About

Monday, August 18 2025

The best way to understand my love of filmmaking is to watch my movies. Filmmaking is my lifeblood. It fuels me to wake up in the morning, it keeps me up at night, it's what I dream about it. Ever since I was a little kid, making movies with my brothers on our Flip video camera and editing on the family computer, I knew that making movies was something special. As technology has evolved, so have I. For me, growing up and learning filmmaking were inseparable; one couldn't progress without the other. For me, there's no other way for me to live.

As a kid, I loved writing stories. I would write full-length novels on my school's Google Drive, hundreds of pages about high-fantasy world wars, sci-fi adventures, and historical epics discovering new worlds. Throughout elementary, middle, and high school, I wrote hundreds of screenplays, short stories, and books- purely because I wanted to. My childhood work ethic is something I still envy, sometimes I worry that I lost that spark. After high school, I lost that Google Drive, and all my stories written over a decade disappeared. Of all my regrets, not saving my work is the biggest. From then on, I learned to not put my faith in technology; it all changes so fast, we're all struggling to adapt to it. I wanted to learn how to live without it in a world which grows increasingly more reliant on it, which lead me to one realization: I had to figure this stuff out sooner or later.

I spent all that time writing stories because I didn't know how to put it on screen. My ideas were too outlandish, too absurd to manifest into reality. If I really wanted to open my creative horizons, I'd have to teach myself how this shit actually works. So that's been mission over the last 5 years. Where should lights be placed to achieve the intended look? What lights do I need, how does light fundamentally work? Figuring out how digital cameras work, how different camera technology aids my stories, finding creative solutions to complex problems; that's been my goal over my college career. And as that career draws to a close, I'm drawn back to the realm of storytelling. At the end of the day, I can learn how to do anything, but if I've got nothing to do, I've got nothing. Cinematography is an echo chamber. "What camera do you shoot on? Is that 4k? What lights do you use?" WHO CARES. None of it matters. The story is what makes a movie good, not good cinematography. I've been learning to blend my new ideas about how to make a movie with my strange ideas of why to tell a story.

My first big foray into narrative filmmaking comes in the form of APE/MAN, the strange tale of a pencil pusher alienated by society, who abandons society in order to trade lives with Bigfoot. It's an odd little film, but I'm proud of it, and I'm excited to share it with the world.