We’re two days behind schedule, the pig’s guts are rotting, and we haven’t slept in two weeks. I was directing a feature horror film, and I was miserable. Cut from that set to the set of “Meet the Mayfarers.”All of us are Dancing next to people dressed in mascot outfits - particularly a Bunny Rabbit and a Parrot suit. And we are laughing hysterically.

Standing there on that original set, blood on my jacket, sheep’s guts oozing out of the cooler and onto my hands, I realized something profound: I’m not having fun. So what, you say? Is anything suppose to be fun? Making a film is, by its very definition - a difficult experience. You’re up before sunrise, working through the day, and lucky if you fall asleep before midnight, then do it all again.

There’s a difference, and that’s passion.

So I’m sitting there with a film I’m not passionate about and then I see what people are doing online. There was a lot to be impressed about. Within a few months, some of the channels received more views than any of my filmmaker friends. But more important than any of this - they were all having fun. Or looked like they were anyway.

I sat down, and realized what was wrong. I wasn’t having fun.  For me the happiest moments, of both childhood and high school were having friends come over, and “make a movie.” Of course some, (many) of these are laughably bad. But they were fun to do. We’d make ‘em, have a blast shooting them, and had a laugh watch them. The perfect way to spend an afternoon.

But somewhere along the line, when I started making features it didn’t become fun. At first I thought, this is what it is to be professional, and truth be told, there is a lot of work, from scheduling, to figuring shots, to dealing with on set divas. But fun and professional are not mutually exclusive. Fun doesn’t have to be lazy and professional doesn’t have to be bland. And on that horror film set, a crew member said to me, “Not every project can be fun” But I disagree. We can’t control many things on set, but we can have fun.

I remember sitting in one of countless screenwriting courses, and the teacher kept saying that writing “shouldn’t be fun.” She said that writing should “make your head bleed.” On one level, I understood what she was saying - that writing is rewriting, and to make the script work you need to keep rewriting it. But I think she’s wrong. Time and again, the scenes that I’ve had the most fun writing, the scenes where  I’m so into the scene and I’m writing one character talking to another and I’m “in the zone” are invariably, so much better than the scenes that I’ll slave over for months, or years even. I see that it my colleagues scripts as well - when the passion isn’t there, it isn’t on the page. That doesn’t mean one should “toss off a script” with no rewriting, nor does it mean neglecting and shortchanging the very difficult architecture like importance of structuring a script.

But still - it needs to be fun. Writing - filmmaking - it should be fun.

At the end of the day, in filmmaking, as in life, there are no guarantees. Try as you might, you can’t be sure certain a film will sell, you can’t be certain people will latch onto it, you can’t even be certain that the scene you’re shooting won’t eventually be cut from the final film. But you can control your enjoyment. This career is too difficult not to have fun.

I love this web Internet space because the cost of projects have gone down, but the possibilities are limitless, and there’s no excuse not to have fun. I think it shows on the screen.

For me, that’s what “Meet the Mayfarers” is. A chance to reclaim the “fun” of filmmaking. A chance to bring the level of fun I had as a kid, making movies with friends in my backyard, but hopefully with a more professional sensibility. Whatever becomes of the show, it totally rekindled my love for the fun of making movies. And I’ll be forever grateful for that.

I can’t wait to shoot more episodes, to shoot more series, and then use this passion to do more features. In many ways, I feel like a kid again, and that’s important.

I hope you enjoy the show, and I hope that passion and fun plays through your computer monitor and gives you a smile.

It did for me.