The Shooting Star Salesman is a fantasy drama about Finis Picazo, a 19th-century inventor granted the ability to connect people with their own shooting stars. His gift gives others something to believe in, but immortality turns the gift into a curse. After outliving everyone he loves, Finis retreats from the world until an eight-year-old boy named Elijah forces him to consider that the person most in need of hope may be himself.
The story arrived at a bad moment, which is why it got made. Velarde had spent years editing and producing while trying to get a directing job, and the work had thinned out. He was questioning whether the dream was going to happen at all. A story about a man who had lost his faith in his own gift did not read as fiction. Rather than keep waiting for someone to hand him a film, he built one.
With the team behind The Film Imaginarium, Velarde launched a grassroots Kickstarter that raised more than $10,000 in 30 days. Two months later the film was shooting, with a cast led by Yancey Arias alongside Jason Gedrick, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, and Velarde's son Elijah, for whom the role had been written.
Then the money ran out. There wasn't enough left to finish post, and the film sat unfinished on a hard drive while Velarde looked for work. He took a job at NBCUniversal and finished the picture at home, after hours, night after night, until it was done.
Finding an audience was its own fight. Roughly 50 festival submissions in the first year came back as rejections. Nearly a year in, the New York International Latino Film Festival presented by HBO became the first to say yes, and instead of submitting the same way to the next hundred, Velarde changed the approach.
He started cutting 15-second micro-trailers, each one customized with the branding of the festival screening the film, along with behind-the-scenes content built for the platforms audiences were actually on. Every selection became its own piece of marketing and its own gift to the festival running it. Programmers started recommending the film to each other. This was 2012, years before short-form vertical content became an industry standard, and the same instinct would later scale into 51 episodes of Lowrider Roll Models.
The film was named Film of the Year at the Georgia Latino Film Festival, became an Official Selection of the San Diego Latino Film Festival, took a Silver Telly, and earned a 2013 Imagen Foundation nomination for Best Theatrical Short Film. Film Shortage named it one of the Top 5 Short Film Trailers of 2012 and later selected the completed film as a Featured Short. In 2022, ten years on, Omeleto Drama introduced it to a new generation of viewers.
The Shooting Star Salesman was financed by strangers, finished after hours, and carried for a decade by the filmmaker who made it.
