This was not the plan.

Thirty-three years old and walking away from a five-year journalism career that at one point I felt so strongly about that I went to graduate school to pursue it. A career that as little as three years ago I planned to build my life around. No, this was not the plan. Not at all.

But here we are, a year into our first documentary film and staring down the barrel of a Dec. 9 deadline for the South by Southwest Film Festival. And that's the very last deadline, four months and one week after submissions opened, five weeks after the early deadline and one week after the late deadline. Dec. 9 is the officially known as the "last minute" deadline. That's us.

Our film, Art Car: The Movie, has taken us to a couple of foreign countries, a handful of states, and many parts of Houston we didn't know existed a year ago. We've met some of the most interesting people we've ever known, and found a thriving subculture of obscenely creative and fiercely protective outsider artists that welcomed us in with more grace than not. We've made a ton of friends and one or two enemies. And right now, we're on the verge of making a movie.

Maybe I should back up.

My business partner and co-director on this beast, his name is Carlton Ahrens. We were born two days apart in the same hospital. Our mothers talked. They probably bonded. But our families lived across town, and some time in early November 1976, everyone went their separate ways, bundles of joy included.

A few years later my parents moved two blocks from Carlton and a few years after that, onto the same street: Del Monte. This is what we named our production company, and early on, this is what blew our street cred with just about anyone we turned our cameras on.

Long before that, though, we had already done some serious damage to our street cred with a combined 17 years at St. John’s, some of which we managed to recover with a combined eight years at Lamar. We've been friends for a long time. We probably had the drunken "wouldn't it be fun if" conversation about film at least a 100 times in our twenties.

We formed del monte films in 2008 after producing a series of satirical shorts on the presidential election. Let's just say we needed an outlet. We planned to make a feature in 2009, an ultra-low-budget job that we'd shoot with friends for practice. Then Hurricane Ike swamped our Galveston set, stalling production long enough for us to realize this plan was, at heart, crazy.

Soon after we stumbled upon an amazing idea for a documentary that I won't repeat here because we're going to come back to it, but it was more than we were ready for at the time, and the subjects were wary and untrusting. We needed to find people who liked being filmed, who wanted to tell their stories, and who weren't surrounded in controversy.

The Art Car idea came out in May of 2009, when Carlton attended the parade as an aspiring filmmaker for the first time and came back saying something along the lines of, "Holy shit, we have to film this thing."

How we got from there to here will emerge over time in this column, which I aim to be an inside look on what it takes to make an independent feature in Texas today.

Our state is at an interesting crossroads with filmmaking. The Wes Anderson/Robert Rodriguez/Richard Linklater/Mike Judge glory days of the 1990s have given way to a much harsher climate. Neighboring states like New Mexico and Louisiana, with their huge tax rebates, are sucking the movies and, to a large extent, the filmmakers out of Texas.

The movie industry as a whole, too, is at a crux of sorts. On one hand, it has never been easier to make a movie. The digital revolution has made everything cheaper. We are shooting on cameras that the pros use on projects ranging from the Best Picture-nominated District 9 to the TV show House. Aside from the up-front costs, which have gone way, way down, the biggest financial barrier to entry with these cameras is the digital storage needed to house all the footage.

On the other hand, Hollywood is struggling. You can count on one hand the number of summer blockbusters that actually turn a profit. So far this summer, that list pretty much begins and ends with Inception. The studios aren't backing many original projects, choosing instead to produce sequels, reboots and franchises, which have a built-in audience and do not require as much marketing on the front end, so the thinking goes. It's never been harder to get a studio interested in your picture.

Fortunately we don't have to worry too much about that right now. We're not going to qualify for any tax breaks, and we don't think a studio or major distributor is going to be interested in a movie about a bunch of people who do crazy things to their cars. Instead we hope to get into SXSW and a few other festivals, and in the end have a pretty cool calling card so we can approach investors and say things like:

"Here's what we can do for this amount of money. This is our next project, and this is how much we need to do it. Is that a Lexus in your driveway?"

Because we are probably (read: almost certainly) not going to make any money off this one, we’re also adding the experience to the value. Making a movie is the hardest I have ever worked in my life, and I've never had more fun doing it. I can say the same for Carlton. Sometimes we even have fun at the same time.

Sure, there have been countless late nights, a few all-nighters, more than a few 80-hour weeks, lots of headaches and one or two heartaches. Some blow ups. Some meltdowns. Endless hours hunched over cameras and computers. Zero social life.

And sure, I wish I could have made this career move at 23 instead of 33, but I probably would have fucked it up then. Plus it never would have been as terrifying as it is now, and a good friend told me, when I decided to quit my job: "You should do at least one thing every day that terrifies you."

That seems like a lot, so I will settle for one thing a year. This one thing. Right here.

I recently finished my last day of work. Then, we set out on a six-day, five-stop, four-state filming tour to pick up a few final interviews.

We’ll sleep on friends’ couches, in offered guest rooms and in cheap roadside motels. We’ll go near South Beach but probably not in. Pass over New Orleans but not through it.

This is a working trip and Dec. 9 is looming large. Crunch time is officially here. Let the joyous torture begin.