Armed with a bucket of ashes and DV camera, Neil Mandt and Marc Carter set out on a mission.

They were going to travel the world and make a movie in a process—a movie with no crew, no cast and no script.

Yet, the idea was in place—a story about two friends taking the ashes of a loved one to a Full Moon party in Thailand. Thus, Last Stop for Paul was born.

Mandt decided to let the magic of travel fill in the missing pieces.

The duo purchased around-the-world tickets to embark on their journey. “It’s the cheapest and most efficient way to go around world and the only option to travel to 10 places for like $2,000,” said Mandt. They choose to go with Star Alliance and picked out a series of countries to stop at along the route to Thailand.

Mandt, a veteran television producer, initially envisioned Last Stop for Paul as a television series. However, that idea morphed into creating a series of Web episodes that they cut while traveling and posted to their site, www.laststopforpaul.com. The series had a general outline, and the goal was to create 10 vignettes to post to the site. Each episode is just a few minutes long and takes place in such far-flung locations as Chile, Egypt, Moscow and Greece.

“We just traveled as two guys with a hand-held camera,” said Mandt. “We would be on the street and Marc would hold the camera and I would hold the camera and we would approach strangers and they would hold the camera as well.”

Upon return, the reaction to the footage was so positive, they turned the Web footage into a movie, said Mandt. Since then, the film version of Last Stop for Paul has traveled the independent film festival circuit and won numerous awards … in fact, it is being touted as the “most award-winning independent film of 2007. The next step, Mandt says, is to bring the movie to theaters.

What’s surprising to him, said Mandt, was the reaction of those who see the film: “I thought it would be just a little thing about two guys traveling the world but it turned out to have a real impact on people.”

Listen to Neil Mandt live on Peter’s radio show this weekend.

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Interested in film related travel? Check out “Movie-Inspired Travel”.

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