Day 23: The time I Bought a Van for $75

Thanks so much to everyone who has donated so far. It means a lot to have support from my friends, family, and people from all over the world. Today's film story is about the van from Mousetrap 2. So I already talked about the car chase from Mousetrap 2 and how we pulled it off. I never talked about how we got a van that we could completely destroy. Its a great story!

So when I wrote the script for Mousetrap 2 I knew we would do a big car chase and we would need a vehicle we could destroy. That is when I started looking around for cheap vehicles. I started looking on sites like Craigslist to see for cheap vehicles, but wasn't finding anything that ran for under $500. I knew I needed to spend the least amount of money possible because the entire budget for the film was $1776. My options started to dwindle and I honestly thought I might have to cut the car chase out.

That is until I got a message online from somebody who said they had a vehicle for sale. An old van with over 300,000 miles on it. It still ran, but was in pretty bad condition. I went over with Colin and my buddy Isaak to take a look at it. Looked good to me, but he was asking for $300. I thought for a second and immediately went down to $150. He said he could do $250. Now I don't know if you know anything about me, but I have a lot of persistence and I'm not the kind of guy to walk away without a good fight. Let's just say it went back and forth for a long time and at the end I walked out of there paying $75 for a running minivan.

We would end up smashing this minivan up and putting a pole from the seat to the accelerator and sending it down a hill crashing into a creek. The minivan lasted the entire car chase which took days to film. This may have been one of the best purchases I have ever made. It was all because I wasn't willing to give up.

What I learned: Never give up. As soon as you walk away you lose the fight.

Watch Mousetrap 2 here!