An amazing example of "Enjoy the process" and "Take time for projects" -- from France.

Two of my happiness-project resolutions are to Take time for projects and “Enjoy the process,” and following those, I’ve had a huge amount of fun working on the Boy Castaways project with one of my close friends.

A reader from France emailed me to tell me about a similar (but much larger) project she did with a cousin. I loved this idea so much that I asked her if I could post about it, and she said yes. Here’s her email:

I've been reading your blog for a year and a half from now, and it has really helped me to focus on certain things to make me happy. It is incredible how very little things can make a real change.

I wanted to tell you a story about your "Enjoy the process" commandement. 7 years from now, my cousin who is just the same age as me (22 years old) has been very much influenced by the saga "The lord of the rings" and started to think about making his own movie about it. He talked to me about this project 3 years later, and as I love to write stories (historic or fantasy novels) I said "Ok, why not try to write a scenario?"

So we started to spend our family meetings writing this scenario, we even made descriptions of each important character. We spent something like one year writing it, and then on the summer 2006 we started to shoot the movie (my cousin and I were also actors). Of course, it was a Lord of the rings-like movie, with medieval rooting and magic and such. My cousin was especially attracted by the fighting part and needed me to enrich the "story" part and I also pushed him to introduce some magic. My other cousin (who is 3 years younger) was taking care of all the technical aspects.

The shooting was so much fun. We went into the forest, in a church, in a medieval pub, we created a fire for a night scene, we also went several days in a country house to find good spots...The next summer we had to re-shoot some views to make the making better, to record some voices that weren't clear, etc. My cousins have been working on it since then and last Saturday, on november the 8th, we made a public projection for all the actors, some of our friends and family; we were about a hundred people. There was a show of the movie, than a making of and then a little cocktail so that we could talk with our guests. People told us they really enjoyed it and found it amazing. But the interesting fact, is that all the people who took part in it and the ones who saw the making of told us that it was clear we really had fun making it. Which is so true, it wasn't actually the final product that was fun to have, but all the time spending preparing everything, the post-making meetings to say "You should rise the music here, put some more blood there, add some steps sounds at that time", and of course all the making-off bits that were recorded.

So finally, while I was so excited about the show last week, and slept so badly and could only talk about it, I was thinking "this is also part of the fun". It was also good to expect that evening, and to get excited about it, which means that I enjoyed it much longer than the single evening.

If you want to have a look at it, the website is Opeprod. Everything is in french, we are french.

The exact link of the trailer with the english subtitles is here. While on the page, you need to click on the link "Anglais" below the pictures in order to have the English subtitles he made.

The name of the movie is "La Pierre de Drakil" [The Drakil’s Stone].

So I'd like to thank you for helping me to enjoy this project as much as possible. I thought it was the same kind of big project as your Boy Castaways project and I wanted to share it with you.

What a fabulous undertaking! It makes me happy just to read about it.

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I love Unclutterer, and this post about Preparing for Holiday House Guests is hugely helpful.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my personal Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.