How It Started

So how did this process begin? I had a short break between projects and wanted to try my hand at directing a feature film, so my sister, Brittany, who I also work with, came to me with an idea. She has a friend who's into the new sport/hobby of geocaching and she told me what geocaching was. Geocaching is a hobby where people get GPS coordinates online and then follow them to a location where a cache or container is hidden. When they find the cache they are suppose to take whatever's in the cache and leave something behind for the next person. For more information about it, you can go to the most popular site at http://www.geocaching.com. I liked the idea of incorporating this hobby into a movie, so we started brainstorming and came up with a story. Brittany took it from there and started writing the script. We wanted to be able to make this movie with a small cast to make it easier to find the actors we'd need, so we made sure the number of cast members was kept to a small number.

I didn't just want to make a movie that had people sitting in a room and talking. I wanted to do something that had great visuals to help the movie have a bigger feel, and since we decided to do a movie with geocaching as a central component, that made it possible to make it visually interesting. I talked to a friend of mine, Steve Lee, and told him about the idea for this movie that we were calling Caching Out (we've since renamed it Tracker, which I like better). I've worked with Steve over the last few years and he has a lot of experience in screenwriting, art design, producing, and knowing good locations.

So Brittany, Steve, and I made a list of possible locations and then drove throughout the state to visit them. We visited each location and came up with story ideas that would fit. We pretty much outlined each scene and story point as we visited Bridal Veil Falls, Goblin Valley, the Arsenic Mines, etc. After we came up with what would happen in each place, Brittany and Steve started writing. Since I'm not much of a writer, they did the writing and then I'd meet with them to tweak each scene. The script actually came together pretty quickly and within a few weeks we had a first draft ready.