It doesn’t matter where you start; it just matters that you do.
My journey to become a filmmaker and online creator has left me with a lot of scars... and hopefully equal parts happy memories. So, this email is a quick creative life recap.
If you’d rather watch this than read it, I just posted a shorter version on YouTube.
If you want the extended version with more behind-the-scenes context, that’s on Patreon.
There’s a fun little term getting tossed around a lot right now: “era.” (Thanks, Taylor.) And yeah… I guess creatively I’ve gone through a few.
ERAS
In high school I started tooling around with animation and filmmaking as much as I could. It was hard to rope people into my projects, so most of it was me “going it alone.”
Then in college I had the opportunity to collaborate with other filmmakers. I made a bunch of stuff, but it was very much about learning how to emulate others… or something. Who knows.
The next era of my creative development was the early YouTube / viral video landscape. In the years following film school, I tried to somehow package the movies I grew up on for an online audience. It turned into parody and silly content.
All of that now “slightly cringe for me” stuff I would call my Freakin Rad era.
That era led into corporate video work. There was overlap — documentary-style shorts for the internet, cool clients, great connections. I learned how to work on a team at a professional level.
And then we entered the Alien Country era — 2019 to 2024.
The all-consuming project that was our first feature film taught me… EVERYTHING.
It was the combined knowledge of how to reach an audience and how to actually make something at scale. The movie itself was me standing on my tiptoes with all of the technical knowledge I had built up over years of messing around in high school, film school, and making 10,000 mistakes.
The chance to collaborate with incredible actors, cinematographers, and talented artists to make one little 97-minute sci-fi action comedy film was a dream come true.
It took me 15–20 years to get to the point where I was making what felt like “a real movie.” The thing I had dreamed about when I was a kid. Let’s call it 80% there. (And that might still be generous — we had somewhere between one hundredth and one thousandth of a Hollywood budget.)
But by the time I finally made something I was proud of, the independent film market had basically collapsed.
That has been devastating. The movie should’ve made more money than it has so far.
So now there are some creative pivots happening.
While we were making Alien Country, I posted short-form updates about the process. But my dream was always to take people along in a deeper way — to really show how the thing was being built.
The truth is, I didn’t have the bandwidth. I put the movie first.
And that’s what led me to develop what I now call A.R.C.
ARC — Art. Reason. Craft.
ART — The creation of original stories. Designing worlds, characters, and narratives.
REASON — Sharing why I made something. The themes. The ideas. The internal stuff.
CRAFT — How it was actually built. The decisions. The mistakes. The process.
I’ve realized that the art itself is only one of three stories I need to share if I want to keep doing this long term.
Just releasing the final film, while rewarding, was a fraction of the creative output and honestly didn’t fully satisfy my need to connect.
So moving forward, I’m committing to sharing all three.
Regular updates. Even if incomplete. Even if unfinished. At the very least: authentic.
I recorded a longer version of this and posted more behind-the-scenes context and images over on Patreon. That’s also where the discussion is happening.
If you want to watch the extended video or see more from this shift, you can find it here:
And if this resonates, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.
What “era” are you in right now?
You can reply directly to this email, or jump into the comments on Patreon or Discord.
“Yet, out of the ashes of this tragedy, we shall rise to greet the dawning of a new era…”
– Scar, The Lion King (1994)
– Also Boston
