Hey all:

I just joined this site because I now have something to promote: a 25-minute
short film I produced, wrote, directed and edited called "The Tolltaker." It
will be screened for the first time at this month's New Jersey Film
Festival, Friday, Sept. 23 at Voorhees Hall on Rutgers University's New
Brunswick campus. The program of shorts begins at 7 p.m.

There's a trailer up on Vimeo at this link:

http://www.vimeo.com/6323248

Here's the short synopsis:

It's the summer of 1973, and eight-year-old Bobby Burke's father has been
MIA in Vietnam for three years. Bobby believes in the power of his magic
charm bracelet - called the Safekeeper - to bring his dad back home, but
he's dismayed that his mother, who has begun dating a new man, appears to be
moving on with her life. Now, to make matters worse, Bobby has come upon a
demonic creature known as The Tolltaker living in a nearby storm drain, who
seems intent on snatching the Safekeeper from Bobby's wrist and keeping his
father from him forever.

The short film is an adaptation of a feature-length screenplay version I
wrote in 2005, and which was named a semi-finalist in that year's Nicholl
Fellowship screenwriting competition (which is held by the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts & Sciences). My intention is to take the screenplay and the
short film to potential backers to try to get the whole feature made.

The animation was done mostly by students at the Art Institute of
Philadelphia, working at my home in Cherry Hill, NJ. I basically turned the
entire first floor into a mini animation studio, with up to 12 animators
sitting and working at a time. We built a mock-up of a Vietcong tunnel
inside an old warehouse in Northeast Philadelphia.

The roughly $20,000 budget came from a short-form original series I produced
for The Discovery Channel called "Living Tomorrow" in 2007. It's taken me
four years to get the film finished.

We do have a Facebook page up for the film (gotta get a website together),
which you can visit here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Tolltaker/140213159398654

I'm encouraging people to visit and "Like" the page to demonstrate to
potential backers that there would be an audience for a feature-length
version of the film.

And that's that. Like any self-obsessed artist, I invite people to get back
to me with feedback, praise and abuse.

Steve Janas
Stevejanas?yahoo.com