When I was in 10th grade, I was in a Creative Writing class that I adored. We had a big collaborative project to do for the end of the year, so I chose to do it with my best friend, Bruce Milligan. Since I loved fantasy fiction, I wrote a story about trees that had magically become animated. There are some political differences between the types of trees, which comes to the fore when a human enters their magical forest. Xenophobic and fire-loving Black Willow trees are forced to leave the magic forest, called Silvercast, but they soon return to wage war. Advice from the oldest tree, a bristlecone pine tree, and a little bird who brings news of the coming army helps to save the good trees.

When I was 16, I had a pronounced Alabamian accent, which you can hear in the recorded dialogue. Much of the narration is from Bruce. Many of the character roles were spoken by my older brother, Rus Curtis. There were no digital special effects–only things like talking through a paper towel roll tube (for more echo-y sound). The music was simply analogue recorded from the speaker of my record player to the microphone that was also for voices.

Even though this is not really a trumpet project, I like the fact that you can hear my favorite music from that time period–Maurice André, John Williams and Jean-Pierre Rampal.

I converted these slides into JPEG images in 2009, and actually made a little movie, but that movie has disappeared in my files, so I reset it yesterday into a movie format. I am sure that some of the slides were incorrectly placed (but I did my best to line them up with the audio). Also, I realized that two slides were missing. Nevertheless, I still have the acetate drawings (but not the watercolor backgrounds), so I scanned these drawings and inserted the figures (without background) into the story line. Bruce, my friend, was the photographer of the images.