It's not everyone who can find the bright side in a back injury that lays them up unexpectedly for months - particularly when they're in their 20s, fresh out of school and ready to take on the world.
Ace Dixon can.
The Burnaby resident found his silver lining in the silver screen.
Dixon was fresh out of film school at Simon Fraser University when a herniated disc in his back laid him up. Facing months of being bedridden, only able to stand for limited periods, he came up with one solution to kill boredom.
"I just got this crazy idea I should do a feature film," he recalls.
He's able to smile about it now - fully recovered and sipping coffee at Caffe Artigiano as he recounts the story of his filmmaking journey.
But, at the time, it wasn't particularly easy. He'd get images in his head of moments or scenes and scribble them down on post-it notes. When he could stand - only in short bursts - he'd pin them up on a board and shuffle them around, moving them here and there until he started seeing a story taking shape.
His board turned into an outline and he started typing. And typing. And typing.
"The injury was kind of a blessing in disguise," he says now, noting he'd never have had six uninterrupted months of writing time otherwise.
Once he had a script in hand, he started calling up his film school buddies to recruit people to turn the script into an actual film. Mop King is a comedy that traces the journey of Jed, a freelance maid (played by Bruce Novakowski), who meets up with a beer-guzzling, chain-smoking drifter girl named Deborah (Dayna Mahannah).
Dixon found a slew of willing volunteers - a cast and crew numbering about 30 in all - and they devoted one month of their summer to shooting Mop King. Dixon gives special credit to his co-producer/cinematographer, Felix Oltean, who kept a "chill, laid-back" spirit throughout the journey.
Dixon jokes, now, that if he'd known how much work it was going to be to shoot a film, he might have had second thoughts about trying.
But then he shakes his head.
"I was just so hungry to do the film," he says. "Your mindset's different when you're doing something like this for the first time."
Once he had a completed film, though, he made a new discovery: that the so-called "finished" product was really just the beginning of the long journey to getting it onto screens.
He held his own private screening at the Rio Theatre to introduce it to family and friends and get feedback on what people thought. Buoyed by a positive reception, he turned his attention to the film festival circuit and the attempt to win a coveted spot on screen.
"You get rejection after rejection and you don't know why," he reminisces with a wry grin.
When he did get a positive call - from the highly respected Austin Film Festival in Texas - he was so surprised that he's pretty sure he came across as rude.
"I was just in disbelief," he says.
This was the big leagues - a festival that featured such screenings as 12 Years a Slave, Nebraska and the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis.
Which raised a whole new question: In such prestigious company, how does a little indie film from Canada get itself noticed?
Dixon, Oltean and three actors made the journey together and decided to take an on-the-ground approach to finding an audience - decked out in gaudy yellow shirts advertising Mop King, they hit the streets and the pubs and anywhere they thought they'd find people to talk to about the movie.
They rounded up about 100 people for their first screening, and more for their second - at the famed Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. The day of that screening, Dixon recalls, they were still driving around town about half an hour before the screening, strong-arming people into going to see it.
"You get this bravado and this courage," he laughs. "It helps that it's a festival environment, and people are there to check out films."
And, much to his delight, the film got an excellent reception - even better, he says, than it got from his family and friends in the screening at home. He and his team also took the chance to soak in the atmosphere, meeting writers and filmmakers and directors and realizing that, famous or otherwise, they're all really just ordinary people.
At the same time, though, the festival experience opened his eyes to yet another hurdle: getting the film into distribution.
He had his share of issues with distributors, quickly learning that most were interested only in bigger-budget pictures with name actors. He also ran into shysters who promised the world but wanted massive retainers - retainers bigger than the $10,000 it took Dixon to make the film in the first place.
So, in the end, he decided to take the self-distribution route, discovering film service companies called "aggregators" that act as a gateway to getting independent projects onto platforms like iTunes - where, after a technical journey that included a sound remix, Mop King is now available.
Recounting the tale, Dixon lets out a long breath.
"If I had known about all that beforehand, I dunno, it might have stopped me from doing it," he says. Then he grins. "But probably not."
Armed with the newfound knowledge from his Mop King journey, Dixon has plunged into his second feature film.
He's been battling the "sophomore slump," noting he had a much harder time just freeing his mind to let the writing flow than he did back when he was laid up in bed.
He's also now focused on finding investors; he's eyeing a budget of $100,000 to $200,000 this time around, a huge chunk of which will be devoted to marketing.
He knows he has another long journey ahead, but he can't envision himself doing anything else.
"It's a difficult, competitive world, but it's what I like to do," he says. "I think that's who I am. I'm going to go for it. ... I'm not looking to be Spielberg or anything. I'm just looking to sustain myself, support myself."
And, he says, whatever happens in the future, he'll always have the achievement of Mop King.
"I'm glad I did the whole thing, to say, 'I did it.' I gave it my best, this is the result, and no one can take that away from me."
Check out mopkingmovie.com for more about the film.
