It was the kind of epic beating that drives you to your knees and keeps you there.

Last fall, student filmmaker Christopher Anderson ’18 was working on his film “The Scene,” when a nor’easter decimated his set: a bar he’d onstructed out of plywood pallets, PVC piping, and foam walls. Anderson’s film professor, Keith Brown, had warned him that the scope of his project would exceed the time a semester allowed. Undeterred he’d proceeded and now the worst had happened. Anderson found himself with no set, no cast, and a looming deadline.

A rapid-fire talker, Anderson tells the story of the trashed set in movie trailer staccato. Spoiler alert: It ends with the hero rebuilding the set, playing almost all of the parts himself, and driving away in a Ferrari F430. (A loaner, just to be clear.)

“Make moves, not excuses,” Anderson says. “You get what you put in.”

After graduation, the film major intends to find an agent, move to L.A., and write and/or direct films. He’ll have to his credit his film work, his energy, and, of course, his education, he says.

“I was going to transfer to Emerson,” Anderson recalls. He believed, at the time, that Emerson’s was the superior program. He mentioned this to a visiting lecturer who, here Anderson pauses and smiles, “ripped me apart.”

“A camera’s a camera,” the man told Anderson. “You’re not going to have the same opportunities in Boston that you have in Kingston.”

“I went home and told my mom, ‘I’m not going to transfer.’ Then I just threw myself into everything. You gotta try to make it happen.”