The Last Fest That Wasn’t

I was deep in another edit session when a message blinked onto my screen:

“We’ve heard about this thing called FEST. We might want to go.
Would you want to shoot it?”

I actually laughed.

Heard of it? I’d been circling this scene for years. Friends With Benefits—the FWB DAO—was the first collective where I felt my weird tangle of polymath proclivities made sense: art, music, crypto, tech, film philosophy.

Every summer, they threw a gathering in the redwoods of Idyllwild.

FEST.

Year one, I went alone. A stranger at the edge of a circle.

Year two, I brought friends. I was more tour guide than tourist, but still outside the inner orbit.

Year three, I was finally working the event, camera in hand. Participating with my craft. They knew my name. I knew theirs. I wasn’t just watching the culture; I was helping capture it.

When DSC asked if I could document the next FEST, it felt like a threshold finally crossed. And then came the kicker—organizers hinted it would be the last FEST.

Suddenly it wasn’t just another client gig. I had been given the bittersweet honor—and the weight—of telling the story of a community closing a chapter.

The Spark

It started perfectly.

The DSC producer who first brought me in was sharp, organized, and excited. I felt we were about to pull off something special.

I could picture the shape of the film: a story about beginnings and endings, anticipations and echoes, about a strange Internet-born collective daring to gather in the flesh, about the way a festival can be a brief and fragile country that disappears at dawn.

For a few weeks it felt like the project was charmed. The shoot went beautifully. I was riding the high of capturing long interviews with founders and attendees—some of whom wept when they talked about what the festival had meant to them. I felt like I was finally doing what I came to the DAO to do: participate, create, be of use.

The Descent

Then the good producer left for a three-week vacation.

In her place stepped another producer—a kind-hearted but erratic presence. I still don’t know what his battle was—chemistry, history, or a cocktail of both—but his way of working slowed everything to a crawl. At times it felt as though he might collapse the project entirely.

The energy shifted. I found myself spending as much time managing moods and damage as I did making the film. Relationships I valued began to fray.

This is the unspoken truth of client work: you’re rarely hired just for your craft. You’re hired to survive the people in the room. One misaligned personality can tilt the entire ship.

Eventually the project was “paused.” I was paid, but it felt like being dropped off halfway across a bridge.

The 180

Before the pause, though, I’d built a strong first cut. The emotional core was there. Viewers cried.

And then came the twist: FEST might not be over after all.

The very premise around which I’d built the documentary—the sense of a last gathering, of a closing chapter—was suddenly off-limits.

I was gutted. Not because I wanted FEST to die, but because the story I’d been trusted to tell had evaporated. The film that had made people weep now had to be gutted.

There’s a strange kind of grief in that. As documentarians we don’t own the stories we capture, but we do spend ourselves shaping them. When that shape is rejected, it’s not just a technical note; it’s a kind of bereavement.

I kept asking myself: Who gets to decide what the story really is?

The organizers? The funders? The editor at the keyboard?

Is the best version of a story always the one that is “approved”?

The Rebuild

Months passed. I reached back out to DSC, ready to mend fences.

To my surprise, they didn’t even know why the project had stalled. The erratic producer was gone. The original producer was gone too.

I got a phone call, heavy with apology.
The roller-coaster lurched back upward.

It wasn’t the triumphant return I’d once imagined, but it was honest. The work resumed. I finished the film. It isn’t the story I first set out to tell, but it has its own integrity—and my relationship with DSC is stronger for having survived the storm.

The Reflection

Every client project teaches you, but not in the way inspirational slogans promise.

You learn how fragile creative trust is.

You learn that “approval” is often more about politics than quality.

You learn that even in a decentralized DAO, power still pools in a few hands.

You learn that the most meaningful moments—the raw, the tear-streaked, the human—can be the first casualties when stakeholders fear the narrative.

And you learn that doing work you love for people you believe in doesn’t protect you from the usual heartbreaks of the job. Sometimes it makes them cut deeper.

Closing the Circle

When I think back on this project, the image that sticks isn’t a shot from the film.
It’s the camp after the FEST was over—dust settling, cables coiled, the smell of pine and sweat fading.

The community I’d finally felt woven into had already begun to scatter back to their cities and screens. The documentary was still unfinished, and already the story I wanted to tell had dissolved.

Maybe that’s the truest documentary of all: the experience itself—messy, political, beautiful, frustrating. The story behind the story.

My story.