Behind the film
The Story Behind the Film
Chapter one · The Spark
It started with Ferris Bueller.
There’s a scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off where Cameron wanders into an art museum and gets fixated on a little girl in a Seurat painting. The camera pushes in tighter on the painting — then tighter on Cameron’s face — then tighter, and tighter. A young man, transfixed by a work of art, and something shifting inside him.
Ray couldn’t shake that image. What if you filmed somebody reacting to a piece of artwork — and showed how it changed their life? That single question became a six-minute film with no dialogue, shot by longtime collaborator Cliff Richhart, scored by Ray, and starring Four Day Weekend’s Colton Winburn as a struggling young songwriter.
Chapter two · The Concept
Five plaques. Five religions. One fountain.
The film is set in a park, around a pond with a large water fountain at its center. Ringed around the pond are five plaques. A young man sits nearby with a guitar, trying to write a song — trying to write lyrics — and visibly struggling.
He notices a mother showing her little son one of the plaques, gesturing up at the clouds and the sky. Curious, he waits until they leave, walks over, and reads it.
Each plaque carries the Golden Rule as expressed by one of the world’s five major religions. And every plaque points toward the same water fountain at the center of the pond.
The fountain is the same God that all of these man-made religions are pointing to.
Chapter three · The Question
An if/then statement, in six minutes.
The young man walks the full circle of the pond, reading all five plaques. After the fifth, he closes his eyes — and understands. He returns to his guitar, and the words and music flood out of him. We never hear the song. We don’t need to.
He looks up and sees a woman noticing one of the plaques for the first time. He smiles, because she’s about to go on the same journey he just finished.
If human beings, when they were forming these religions, all pointed to the same God — what does that say about each religion?
That’s the whole film. An if/then statement. No dialogue, no argument, no answer — just the question, asked clearly enough that a festival audience in a city where nobody knew Ray’s name applauded when the credits rolled.
Chapter four · The Ending
The Earth becomes the O.
The final shot begins on the water fountain. A drone rises — as high as it can go — and then computer graphics take over, pulling back past the clouds, past the atmosphere, into space. The Earth appears as a beautiful blue dot.
Then the dot becomes the letter O. And beside it, in the darkness of space, the letters N and E appear.
ONE. The planet is the title card.
Chapter five · The Reception
First place in Dubai.
First Place, Religious Category — the Dubai International Film Festival. Ray didn’t go. “If I had known I was going to win, I would’ve gone,” he says.
The film went on to collect 25+ festival selections and awards in a single-year run — winners’ circles at 8 & Halfilm, Globe Roaming, Best Shorts and Top Shorts; official selections from the Global Peace Film Festival to Switzerland International; an honorable mention for Ray’s score at the Arrow International Film Festival.
But the moment Ray is proudest of happened at a festival where nobody knew his name — when the audience applauded at the credits.
