Mike Black and Carole Black Summers -- brother and sister, twins -- were born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Growing up with a love of movies, they pretended to make movies with the neighborhood kids. They had to stop "production" on Attack of the Cactus because it was too scary.
Black and Summers abandoned all pretense of sober-minded adulthood in 2005 and, at age 52, formed their own film production company. Undaunted by their inexperience and with scarcely the money to buy the digital equipment necessary to make their first film -- and brushing aside any self-consciousness about the indulgent cinematic karaoke that such technology is fostering -- they worked with creative daring at a necessarily breakneck pace (nine days of actual shooting) to craft Cassandra's Echo. The generosity of fellow artists and the kindness of strangers, along with their own phenomenal organizational skills -- not to mention plain old-fashioned guts -- had to make up for the lack of a budget. Cassandra's Echo would certainly not have been possible without the help of a lot of people more talented than themselves, although, surely, none were more foolhardy.