The Beginning of the End

The end of Ragged Isle is drawing near.  It fills me with sadness, pride, relief, fear, anxiety, and comfort.  What a mix.  Well, that’s just it.  It’s very mixed.  This project has claimed three years of my life and all the more so three of Barry’s.  It has been an adventure, an education, a pleasure, and a pain, in truth.  I am glad we have this last season to go still.  I will enjoy the launch of each episode with renewed excitement.  When we first started this project in 2010 we had no expectations.  We wanted to try out this new thing, well, new to us, called a web series and have it be something that we’d enjoy watching. 

The biggest goal of all, really, was to get something done.  It seems that this is one of the hardest things to do when creating art on your own, with limited means, and still having to maintain a day job.  Things get started and everyone is excited then, bang, life gets in the way.  Next project.  Over and over, this is what happens.  It takes too long, people lose interest, move, have kids, get a new job, etc., etc., etc.   It can really wear you down and make you lose focus or even desire.   Why bother?  Again?  Get real.  We have a household to maintain and a life to lead.  It never works out.  Let’s just face it.

This is the wonderful space I was in when Barry came to me wanting to start Ragged Isle , which is loosely based on a project we had done years before.  Barry would bring it up now and again and I would shoot it down.  Well, we’d been into Dark Shadows for a while but at this time we had access to a greater volume of episodes and were doing marathons of the show.  I found that while we watched the creative juices would start to flow and our project started to seem possible.  The more we watched the more I felt this.  I can’t even explain it. That’s just how it was.  After many weeks of Dark Shadows marathons and Barry ramping up his efforts to start this project I gave an unsure, yes. 

Here we are now, three and a half years later.  Ragged Isle is one of the best adventures I have ever had and am still enjoying.  We have met amazing people, traveled to great places, learned a lot, and can now count ourselves as members of the web series community, which is filled with the most talented, creative, warm, friendly, and resilient people I have ever met.  I am so proud to be a part of it.  The sense of community cannot be overstated.  We’ve felt it in person in Maine, New York City, London, and all over the world via the Internet.  

Some of the biggest lessons I have learned are to not give up and keep dreaming big.  This may seem like a kind of boring and canned thing to say, but the journey to learning those lessons for real, is extraordinary.