Roslyn Car­ring­ton

Bar­ba­di­an writer, Shaki­rah Bourne, has done what most screen­play writ­ers on­ly dream of do­ing, and many more don't even dare to dream: writ­ten and shot a full-length, fea­ture film on her own soil.

Like most writ­ers, she was scrib­bling as far back as she can re­mem­ber, but on­ly be­gan tak­ing it se­ri­ous­ly around 2009, af­ter grad­u­at­ing from UWI Cave Hill with a de­gree in Man­age­ment and Psy­chol­o­gy. Iron­i­cal­ly, at the same time that her hunger for writ­ing deep­ened, she had just start­ed her first re­al job...which cut her writ­ing time down al­most to noth­ing."I was mis­er­able. I quit my job, and since then I've worked for my­self." A brave move, at a time when quit­ting your day job to try to make a liv­ing off of writ­ing is a risk on par with cliff-div­ing. But Bourne knew the time was right. "I don't have any kids; I didn't have any ma­jor fi­nan­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ties. If ever there was a time to do some­thing crazy, it was then."

But the crazy move paid off. She be­gan to get work, main­ly pro­duc­ing copy for mag­a­zines and short ed­u­ca­tion­al scripts. With­in a year she went off to Scot­land to do a Mas­ters' de­gree in Arts and Cul­tur­al Man­age­ment, and up­on her re­turn im­mersed her­self in the tricky task of har­ness­ing and mon­etis­ing cul­tur­al tal­ent on her is­land. There are a lot of peo­ple and small com­pa­nies out there who have valu­able tal­ents, she ex­plains, "They just don't know how to go about mar­ket­ing them­selves."

But the econ­o­my made it hard, and the low mon­e­tary val­ue that clients place on such ser­vices was frus­trat­ing. "They were in­ter­est­ed, but as soon as we got to the point of talk­ing about mon­ey...." Bourne wipes her hand across her fore­head rue­ful­ly, leav­ing the rest un­said.She couldn't re­sist the lure of the screen, and wasn't about to sit around cool­ing her heels wait­ing for a mir­a­cle to pro­pel her own writ­ing in­to the pub­lic eye. "I talked to this guy; he told me he's had his screen­play for 15 years! I can't do that...I'm re­al im­pa­tient!"She and a few oth­er young artistes came to­geth­er–a video­g­ra­ph­er/di­rec­tor, a pro­duc­er and a few oth­ers, and formed Let's Do This Filmz. To­geth­er they de­cid­ed that, do or die, they were pro­duc­ing their own home-grown Ba­jan movie, and get­ting it out there. "We need­ed a film that was easy to make, en­ter­tain­ing, and re­flec­tive of the Caribbean."

The first step, writ­ing the screen­play it­self, was rel­a­tive­ly easy. Bourne re­mem­bers watch­ing the pop­u­lar Amer­i­can film, Fri­day, fea­tur­ing Ice Cube and Chris Tuck­er, and ob­serv­ing how ef­fec­tive and cap­ti­vat­ing the sto­ry could be, while con­fined to a sin­gle lo­ca­tion and a small cast. "I took out all the el­e­ments I loved, and came up with a raw slice of Bar­ba­di­an life."The movie, called Pay­day, had to be done on a bud­get that wasn't even big enough to qual­i­fy as shoe­string. How did they pull it off? Through in­ge­nu­ity, per­sua­sion, beg­ging, and the kind­ness of strangers. "We shot it all on one street," she re­mem­bers, in Bay­field, St. Philip, to be pre­cise, and every­one on the street took part...with true West In­di­an aplomb.

"We knocked on doors and asked, 'We're shoot­ing a movie. Can we use your house?' And they wel­comed us with open arms. They helped us find props. One guy was go­ing to work, he gave us his house keys and told us to lock up af­ter." A woman let the cast and crew of 29 use her bath­room. Oth­ers promised bread­fruit, co­conuts and fish to feed the cast. "They were al­ways there. We couldn't have done this with­out them." As she re­lates the sto­ry, Bourne is over­whelmed by emo­tion.

While she did have sea­soned ac­tors, the cast al­so com­prised ac­tors who turned up to au­di­tion with more en­thu­si­asm than ex­pe­ri­ence. "You'd nev­er be­lieve they were first-time ac­tors," she says. She laughs when she re­counts the sto­ry of be­ing con­front­ed in a bar by a man pre­tend­ing to be drunk, just to get a laugh out of every­one. She hired him on the spot to play the role of the drug-ad­dled va­grant, Flint­stone. There were al­so mu­si­cians, writ­ers and po­ets thrown in­to the mix.

Re­flect­ing up­on her fan­tas­tic jour­ney over the past few months, she is over­whelmed by how much can be achieved if every­one wants the same thing, and be­lieves they can touch what's out of their reach if they on­ly stand tall enough. "Once you're com­mit­ted, and you re­al­ly want some­thing, you try your best at it. And that's re­al­ly what's im­por­tant."Be­fore her first film has even hit the cin­e­mas, Bourne is al­ready plan­ning a sec­ond, al­so due for re­lease this year. You can find trail­ers and mov­ing posters on their YouTube Chan­nel at Lets­Do This Filmz. Pay­day is due for re­lease this sum­mer.