🍂 Thanksgiving Update 🍂
As we approach Thanksgiving, I’ve been reflecting on this past year — a year filled with growth, gratitude, and moments that reminded me why I started This Is Not A Draft in the first place.
I’m thankful for the Veterans who opened their lives and shared their stories with honesty, courage, and vulnerability. Every interview, every conversation, and every moment on camera has reinforced just how important it is to tell these stories with care and integrity.
Over the past year, our team has made tremendous progress:
We continued filming across the country, from Washington, D.C. to Arizona, capturing powerful interviews and community-driven experiences.
We deepened the film’s three-act structure — Motivation to Serve, Price of Service, and Life After Service — refining the emotional journey and adding expert insight from Dr. Rebecca Blais, whose research on Veteran suicide brings essential context to the documentary.
We documented meaningful work happening in the Veteran community, including Treks 4 Vets and other organizations dedicated to reconnection, healing, and hope.
We interviewed a Veteran couple who served in Iraq together and later married — a reminder of how service shapes lives and relationships in unexpected ways.
And one of the most exciting milestones of all: This Is Not A Draft was selected for the Florence International Film Festival, where we’ll have the opportunity to share these stories with international audiences.
I’m also grateful to everyone who has supported this project — from the families who attended screenings and shared heartfelt feedback, to the friends, collaborators, and contributors who continue to believe in this film’s impact. Your encouragement has kept this project moving forward, especially during the long nights of editing, planning, and refining.
This journey has reaffirmed something I believe deeply: community gives us hope. Whether it’s Veterans reconnecting with each other, supporters helping lift this project off the ground, or people simply reaching out after a screening — you’ve all helped build a community around this film, and I’m profoundly thankful for that.
As we close out the year, I’m excited to continue editing, scoring, and preparing the film for additional festival opportunities. There’s more to come, and I can’t wait to share every step with you.
Thank you for being part of this story.
Wishing you and your loved ones a meaningful and connected Thanksgiving.
— Jack
Director, This Is Not A Draft
We’re headed to Italia!
We’re honored to share that This Is Not A Draft has been officially selected to screen at the Florence International Film Festival in Florence, Italy.
This film has been a labor of love from the start — a journey through the hearts and histories of post-9/11 Veterans, their reasons for raising their hands, the costs carried home, and the power of community that helps them rebuild. To have this story recognized on an international stage feels both humbling and deeply affirming — a reminder that truth and compassion travel far beyond borders.
Endless gratitude to everyone who helped bring this project to life — the veterans who entrusted us with their stories, our extraordinary crew, and the community that continues to show up with heart and purpose.
🎥 This Is Not A Draft continues its mission to spark conversation, build connection, and honor those who serve — in every form that service takes.
#ThisIsNotADraft #FlorenceInternationalFilmFestival #VeteranStories #DocumentaryFilm #HappyJackMedia #IndependentFilm #FilmFestival #FilmmakerLife #VeteranCommunity
And That’s A Wrap
Hey, folks! Wow, it’s been almost a year since we started this journey, and it’s been a wild ride. Our first interviewee was also our last - we started off by interviewing Shawn Banzhaf in June of 2024, and we finished up his last interview this past Saturday, April 26th, 2025.
The First Interview
Shawn shared his Act I with us in the hot June summer heat at the Pat Tillman Veterans Center, ASU Mountain America Stadium.
By the time we made it to his Act III Interview
the team was used to working in wild locales, mountains, deserts, beaches. Come rain or shine we turned out.
Now that principle photography is over, we are putting our heads down and pushing forward through the post production phase. That means that over the next two months we’ll be find this best moments of our interviews with Shawn, Cheryl, Eric, Grant, Cris, Danny and Karen and Melvin all of the awesome Vets who shared their stories with us! Also, a big shoutout to Dr. Becky Blais from ASU who shared with us the findings from her years of studies around active duty service members and Veterans and Reservists.
This journey has been amazing, and at the heart of it was a desire to share Veteran stories and prevent Veteran suicide. As we’ve traveled the last year, it’s been really impactful to speak to members of the community and hear their stories of being personally impacted by Veteran suicide. It opened up my eyes and made me realize how important a topic this is and that we can’t stop talking about Veteran suicide and doing whatever we can to prevent it. Building strong communities for veterans is critical, and so we want to bring awareness to this issue, and encourage Veterans to seek out other Veterans. It’s easy to lose touch with Veteran community, especially after transitioning out of the military, and even more-so in a Post-Covid world. So join us in fighting Veteran suicide, because we don’t leave each other behind.
Ready to Launch
Hey folks, thanks for stopping by! We are really excited to announce that we are in full-on production mode now and have closed out our pre-production period! So now that we are in production mode, we have launched our crowd funding! We are thrilled to be able to start capturing these stories of folks across the nation. We will be filming in Arizona again on October 5th and then we’re heading to San Diego to film some great stories there October 11th-13th.
November will be a busy month with lots of Veteran’s Day activities and we are excited to connect with as many Vets as we can to tell their stories.
In addition to cataloguing our stories through Documentary form we’ll also be collecting answers and questions in order to upload to the Library of Congress’ Veterans’ History Project. They have a toolkit that helps you know what questions to ask when you’re doing your own recordings.
We love this project and are excited to contribute our stories to it as well!
Here’s the link to support if you can: https://gofund.me/65611c1b
If you can’t donate you can still support the film by sharing with your community!
This Is Not A Draft
It all begins with an idea.
It all began with an idea. I was interviewing a Veteran for my podcast and I realized that I wanted to bring the story to a larger audience. I wanted to honor the sacrifice of so many, and highlight the courage, resilience and hope that our Veterans live and breathe. The process of talking to these Veterans has been extremely therapeutic for me.
Ian Scott Blair 11/21/2009 - 05/21/2014
May 21, 2024 marked 10 years since my son, Ian Scott Blair, had been killed. I was deployed in Afghanistan in 2014 when he was tragically killed. The fallout of my sons death took me over a decade to process, and still hurts to this day.
This year when marking Ian’s passing I challenged myself and my wife Jennie to make this the year that we share our story. Jennie is working on writing a book about our experiences and her experience as a Veteran Caretaker and I am focused on telling my and other Veteran stories through the documentary, “This Is Not A Draft”.
So I hope that you’ll join us this year as we gather stories from other Veterans and craft them, we could really use your support in getting the message out.
Follow along for behind the scenes photos and videos as we travel across the United States telling the stories of our wonderful Post 9/11 Veterans.
This Is Not A Draft Crew Members