Amir Barda and I met for the first time in spring of 2004. I was a screenwriter and stay-at-home dad. Amir was self-financing and directing a short film. His lead actor was a friend of mine and knew Amir had an idea for a screenplay involving kids and magic. Introductions were made.
Our first meeting not only helped define our story, it also helped define our friendship. We realized, as we fleshed out his kernel of an idea, that we shared a love for the same movies. Although I'd grown up in a Chicago suburb, and he in an Israeli kibbutz, we both had been raised on a healthy diet of all things Spielbergian. E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark were watershed experiences for us both.
So we started with Amir's initial premise: two kids come into possession of a magic stick that transports them instantly to the point on whatever map it touches. It was a great device. Limitless yet with defined rules. We started writing our screenplay in the summer of 2004, and by autumn we started showing it around. The feedback wasn't tremendous. We'd created a good adventure, but the stakes weren't epic, the villain wasn't very villainous, the scope didn't scream SUMMER TENT-POLE.
So we shelved Yonder. We began thinking smaller, brainstorming things we could shoot ourselves. But our imaginations inevitably returned to our kids and that magic stick. And that's when we found the other half to our story. It was a screenplay called Dark that I'd written some years before. It was a fantasy-adventure with a hero known as a Twilighter, a professional lighter of dungeons and dark places. He never carries a sword, only instruments of light. What if, we thought, this was the world of our kids and their magic stick?
Amir insisted that we base the story in the real world: no Middle-earth fantasies. The 1200's became our setting. The Twilighter became the kids' father. And Yonder 2.0 was officially underway. We developed, wrote, and revised the screenplay over the next year. This time, we met a much greater response. But the vision still had limitations. The script couldn't convey some of the concepts for the magic stick (now known as The Cane) and its portal. We couldn't show the massive set-piece locations or the intricate split-screen action scenes. Raising some money and shooting a trailer was an option. But the cost for special effects that could properly showcase our ideas was prohibitive at best. So we decided to shelveYonder for the second and perhaps final time.
Slow-crawl to Christmas 2006. A friend of mine suggests a new tack. Many films were being adapted from graphic novels. Why not ours? Why not. Here was a medium that could tell our story in its completeness, here was an opportunity to create a calling card that would be unmistakably cinematic. So we began adapting our screenplay, developing our aesthetic, and finding the right collaborators. The last two years have been a wonderful learning and growing experience. YONDER is a hundred and twenty pages, released in a hard cover. We hope you enjoy our work.