We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Bryan Sabillon a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Bryan, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My friends and I have been making videos together since 2007, and in that time since we’ve attempted making a full feature film exactly three times, and we finally succeeded on the third try. In 2013 it was a superhero flick about two heroes named The Ever-So-Tactical Pterodactyl & Cheer-Boy. The problem was we had no script and just kept improvising the whole thing, and we shot and we shot and we shot until we had well over an hour of movie altogether, but because of lack of structure it just never came together. Our second attempt was a script we actually wrote titled Doggy Style, a raunchy comedy about a guy who’s magically transformed into a chihuahua and has a week to break the curse. We took that production more seriously but it all fell apart due to inexperience. Finally we found our stride with a project titled We Start A Series that we premiered back in 2022. A narrative told over 7 episodes about a failing film crew, that when spliced together formed a full feature film. We Start A Series is a triumph born out of pure fun and friendship and will forever be one of my favorite achievements as a creative.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We’re a comedy collective named Raw Lemon, a group comprised of eight of us. Most of us have been friends since middle school, and have been uploading to our YouTube channel since 2007. None of us went to film school, we’re just a ragtag group of filmmakers from Oak Cliff who are self-taught and grew up together doing it the way we do it. We mostly do sketch comedy, but are far more interested in long form story telling and constantly in the lab cooking up ways to make that happen. I’m the director of all of our projects, and my writing partner is Eric Sosa who joined Raw Lemon in 2009. The rest of our members are Daniel Campos (since 2007), Louis Clifton (since 2008), Oscar Sanchez (since 2010), Sigifredo Flores (since 2018), Victor Hernandez (since 2019) and Guadalupe Reveles (who’s done work with us since 2011, but became a part of the crew in 2019).

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In all of our time making content/short films/full-feature(s) we’ve never taken off, and none of the failed projects nor the lack of a breakthrough have never broken our spirit. We genuinely just love doing this. We love creating, we have the greatest time filming things together, for anyone tuning in we love making them laugh, and we’ll hopefully just keep doing this forever.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

The need for profit is one thing that comes to mind. Obviously in a perfect world we’d be making money doing this, but I do think a non-creative might fail to understand why on Earth we’d devote so much time and energy to something not bringing us any profit. There’s something so fulfilling about creating something, writing a story big or small, putting it to screen and making it come alive. Anyone out there taking even five minutes of their day to sit down and watch something you made, now that’s just a special kind of joy you don’t get from a dollar.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: Bryan.sabillon
• Facebook: Bryan Sabillon
• Twitter: @bryan_sabillon
• Youtube: @RawLemonFilm

Image Credits

Jahaziel Ortiz, Oscar Lozada, Christopher Rubalcado