Editor's note: Ford Gunter quit his full-time journalism job in Houston to make a movie with his childhood buddy/co-director/business partner Carlton Ahrens. This is the latest installment of his account of chasing the dream with Art Car: The Movie.

The sneak peek of Art Car: The Movie at Discovery Green during Art Car weekend was the first taste of footage for almost everyone in our little movie. This experience taught us two things:

1. Expectations were low.

2. They aren't anymore.

A lot of these people have been immersed in the art car world for the better part of 30 years. They've had lots of camera crews come and go, and they've seen themselves in movies and television shows before, good and bad. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense that we would appear no different. We know this because every artist that we talked to after the screening said something along the lines of "Wow, that was really good. We didn't expect that at all."

A few were even more blunt: "I kind of thought it was going to be crappy, but now that I've seen it ..."

During the 12 minutes of footage, we heard some laughs and we were even told there were some tears. Afterward it was our time to laugh and cry (only Carlton; I don't cry).

I can't really put my finger on a good comparison, but my best guess is that any artist or musician (or certainly filmmaker, writer, playwright, et al) that finally reveals his or her work to his or her support group has felt something similar. In that situation you're almost always surrounded and supported by loved ones who have never done something similar and can't understand what that's like.

Just like I can't imagine the sense of fulfillment my friend has gotten from doling out aid in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past five years when all he hears from home is "Are you nuts?" and "When are you coming home?"

It's actually quite a lot like building an art car. Over the course of filming, many artists told us that their friends and families told them they were crazy, that there's no money in this, that you're not meant to do that to cars, that it's a waste of their time, that they need to focus on real things in life. (Full disclaimer: Our friends and family were overwhelmingly cool, but some raised eyebrows from the peanut gallery tended to convey the same message.)

So getting the big thumbs up from the stars of our film was a huge lift. (This whole self-indulgent meandering reminds me of Sally Field's infamous Oscar acceptance speech: "You like me! You really like me!"). But it kind of holds true. These are people we spent the last two years studying, researching, filming, getting to know, getting to like.

We consider many to be our good friends now. And the disappointment of disappointing them would have been pretty deflating.

More hindsight: It's probably a blessing that we didn't really know how low the expectations were. We were flying pretty far under the radar without having our egos get in the way. Now? Not so much. Expectations went from the basement to the penthouse.

Come Nov.13 at Miller Outdoor Theatre, when the film will premiere as part of the Cinema Arts Festival Houston with what is mounting up to be a pretty big production that could include on-site art cars and live music, people will be expecting big things.

And now that we've finished patting ourselves on the back, it's time to get back to work. We need a rough cut in five weeks, and we want it to be under two hours, and arranged in a way that will be pretty damn close to the finished project. That means there's 248 hours we have to toss, and that will be the easy part.