For as long as I can remember all I wanted to do was to be a filmmaker. From the time that I was 7 years old I was outside with my friends and we were filming anything and everything that we could. I would write us scripts, albeit bad ones, but scripts none the less, and we would film our movies from dawn till dusk, often forgetting to eat. We started out small with just a simple 8mm camera and quickly moved up to using my parents camcorder. We made movies almost every weekend from the summer of 1983 till I moved Arizona to North Carolina in 1988.
My passion took a back seat for a short time after the move. However, it didn't take me very long before I was back to writing scripts and filming again. Only this time, my backdrop was no longer just a huge desert, now I had the woods that I needed to start filming the horror films that I had wanted to film for so long. The cameras that I used had also gotten a bit of an upgrade. I had gone from the huge shoulder crushing camcorder to slightly less bulky one. The addition of the snowy weather also made for an interesting setting for the blood and gore.
Fast forward 5 years to 1992 and the move to South Florida. After landing in my current residential city, my filmmaking took a serious backseat. I was too wrapped in other pursuits to even think about writing or filming. However, the passion didn't die, just went into a deep slumber for about 14 years, which bring us to 2006. I heard about a small film school here in West Palm Beach called The Palm Beach Film School. After mulling it over for about a week I finally decided to go to an open house and see what it was all about. Boy was I thrilled with what I witnessed.
Upon stepping through the front doors of the school we were greeted with high praise for the filmmaking community and it was explained to us that if we worked hard enough, and were passionate enough, we could make it in one of the toughest industries to break into. We weren't given false hopes that we'd become rich and famous, in fact, quite the opposite. They told us that if you are there because you want to be famous, than that isn't the place for you and that you should leave right now. No sooner had those words been spoken did more than 3/4 of the room emptied out. For the remaining six of us, it would be a journey of epic proportions.
During the course of the four month class we all had to write a short film, learn how to run lighting, sound and how to run the cameras. By the time we were done with our four months we would each have a better understanding of what the community, or a better word for it; family, was like. We would also have six amazing films to add to portfolio and a number of professional contact within the industry that we could contact in the future should we have questions.
After graduating from that school I had the honor of working on two more short films, as well as two feature films, the latter of which have earned me a place on the Internet Movie Data Base (www.IMDB.com). For the past eight years I have been working on small projects here and there to help keep me up to date on the industry standards. All this has finally brought me to why I decided to finally pursue my dream even further at Full Sail University. My passion has gone far beyond just working on a film set. Now I have decided to pursue a career within the industry behind the scenes. Thank you for reading this post, and hopefully I'll have more very soon.
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