Today we’d like to introduce you to Corey Burkes.
Corey, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Born in New York in 1968, I think I was five years old when I started writing stories. I was an only child growing up, so fantasizing about the world was a lot easier without siblings in the way. When I got older, it turns out I had other brothers and sisters I wasn’t aware of from my father’s side but you know how that goes.
It wasn’t until 1977, when my mother took me to see Star Wars when I knew my storytelling could get better to the point where it was important to make people feel something when they read or saw a film I could make one day. Funny but true story: I remember wanting to tell the greatest stories ever, and I prayed on it really hard. I was maybe around ten years old or so. I asked God how to do it. How can I tell great stories that everyone will love? What kind of came to me in an answer was essentially ‘live life’ … followed by ‘Welp, you asked for it.”
And live the life I did. Ups, downs, loves, wins, loss, marriages, divorces, meeting new friends, making enemies, owning things, losing everything, getting knocked down, standing back up … I’ve seen it all in my 54 years and plan to keep seeing more. But it’s from this fabric of living life I’ve seen the pattern that makes sense in telling a story people can relate to. I could never have been a storyteller from being a recluse. From not falling in love or having a burning hate so fierce it could burn a city.
I had to live it to tell it.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I wish it was a smooth road, and 95% of it was my fault. I’ve been wanting to be a filmmaker since 1977. Everything we have today— the accessibility to shoot a film over the weekend with your phone if you want to — is a godsend compared to the early days when you were lucky to get your hands on a 16mm camera. Today, right now, I can grab my iPhone Pro Max and, I kid you not, shoot 24 fps 4K and submit it to a film festival within the hour and probably get accepted if edited correctly. There is a line I’ve been rolling around in my head: “The poor man knows how to cook a King’s feast.” Meaning, if you have nothing, that little bit you do have, you know how to make it sing.
When we shot our short film Predawn and actually finished it, there may have been a few light errors in the production but compared to where I came from — struggling to get anything off the ground with anything I could get my hands on — those errors are nothing. I had less to work with, and I appreciate coming from that vantage point. I am grateful for life’s education of working with what you have to make a feast.
Now, someone can come to me and be like, “Corey! We have so much trouble! This didn’t show up. That didn’t happen. We don’t have the money for this or that.” And I’m like, “Shit… you call that a problem? There’s always a fix.”
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I started writing but failed to get published over the years so life evolved practically for me, and the whole self-publishing era grew, followed by eBooks, making it a lot easier to get around the publishing industry gatekeepers and still do well.
Mid-to-late 1980’s I wrote my first script, “8 Hours Till Dinner”. Miramax Films was interested in the concept at the time, and I attempted to shoot the film myself, but that was an expensive disaster. I ended up selling the script (my first sale) and it sat on a shelf undone like Hollywood does, and the right reverted back to me. That would be the last time I would ever try to sell a script. A waste of time.
My first book was “Butta” (previously titled Butta and the Tower of Bling)…Thriller. That was my first proudest accomplishment. Sold well, though not as mass as I would have liked. Very well-reviewed.
I wrote the sequel, “Butta: Worldwide” and a bunch of short stories, and the last full novel was a suspense drama “Family In Savannah”.
After that, I tried to get some animation projects off the ground, but I just couldn’t stand the quality of my work and a lot of it became stalled projects. I thought to go back to writing eBooks, but I love film and made the decision to do ‘Predawn’ in January 2022. We shot it summer 2023, and it’s in the editing stage now.
Predawn is my first truly accomplished short film. What was the difference between previous attempted failures and this one? I executed it with the experience I had of years being a manager at multiple jobs that had nothing to do with film. You learn to motivate and manage people after doing a stint as a Walmart Assistant manager and other people-orientated jobs.
After a while, you learn to shelve your ego and realize the project is less about you and more about the people around you getting it done. In all things, all future productions, it makes sense I am in service of those working with me — making sure they have what they need to get the job done.
If you go to my DesktopEpics website, you’ll find I have a list of principles, and the #1 core principle is “Don’t be a dick.” If I can live by that one rule, life will be grand.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
I found the key and pattern to getting your work done. I won’t say “The key to success” because people with a lot of money and a lot of planning still fail.
If you are having trouble getting things off the ground no matter how you try—and it could be you have the money and the resources and you still don’t have it in motion enough to even determine if you have a chance to win or fail — then this advice is for you.
You have an execution dysfunction, and chances are it’s because of you being in your own way with fanciful beliefs that ‘only you have the answers or ‘your ideas are gold and they should be winners’ on a sense of automatic. You wake up and hear on the news every day how “Little Timmy won the top prize at the film festival for his first film and was given a movie deal to direct the next James Cameron film” and you spend your day burning “How the fuck did the first time Timmy get this deal and why can’t you?” You’re so eaten up by it you push your concepts forward so quickly you don’t take the steps necessary to properly execute them.
So you end up with a lack of funding, wrong people working with you, loss of money, loss of time, and empty promises for projects you keep delaying with a body count of dead projects you didn’t finish. Sounds familiar?
Here’s my advice: Breathe. Fuck little Timmy because you don’t know that story. You only got two minutes of a revealing story that told you nothing. You don’t know if Timmy worked his ass off from nothing. Or you don’t know about Timmy being part of a wealthy family that has money to burn. You don’t even know if Timmy exists because, quite frankly, you never heard about him before.
On a bigger scale, you hear about George Lucas. As far as you know, he was at a university, did THX-1138, got to do American Graffiti, and then Star Wars. There are important steps in-between all of that we just don’t know, but that’s all we get. You just hear the success story and wonder why it’s not you.
Your success story will always need to begin with NOT what you hear about others but the patience, planning, and strategy you made to get there.
Give yourself time to properly plan the execution of your dreams. Thinking you can do something in 30 days or less is foolish, so the slide rule of it all is if you want to do something fast, you better have the money. But if you don’t have the money, take more time.
Predawn is a thirty-minute or so movie. I started planning a year prior for a five-day shoot and walked through each and every day of that shoot in my head to pre-plan every possible outcome. Something I never did before after years of just ‘running and gunning’ and shooting from the hip on ideas.
Even my storytelling. I’ve been writing since five years old. I can create a story effortlessly because I’ve been doing it for 40+ years. I put in the time. However, I always hit brick walls trying to accomplish a finished film production because I didn’t take the time to think. To breathe.
The success of Predawn taught me I cannot do any less when it comes to properly charting the motion of a project. People take planning for granted, and we still see a lot of failed projects out there.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://predawn.desktopepics.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/desktopepics/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DesktopepicsEntertainment
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/desktopepics
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFpRgUmaA-GFYa8EUY2s7rQ
- Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3401297/?ref_=tt_ov_dr
Image Credits
Theresa Matos – Photographer
