I added this foreword to the books in my store with a completely true story. What I didn’t include was that we had two classrooms connected by a smaller room and 3-4 classes worth of students crammed in for the lecture, and all of us had to stay in those rooms during the lockdown. Some of us had our class in that room already (9am-330 i think), the lecture started at the end of class, the lockdown started at the tail end of the lecture (about 430?), and the lockdown ended around 10. The studio president was able to leave sorta early into it, but while he was stuck with our faculty, the studio’s relationship with our school got a lot stronger than it already was. The studio had a policy of producing 12 shorts a year and, after the lockdown, reserved one slot for a student from our school. A bunch of us developed ideas and got to pitch in person to executives, it was a fantastic experience and that’s where Cupbearers came from. I perfectly understand why my pitch was passed on, the idea wasn’t fully baked at the time. If anyone reading this went to California State University, Fullerton and was there, feel free to correct me on any time details I might have gotten wrong (this was back in 2012)
