state of the art: nathan bach - dream writers
“I don’t know if anyone can say what drives them to create something, all I know is that for me, I have to do it.... because its how my brain works... I don’t know any other way.”
Nathan Bach, a man of many tiles, calls himself an original content creator. In search of something that hasn’t been done before, Nathan’s dream late one night has lead to the production of an independent television series pilot titled Dream Writers.
When he first started to develop Dream Writers on his own, he faced many closing doors. No one was listening and he started to doubt if the concept was even something he should pursue. Nathan knew he wouldn’t be able to do it alone and began searching for a group of people to give it a try with him.
A big part of Nathan's success has come from the creative community he surrounded himself with. At the start of the interview Nathan shared with me an inspiring story about the creators of Pixar. In one lunch meeting they developed the ideas and plots for ‘A Bugs Life’, ‘Monsters Inc.’, ‘Finding Nemo’, and ‘WALL-E’. The Pixar team members raved about how they pushed each other's ideas and brought the best out in each other. Nathan believed that a group with these same qualities would help his idea become the success it is today,
“Thats what creatives like to do, they like to sit around and create whether that’s in words or in actions and thats why I like to surround myself with these kinds of people.”
The final push to taking on his “dream” came when Nathan realized that the fear of failure was not as strong as his fear of regret.
“I can’t live with myself if I were to see something like this in 5 years...”
Nathan got his start in content creation at an early age. “ When I turned 16 my mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday and, I don't even know why, but all I wanted was a video camera. So she went and bought me like a $400 camcorder and for 2 years I had that thing by my side all the time.”
It is amazing to see what can happen in someone’s career when they begin to pursue it as early as high school.
“Yeah it was when I was 16 when I really decided to do it and I kinda realized I had a nack for it as soon as I started, you know you have that eye. I didn't know what that meant but I knew it looked different from the other stuff I was seeing.. And I was really lucky because at 16 I knew that’s what I was going to do with my career. I’m going to go to film school and do something in film... So I started building it in high school. I made sketches with my friends and then this website came out called YouTube. And my friends joined the site, we were one of the first 5,000 people to join YouTube and we started uploading our videos and it just went from there.”
When Nathan was eighteen he went back to look at his long ago posted videos and they had gone viral. A short BMX video he had posted now had over 60,000 views. Nathan was inspired, “ I decided I wanted to create something from the ground up and that something became Dream Writers.”
It all started when one night he woke up with a strange question. “I woke up from a dream one night and wondered what if that (the dream) didn’t come from my brain, if it came from someone else...” This is what Nathan had been searching for, something new, something fresh, something that hadn’t been done before.
Nathan and his team of “Dream Writers” started creating original content as a web series in 2014. In 2015 they decided to independently produce a pilot for TV, and they crowd-sourced over $75,000. Production has wrapped, the footage edited, and the pilot screened. The next chapter in “Dream Writers” takes them on a nationwide tour on the film festival circuit. Dream Writers was selected into the New York Television Festival, the largest and most prestigious tv festival, as one of 50 finalists out of over 3,000 submissions.
“(Dream Writers) thats a different thought from what people in Hollywood are doing because they are always rehashing old thoughts or making sequels from 20 something years later. Original content creation is what I want to strive for in my career. So I woke up from a dream and thought about that and said that is something that has really never been done before and thats kind of what has driven me the last few years.
From one night's sleep to an independent television series, Nathan’s idea has become all he imagined it to be. Though as far as this has come Nathan is not ready to stop creating any time soon.
“I want this to serve as a launching point for what the next thing is... you have to look at is as a catalyst for your career... that could go in a hundred different directions.”
Check out more photos from my time with Nathan here.
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