Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

If you were one of the view­ers who vot­ed Buck: The Man Spir­it a win­ner at the re­cent­ly con­clud­ed 2012 Trinidad & To­ba­go Film Fes­ti­val, thank Juras­sic Park. It was watch­ing this 1993 Hol­ly­wood block­buster that in­spired lit­tle Steven Tay­lor, then sev­en years old and grow­ing up in La Canoa, San­ta Cruz, to be­come a spe­cial-ef­fects artist and film di­rec­tor. Tay­lor's 35-minute dra­mat­ic film won Peo­ple's Choice for Best Lo­cal Short, an award an­nounced at the fes­ti­val's awards cer­e­mo­ny on Sep­tem­ber 30 at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for Per­form­ing Arts (Na­pa). Though Buck was a group project with two oth­er stu­dents for the UWI BA in film pro­duc­tion cap­stone course, it is Tay­lor who has been get­ting all the at­ten­tion. He wrote, di­rect­ed, edit­ed and mar­ket­ed the film, in ad­di­tion to co-pro­duc­ing it with his fel­low stu­dents B Clint Gre­goire and Kivonne Ram­sar­wak.

The film "was an av­enue for me to do some spe­cial ef­fects and do some di­rect­ing," Tay­lor said. Hav­ing stud­ied for a year in Toron­to at the Com­plec­tions In­ter­na­tion­al Acad­e­my of Make-Up Artistry, Tay­lor has been work­ing as an ef­fects make­up artist while do­ing a dou­ble ma­jor in film pro­duc­tion and film stud­ies. Tay­lor did the gory spe­cial ef­fects make­up for the film, and made the an­i­ma­tron­ic ti­tle char­ac­ter-the buck, a myth­i­cal crea­ture that grants wealth to the one who feeds it, but at a ter­ri­ble price.

Some might dis­pute that "myth­i­cal" tag; bucks or ba­coos, as they are known in Guyana, are wide­ly be­lieved to ex­ist, ac­cord­ing to Tay­lor's re­search. In an in­ter­view a few days af­ter cop­ping the Peo­ple's Choice award, Tay­lor said, "I spoke to some Guyanese peo­ple who didn't even want to say their names, they just wrote them on a piece of pa­per. "Once it ex­ists in the hu­man mind it's re­al." He wrote the script as a fea­ture but had to cut it down be­cause of time and bud­get con­straints. And though the main char­ac­ter Au­di (played by vet­er­an ac­tor Er­rol Sita­hal) is part­ly based on Tay­lor's dad, a taxi dri­ver like Au­di, Tay­lor said the sto­ry is fic­tion­al. He was walk­ing home from Hi­Lo when he ran in­to some Guyanese con­struc­tion work­ers with a bag of tools. "What if they had a buck in that bag?" he re­called think­ing.

Buck isn't his first film; he sub­mit­ted The Oth­er Side of Cam­pus, an­oth­er short, to the 2010 fes­ti­val; the fol­low­ing year he did an­oth­er dra­mat­ic short, Brush­strokes, but didn't sub­mit it. All his films so far have been dark and full of men­ace-for ex­am­ple, Brush­strokes, which al­so stars Sita­hal, is about a con man who gets a gris­ly come­up­pance. But Tay­lor, now 24, comes across as friend­ly, con­fi­dent and self-as­sured, the op­po­site of his des­per­ate, sin­is­ter char­ac­ters. Set to grad­u­ate this year, he plans to go to Los An­ge­les this week to scout schools for his mas­ter's de­gree and to net­work with in­dus­try pro­fes­sion­als. Tay­lor is un­sure whether he wants to con­tin­ue his ca­reer in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

"It's a de­ci­sion-mak­ing year for me," he said.