are the gifted actors I already know?
I compiled a list of all the resources I have available and began crafting a story around those resources. To my own surprise, I came up with a damn good movie idea, even if I do say so myself. I centered the story around three actors I already know. I contacted them and pitched the idea to them, and they said they'd be happy to star in it. Okay, the exact words from one of them was F$#% YEAH!
What is in the works is a post-apocalyptic horror movie called Wraith. The screenplay is nearing completion and we're looking to shoot this fall here in Wisconsin. The goal is to complete it on time to get it into the Milwaukee Film Festival in Spring 2026 as well as several other festivals, and hopefully get a streaming deal.
That's my story, and I want to thank you for joining me and the team on this journey!
