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There are a few days left before Joshua J. Mills embarks on his seven-month filmmaking tour, and he's already encountered one of his first obstacles.

An unknown vandal most likely took a BB gun and shot a hole through his camper window.

"It was just a tiny little hole," says Mills, a Jamestown native, as he takes the incident in stride. "There's going to be a lot more instances like that of crazy stuff that happened, I'm sure."

Mills' relaxed, playful demeanor will come in handy these next few months as he and girlfriend Jamie Blankenship travel in their camper to 14 states (from Florida to California) as part of the Two-week T urnaround Tour, or T3.

The tour kicks off today in Greensboro.

Designed as a way to empower filmmaking communities across the country, Mills and Blankenship will stop at a major city in each of the states on their tour. While there, they will team up with locals to make a short film from script to screen in the span of two weeks.

The duo will cap off each two-week production binge with a local premiere of the community's film and a wrap party.

For each of the tour stops, Mills will start with a kick-off event wherein audiences will convene to suggest story elements, available actors, locations and props for filming. Afterwards, they will vote on the ones they like, ultimately determining the genre and overall story of the film.

"Then when the writers get together to start and make the movie, we'll know about the actors and the locations we'll have, and we'll pretty much write the script based on those resources," Mills says. "Normally you write a script then go and find everything, but with this, you have all these things first, then you write a script using them."

As an added bonus, all of the behind-the-scenes drama, action and bloopers will be documented live via Mills' Web site www.filmblazer.com.

"People ask me, 'Well, are you going to make a documentary of the whole thing?' and what I feel like is that it's almost like a real-time documentary of the process," Mills says. "You're always going to be able to find out about where we're going and what we're doing."
Mills admits that there is more that could go wrong with T3 than could go right. The tour could leave him broke or stranded in the middle of nowhere.

But Mills says he is ready, so long as volunteers show up and the cameras continue to roll.

"I think there's going to be tons of problems and lots of hurdles to go through, but I wanted to make sure to document those problems and those hurdles," Mills says. "Because people love watching and participating in a plane crash.

"If everything goes off without a hitch, it's not nearly as interesting as if it hits the fan."

Contact Joe Scott at movieshowjoe@gmail.com.

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