The way Larry tells the story, I dropped him a line that said, Hey, I've got this cockamamy idea. Let's get together and see what you think. So we got together and I said, Okay, what's the idea?

Not too far off.

Before it was CREDO, it was UNTITLED GOD MOVIE, and before that, it was DO SOMETHING WITH LARRY. Before that, it was USE EXISTING RESOURCES TO MAKE AN UNUSUAL AND HIGH-QUALITY SHORT FILM, and before that, it was PLEASE, PLEASE, DON'T LET ME LET 2004 END WITHOUT BY GOD FINISHING SOMETHING GOOD.

So, working forward in time:

It was the end of September, and funding hadn't come through on Cupid & Psyche, the feature-length musical I spent all of 2003 writing and half of 2004 recording. Four songs got to within a few weeks of completion before I got so frustrated with the lack of progress on the overall project that I emailed Larry. Previously, I'd brainstormed with my longtime collaborator Blake about short film concepts, but for one reason or another (some logistical, most political, having to do with funding for the feature, and all perfectly logical), they got vetoed.

So there we were, and I was about going nuts from frustration. I had twins possibly arriving any minute. I had the end of the year bearing down hard. I had a rapidly enlarging wife who needed more and more help, just getting around and staying sane. I had a day job. I'd just finished a 6-month project of 14-hour days. I had a short crime story to finish for a December deadline.

SNYDER'S OBSERVATION: If your spouse doesn't get it, you're sunk.

SNYDER'S COROLLARY TO HIS OWN OBSERVATION: If you wait for your spouse to get it before actually doing it, you're sunk.

Now, right around then was when we let everyone know about our pregnancy, which precipitated a deluge of your-life-is-over remarks from know-it-all husbands. I'm not especially susceptible to outside opinion--as those who wish I'd do more housecleaning can verify--but the sheer unbroken wave of gleeful negativity was doing its incremental damage. Was the creative life over? Would my wife now expect me to give up everything I'd devoted myself to?

Well, here was a test. Another short film: Whether to, or whether not to.

My spouse got it.

My spouse referred to the ongoing creative life as "a matter of life and death."

(My spouse also voiced concerns about spending money that way, and she was right. But we also both know there's never "the right time" to do this sort of thing.)

My spouse helped think of ideas to take to my meeting with Larry. None of them ended up on the table once the meeting started, but they were in my back pocket, ready to lay out if the collaboration didn't spark. The best one was simply A DAY WITH LARRY IN HIS NEIGHBORHOOD, because we agreed that for this to work, it would have to be something he cared about personally.

Back up a sec. Let me touch on something I already mentioned, namely: USE EXISTING RESOURCES TO MAKE AN UNUSUAL AND HIGH-QUALITY SHORT FILM.

This project needed to be two things, and it needed to be strong at both of them. It needed to be personally satisfying, which means artistically challenging and successful; and it also needed to be under ten minutes and look like nothing else that the major film festivals would be likely to receive. Why under ten minutes? Because the shorter the film, the more likely a festival is to program it. A 40-minute short takes up the same screen time as ten 4-minute shorts. Anybody's got time to squeeze in a 4-minute short, if they really like it.

So we decided to make a 2-to-3-minute short. (It ended up 9 minutes long, with a good lesson learned: One page of screenplay dialogue runs about one minute. One page of a screenplay musical sequence can run one, two, or three minutes--or even more, though we didn't let that happen in CREDO.)

Okay, so. What existing resources did I have that might lend themselves to unusual, high-quality short films, the likes of which festivals aren't getting all the time?

Enter the improvising opera singer.

Larry and I have worked together before, both on The Ship That Lies At The Bottom and on the soundtrack to Cupid & Psyche, for which I wrote him a big role. Over the last few years we've become friends, too, so working with him is always fun. (Though he does have an annoying habit of telling funnier stories than I do.)

There are significant advantages, if you're making a screen musical on a short film budget, to using someone who can actually sing his part on location, on the set, and nail it, boom. I'll get into the technical side of this in a later entry, as I've promised the details as an exclusive to an audio industry magazine. For now, it's enough to understand that I considered Larry no less than a secret weapon, because his skills would enable us to make a screen musical faster, cheaper, and better than anyone's supposed to be able to. We could do it on a short film budget. On-set vocal performance is not how anybody makes screen musicals--at least not serious ones--except us. We figured we could do it. I was pretty sure I knew how.

I'll be rambling here as I have moments of free time, and--as just happened--the rambles will often be cut short as work intrudes. The entries will tend to be loosely structured, following the line of my thoughts as I sit down to write. Not so much HOW-TO pieces as OH-YEAH-AND-THEN-WE... pieces.

Unless someone lets me know they want to hear about something specific, the next entry will be about how we shot CREDO three times--by design.

Official CREDO website