Visionary director is a phrase people use loosely. For me it's literal: visions arrive, get written down, and find their way into the films.
I've kept a dream journal since 2019, as a strict discipline. Ideas turn up there, sometimes even edits and corrections to work already in progress, arriving almost like instructions. A sketchbook runs alongside it, tracking the visual side just as closely.
With practice the dreams got longer, more organized, and reached deeper. The subconscious is where the imagination actually lives. Pay attention to it, take notes, and it rewards you. The same works awake: daydreams, quiet structured question and answer sessions, the same source approached the same way. It adds up to a lifestyle built around listening to where ideas come from.
Growing up, I wrote music because film scores got under my skin. As a graphic designer, I wanted to make the images move. Sound design taught me that what really pulled me in was always the story. Directing is the outer shell of all of it. I realized I had to direct to get my pages onto the screen without a middleman.
The Work
Six years as a professional touring musician, four albums, Berklee trained. Then graphic design, then sound design, where the credits ran past sixty and the clients ran from Technicolor to Boeing. All the while, behind the scenes, attending the Truby Writers Studio, and the realisation that story structure was the thing I had been circling the whole time.
The screenplay is the most important thing. Everything else exists to usher it in.
The Process
Sketches, concept art and notes come before any writing. Structure and scene breakdown before pages. Then writing starts at seven in the morning, five days a week.
First drafts are written in cursive with a fountain pen. Before a frame is shot the world already exists on paper, in several hundred drawings. That's why the concept art, the score and the sound design are not side projects. They're the same job at different stages.
On Set
Filmmaking is collaborative, but it sits under one vision. Something always goes wrong, and I look for the beauty in the compromise. Some of the best things in the films came from exactly that: a budget problem, a costume problem, a technical problem, turned into something better than the plan.
Being a concept artist, writer, sound designer, composer, editor and colorist means every department gets told exactly what's wanted, in their own language.
Now
Based in North Hollywood. Conception is on the festival circuit with a feature length expansion in development, alongside a slate that includes The Cursor, Exordium, The Icon of God, The 33 and more.