The Real Z

What’s Your Story?

Z can feel every minute of her deadline ticking away like a countdown she can’t pause, and after days of rewatching her rough cut, she still hasn’t found her movie’s story. She splits her footage into two columns on her laptop. On one side, clips that feel like her: Mari’s band jamming in the rain, Z waving from her front porch, walking Popcorn around the neighborhood, footage from the Beanery and Sweet Treats. On the other side sit her interviews and the pretty-but-generic landmark shots and drone footage of the Locks. Painful as it is, she admits Becka was right. That polished, tourist-style footage belongs in a different movie, and cutting it means losing almost three minutes of her ten-minute film.

One afternoon Mom wanders in with cookies and iced tea and settles onto the bed beside Popcorn, who perks up at the smell. When Z admits editing isn’t going great, Mom asks if she’s ever finished a project only to realize too late it doesn’t have a story. She says it’s easy to get so lost in the details that the whole point slips away. That hits home. Z had been so focused on making the “best movie ever” that the film in front of her now feels like someone else’s. “My hands made it, my brain made it,” she says, “but I’m not sure my heart’s in it.”

Mom watches the rough cut and asks the same question she poses to her film students: What is this movie trying to show the viewer? Z realizes that between everyone’s notes and trying to look like she had it all figured out, she never nailed down her own answer. She has good pieces, like her friends and her time with Popcorn, but buries them under generic filler that keeps nothing fitting together. Mom squeezes her hand and reminds her that finding your story is often the hardest part of filmmaking.

Over the next several days, between classes, breakfast, and half-watched TV, Z keeps a running list of everything she loves about her life in Seattle. An idea forms: instead of showing any old person’s Seattle, she shows hers. Z’s Seattle. Zeattle.

Z pitches it over video chat to Becka and Gigi, while Lauren and Mari, over making posters for Lauren’s soccer tournament, lean in to listen, a typical day in her life, her friends, her family, and Popcorn, barking on cue, the best dog in the world, made to feel real rather than flawless. Z admits, a little nervously, that the “real Z” worries constantly about whether her ideas are good enough. That confession opens the floodgates.

Lauren admits she panics over timed tests, even though outfoxing a defender with a scissors move or a chip shot on the field never fazes her. Becka admits her wheelchair and physical therapy leave her exhausted, and that she sometimes wants to hide away in her own room rather than face the world. Gigi admits that moving for her parents’ work over and over makes it lonely to keep losing friends. She confesses she has stayed quiet about it before, afraid people would judge the real her. And Mari, the self-declared Queen of Fashion, admits she worries about her looks far more than anyone would guess.

Startled that none of them had shared this before, the girls agree to stop performing perfection for each other and for their followers, no more sixty selfies before posting one, no more reshooting a video twenty times until it looks flawless. Fired up, Z suggests they each film a “real me” story for her vlog that week, and Lauren proposes a hashtag, #TheRealMe, so anyone in the Z Crew can share their own story, too. Grinning, Z grabs her camera and points it at Popcorn first, asking for her story, only for her to growl back and crack everyone up. Looking around her room at her friends, Z knows this is exactly the kind of Zeattle moment her movie has been missing.