The Street Musician I Avoided for Two Years... Then He Vanished

A midweek check-in from the studio — and a bit of a turning point. For two years there was a man on Clematis Street here in West Palm Beach with a violin case at his feet. He never played until you got within five feet — then he'd attack the strings with this awful, scraping noise and mutter at you if you didn't tip. I started crossing the street to avoid him. I called him the Mad Violinist. Then one day the wall was empty, and he was gone — and to my surprise, I missed him. I started wondering who he'd been. Somebody's son. Maybe somebody's father. That's the seed of a short film I'm building called Coins for Silence. I walk through the whole messy process on this one — the looks I tried and abandoned (smoky old-London cobblestone, then harsh Florida midday, then a claymation-style character), the rough proof-of-concept clips with everything that went wrong, the character boards, the establishing plates. This is my first real push into realism, and it's the hardest thing I've tried, because I'm not inventing a story — I'm trying to recreate something I actually felt. Some housekeeping, too: this is my last recording on eCam (moving to OBS to cut costs), and I'm going to step back from the weekly midweek chats to focus on finishing my travel stories — with the behind-the-scenes creative work moving over to my other channel. If you want me to keep popping in here with studio updates, say so in the comments. One or two and I'm back. The finished films live on Roaming Cat Studios — 11 videos up, four subscribers, one of them me. Come find the others. → ‪@roamingcatstudios‬ 🐾 Penny refused to look at the camera for the thumbnail. On brand. 🎒 More → ChasingLightAndStory.com This weekend: Missouri to Kansas, meat-cleaver jump-cut style, ending on a Lawrence sunset. See you then.