The most interesting stories are not about things going smoothly. They're about things going wrong so that something unexpected has room to happen. The story of Blacksburg filmmaker Ed Gendron, and the rocky road to completion of his debut feature, Fishbowl, illustrates how a project can succeed even when nothing goes according to plan.

In 1993, an aspiring painter and printmaker, Gendron took a chance on living in Baltimore. He describes this as "a naive attempt at living someplace urban," a venture that did not go well. He found the city harsh and depressing. "I would be waiting for the bus, a total stranger would strike up a conversation, and by the time the bus arrived, I'd know all about their heroin habit. Was it something about my face?"

Yet, if he hadn't ventured outside his safety zone to weather that difficult year in Baltimore, Gendron might not have discovered his passion for underground animation and film. On a rare night of escape from toiling as a waiter, he attended the Tournament of Animation at the Charles Theater and saw Jan Svankmajer's stop-motion masterpiece, Alice. This changed everything—but it still took time for Gendron to decide that he, too, could achieve his artistic goals through filmmaking.

Attending Tech in 1999, he bought his artist girlfriend a 16-millimeter movie camera. She didn't put it to much use, but he found that he couldn't put it down. He continued to study stop-motion and computer animation in his Master's program at Radford. This is where Fishbowl was first conceived.

Originally intended to fulfill a 20-minute film class exercise, the movie that got shelved when the lead actress quit on short notice. Years later, re-inspired by familiar scenes, Fishbowl grew into an obsession for its maker. He enlisted friends and acquaintances from Bollo's coffee shop and other Blackburg hangouts to help him tell the story. It grew into a 90-minute feature film.

Fishbowl is, in its creator's words, "the story of Catfish Charlie finding himself." Charlie, played by first-time actor Joe Kelly, is a 40-year-old single fisherman who works in a bait shop. An eccentric dreamer, Charlie finds friendship and a new perspective on life through a chance encounter with a tough-minded 21-year-old woman, Tammy, played by Amanda Shumate, a 2005 alumna of Virginia Tech's Theater Arts department.

Gendron is moved by the distinctive sounds and images that evoke past decades: the crash of a 16-pound ball against pins and the graceful swoop of the ball returning; the murmur of customers passing the time of day in a country store and the broken-in grunge of old formica countertops. However, Gendron's efforts to film on location were nearly flushed because the locations themselves shut down. The face of Southwest Virginia is changing rapidly, with old landmarks making way for slick, corporate chains. The old Radford bowling alley was demolished before he could shoot there. It's been replaced by a new set of lanes, but the aesthetic was not what Gendron wanted. "I wanted one that looked vintage-y and scuzzy." Luckily he found a new set when Will Pearson, an old high school friend, told him that he managed an oldschool bowling alley called Sportlanes in Martinsville, Virginia.

Another near miss came when Gendron noticed a sign saying the oldtime convenience store that he wanted to use as the set for Catfish Charlie' bait shop was going to be closing in January 2007. "I asked the guy, when are you opening up again? He told me they weren't." Director and cast drove out to Martinsville, stayed with Gendron's parents, and made the most of the time, shooting over 40 hours of digital video in three days. There wasn't going to be another chance.

Unexpected changes in casting challenged the making of Fishbowl as well. A supporting actress who left was replaced on the fly by artist Eva Thornton, a friend of Gendron's who had never acted before. Thrilled with her natural aptitude, Gendron was crestfallen when in post-production it turned out that Thornton's lines were not picked up by her microphone, and she was out of town. Another friend, Courtney Kimball, tried her skill at voice acting to dub the character's lines.

Meanwhile, the director himself hadn't anticipated being in front of the camera at all, but since he was unable to find anyone to play the bad guys, he stepped in to play both. This maneuver called for more juggling with the voice tracks. Fellow filmmaker and actor Jack Bennett lent his voice for Gendron's live-action character, while Gendron speaks for an animated character called Frank, the Angry Hot Dog.

Frank the Angry Hot Dog was inspired by the art style of old, Southern roadside advertisements and other, more familiar designs. In thinking of a cranky, stereotypically Southern, anthropomorphic character, he was tempted to use Mr. Peanut ("Nothing could be more crusty and anachronistic than Mr. Peanut), but better sense and fear of lawsuits prevailed. Cowriter James Corne had a large role in creating Frank's flamboyantly hostile dialogue. When asked how an angry hot dog talks, Gendron says, "I'd have to get really drunk and then stub my toe to say some of the things that come out of Frank."

Gendron hopes to capture a spirit of oddness and whimsy as well as country nostalgia. Now that he is, in his words, finished with "being an indentured slave to this movie," he has several stories waiting to be told. His next big project is inspired by memories of a Civil War re-enactment he sat in on years ago and its combination of historical obsession and the absurd. He is continually looking for new ways to convey his philosophy of the ridiculous. "When you're very young you start to learn that the ways you were taught the world worked are bullshit," he says. "Life is more complicated and comedic than ever dream of it as children."