During my undergraduate studies at Cornell, I began experimenting with Adobe Premiere and my cellphone camera to create short films.
I began to pursue my interests in filmmaking more seriously by enrolling in a Film Minor, where my team, Group 222, wrote, produced, filmed, and edited a short within a week.
In my senior year of undergrad, I used everything I had learned to write, produce, and direct my first major short film, "Plague", which I filmed with my roommates. We used our creepy basement as a finale set piece, and the whole project was filmed on my Google Pixel phone and edited on the library computers. In all, the final budget was around $400-500 including food for the cast.
The short was inspired in part by my fascination with the haunting birdlike profiles of plague doctors during the Black Death. My mother, heralded in our family for her yearly customized Halloween costumes, designed and constructed the Plague Doctor's uniform. In so doing, she lent a considerable amount of believability to what is otherwise a micro-budget student film.
My directing talents have evolved since, as evidenced by my most recent short, shown below, but I remain extremely proud of this film.
In the winter of 2023, I teamed up with my former improv teammate Reed Rosenberg to create another short film. "L is for Lonely" was the result of those efforts, premiering at the Marina Del Rey Film Festival in 2024. Inspired by the reality of socializing in the early 2020s, the film humorously resembles an adult episode of Sesame Street.
With a larger budget and more ambitious effects, I once again transformed my living space into a film set and rigged up my appliances to act as puppets. I achieved the opening shot by balancing my camera's tripod on a jerry-rigged dolly comprised of a skateboard, a dry-erase board, and a great deal of duct tape. I'm proud of this work as an example of DIYÂ filmmaking and look forward to directing more energized, scrappy productions.
