1104 South Wabash, my-oh-my have I missed you. The smell of caffeine overtaking the elevators, the collaborative voices in the conway center, and the massive array of audition signs plastered on the walls. We are all back with new perspectives of our creative endeavors and we’re all excited to begin failing our way to success! Classes have started, principal photography for a commercial project I produced has wrapped, the Toronto International Film Festival was a blast, future short/feature film projects are being developed, and already losing sleep!

Creative Producing My First Professional Commercial

DoP Derek Fisher flexing the Arri Alexa

During the summer I interned with a start-up company (Vamonde) who received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation . They specialize in developing an urban storytelling platform that brings meaning back to a geographical place through the usage of geotagged short form content. Now, with this in mind, the director and I wanted to create a short narrative based upon the quote by Marcel Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”. We recruited our crew members from the Columbia network and the team consisted of 8 members. We had 10 actors in total, 3 of them were child actors, and we had 7 company moves (Producer lingo for changing locations). Some of our locations really helped the production value, which included getting permits to film in the Doane Observatory, Shedd Aquarium, The Broadway Oriental Theatre, and the abandoned United Methodist Church in Gary, Indiana featured in Netflix’s original series Sense8 (2015-). We used my dream motion picture camera, the Arri Alexa to capture what we needed. We’re now in post-production :)

Fall Classes

Marketing, Distribution, & Exhibition with Professor Kerns

As of now, I’m taking Marketing, Distribution, and Exhibition ; Long Form Narrative Development; Cinema Studies III ; And Thesis Seminar. With marketing, distribution, and exhibition, we came to class already prepared for whats to come. We came into the class with a project already in post-production, and with the class, we develop our business, marketing, and festival circuit plan. Now remember, the goal as a creative producer is to create films with a long life cycle, so call it an ROI ( Return of Investment) for us independent creative producers. Once we reach Tuesday, we have Long Form Narrative Development, the class that will stretch our short filmmaking sensibilities into full length feature films/television shows/transmedia projects. By the end of the semester, we will have developed 3 features with attached writers, challenge accepted! Did I mention we’re doing all of this while developing our Thesis film (Thesis is going well by the way, we have a writer!).

Journey to Toronto 

On my way to the internship, but I found a reason to pose.

Ok, so I’ll start out with talking about HOW lucky I was to even fly out to Toronto. So once class wrapped, I went to the office to pick up my suitcase, and made my way to O’hare airport, however once I got there, I realized I was at the wrong airport with an hour until my real departure. To make this story short, I’ll just say that it was a miracle that my real flight was delayed by two hours which allowed me to make the last flight to Toronto that night.

Once I arrived, I stayed with my uncles family an hour outside of Toronto called Keswick. I would ride the trains in the morning and walk over to the Soho Metropolitan hotel to begin my day as an intern for the international sales company IM Global. I can’t say too much about what went on during the internship, but I was surrounded by the best sales agents that were willing to get to know me and provide golden insight. Because of this trip, I have greater knowledge of the international film market due to the company having seven films at this years TIFF. I will mention that Spike Lee came up to our penthouse office, and if you know me, you know that I’m a filmmaker today, because of reading his biography in my high school library. Overall, I got 24 hours of sleep that week….so here’s to being an assistant to 8 international executives at the same time, while producing a commercial in another country, and balancing homework!!

Progress, not perfection.

IM Global interns at TIFF 2015 sporting our ‘Chiraq’ (2016) hats from Spike Lee