May seem hard to believe (probably moreso for me than for anyone else) but I graduated, and even got a picture to prove it!

That's the face of a man who had slept in an actual bed for a handful of days in the previous few weeks, and had endured a couple 14-hour editing sessions to get his movie done on time, as well as a surprise lack of submitted grades needed to actually receive his diploma. I literally got an email from our registrar the morning of graduation saying that my diploma had been processed. Shoutout to that guy for coming in clutch at the most clutch moment possible. Luckily, everything came together, and now I can stop and take a deep breath. For a while, I just assumed that once everything was over and done with, a wave of suppressed exhaustion would cause my body to collapse into dust like the end of Infinity War, but here I am still kickin' it for long enough to write this blog a few days later.

I'm pretty sure I've gone into detail before about how I probably shouldn't have been financially able to go to BU, and that the only reason I finished was due to a generous loan from a family member, so I don't want to get too into it. I'll just say I feel like I did everything in my power to do right by the people that made this possible for me and make the very best of my limited time and resources at BU. It's always at least worth the mention to express how lucky and grateful I am to have the people around me that I do, as I wouldn't really be anywhere without them.

The results of that final semester and the tale of perseverance that was my thesis film culminated in It Came From Above, my most ambitious endeavor in writing, directing, and production design among various other positions I was required to fill. I definitely learned some huge lessons from this project: one being that true friendship can be a huge factor in motivating people to work on a project for you, as I came to find I lost many of my desired crewmates to other projects, but you can't really be mad at people for committing to help those they have a stronger relationship with. The other big lesson was to hold those who work with you to your own standard of quality. Very early on, I made a mistake of assuming that everyone is our thesis film class had the same level of ambition and standards as me, and at the risk of sounding egotistical, that was not the case, and it came back to bite me on more than one occasion.

​Better I do it now than a few years down the road, though. I feel that the ways I've failed on this project have prepared me for the future in ways that you can't learn in a classroom. Something I hear athlete's talking about a lot, this idea of failure strengthening you and setting you up for success down the road. It's definitely something I buy into, and use as motivation to stick with things and not give up. Anyway, here's a picture of some of the people who made the movie possible. Love these people and hope to work with them again soon. Shoutout to Ernie Wu on the left for being the only person to make it to every single shoot from start to finish (the final pickup shoot was literally just the two of us and the actress).

Ignore my inability to look normal on camera, I'm much more comfortable behind the scenes. Also shoutout to Emily Bennett for giving our movie the strongest poster game by a longshot.

To have finally made it to graduation at last is almost too surreal to process. It's a moment that I've contemplated for years, and now that it's come and gone, I don't know what to do with myself. It's a very bizarre feeling of numbness. I guess with a couple of days' rest, it's time to look towards my next project, whatever that may be. There's no more school structure to dictate my life and creative work now, and I haven't found long-term work yet, so I have an intimidating amount of freedom for the time being. I'll jump back into the artistic swing of things in no time, but for now, I think I want to have a beer, sit by some water, and do nothing else. Gotta keep livin, man. ​

Here's a picture of home I took on a boat.

A month ago, I was wide-eyed and ready to take on the world. Ten days ago, I went into Duxbury, Massachusetts to make a movie and barely came out alive. Let me tip my hat to a few people, rat out a few others, and explain how it went down.

Rewind to just after Halloween. My shoot is roughly two and a half weeks away. I'm nervous, but not too worried about things. After months of searching between Boston actors, dancers, and BU student actors, I struggled to find anyone interested in playing the robot, which I thought was really weird. I thought that would seem like a pretty awesome opportunity for most people. I mean how cool would it be to say you played an alien robot in a movie? Probably fair to say people are busy. Anyway, I was luckily able to secure one of my hometown friends to take on the job. Shoutout to Kelli Celentano for coming in clutch.

Casting the robot meant we finally were able to get started on the robot suit itself (it had to be fitted to the actor to avoid looking too clunky or silly). I had done months of research and had as good of a game plan as I was gonna get. I actually got really into prop-making and costume design through YouTube channels like "Tested", it's so cool to see all the ways professionals make these costumes and to think "really? THAT's all you have to do???" None of the movie magic is lost on me. I was prepared with a game plan, and this is when my production designer, whom I've chosen not to name, essentially told me:

"I don't think I can do this... so I'm not going to. Good luck lol."

That's when things got interesting.

At least I know she's going nowhere in this line of work with that attitude, though it didn't exactly solve the problem that I now had nobody to build my robot (she wasn't even going to help). I was pretty much left on my own to build the suit. While this was going on, my other production designer also decided that she was no longer interested.

I do my best to have a positive attitude and motivate the people around me to give it their all, but I just don't get how some film students can call themselves filmmakers and not understand how problematic it can be to commit to extremely important roles on THESIS films and then just decide out of the blue to jump ship at the eleventh hour. It's  just hard not to take stuff like that personally when you so openly express how passionate you are about a project. Not much I can do about it.

Nevertheless, I wasn't going to let it this ruin my movie if I could do something about it, and just like that, I was left with about two weeks to make a full-body robot suit, a dead dog, and a MacGyver'ed teleportation device myself. I knew it would be a test of creative and physical endurance, and would push my limits.

Did I do it? Yes, because I'm a baller. Here are pics of the suit and device. I'll get one up of the dog later once I have screenshots from the actual footage.

It's also worth noting I was very lucky to find some helping hands to chip in along the way. My producer, DP, and two of my other classmates pitched in when they could to help out, which was really nice.

Shoutout to Nicole Rinaldi of Emerson College for coming in for like a week on a call from our mutual professor and helping out some guy she didn't know to build a robot suit. Another shoutout to Kell Blasberg for weathering the suit to literally make the foam look like believable aged metal. It added some phenomenal detail and is honestly just awesome to look at. Definitely keeping the helmet when this is done.

The dark side of this build is that during those two weeks, I completely shut myself out. From the moment I woke up to when I went to bed, I was either shopping for stuff I needed or sitting in the building space I was using putting it together. I was able to get out at times with friends to try to relax, but for the most part, I barely slept, ate, or talked to anyone (unless they were helping me build it). It was by far the most stressful two weeks of my life. It really makes you start to question what matters in life. Is this what it takes to be great? Is sacrificing comfort and happiness worth it for the payoff long term? I don't know. I just think about stuff like that.

Then the actual shoot came! Spoilers: it didn't go fantastically. And that's pretty normal in this industry, but it went a little beyond what I was prepared for.

We had one awesome day of shooting, where we had a full crew, a lot of whom I didn't know but were really excited to work on the project and put in a great effort to get it done. The other two days...not so much. Most people either called out sick or just decided not to show up, including my assistant director, so we were severely understaffed.

I have to once again tip my hat to my producer Jimmy, my DP Alex, as well as my old grip and roommate Ernie, and my PA Lilah, because they were the only people to show up all three days. They came in clutch and are the reason I have any footage to show for those days.

Because my actor shaved and got a haircut immediately following the shoot, the plan right now is to do reshoots in the spring. I know with the actual crew and equipment we wanted and needed, we can really nail it and make something awesome. It's going to be a matter of weather permitting and people really rallying around the movie this time.

Regardless of everything that went wrong, I should be thankful that I'm lucky enough to get to do what I'm doing, because I love making movies and being able to make up stories and characters and see them come to life. If I'm gonna be honest, though, it's still really hard to work for so long towards something, aim so high, and watch things go so horribly wrong when you're so close, knowing how good it could have been.

I'm in a rough spot right now. I know a lot of the problems that came up were out of my control, but I still feel like I blew it. I spent a lot of money to come back to BU and do this, and the lackluster product I've made thus far leaves me feeling gross, and unfortunately I'm gonna have to sit on these feelings for a while until I can go back and try to get it right.

Among the great life lessons I've learned over the years is one from fictional sports hero Rocky Balboa, that noone's gonna hit you harder than life, but it's not about how hard you can it. It's about how hard you can GET hit and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done.

I'm gonna have to move back home soon and try to find a legitimate long-term job. Because BU Financial Aid scammed me into coming to BU but not helping me, I've stayed long enough to take the thesis film class and get a degree, but now I have to move home to save what money I can and finish my degree with online courses. It wasn't how I planned on spending the end of my college experience, but it's just another hit from life and whether I like it or not, it's what I have to do. I'll have time to work on a lot of new stuff and hopefully will be able to get some of it up here. It's the start of a new chapter for me, so stay tuned.

In three weeks, I'm directing the shoot for my thesis film. That's nuts.

It feels like only yesterday I was just another dumbass freshman asking the BUTV guy what I should do to make movies. crazy thinking about how much I've actually been through since then, both academically and personally. I feel like a different person. Luckily, I've managed to get some good advice from some really cool people since then and have figured out a lot of stuff about making movies. I've derived knowledge from unexpected places and have learned so much about making characters, building worlds, and telling stories. I've managed to beat out competition and earn a couple directing gigs through my college, which is pretty cool, and I somehow spent my first time in Hollywood working for The Rock, so I guess I must be doing something right. 

So anyways, now I'm writing and directing my thesis film, a short about a sci-fi loving farmer who discovers an alien robot near his home and gets a little more than he hoped for about the nature of the universe. It's basically a nihilist version of ET (we millennials do love ourselves some nihilism). The main character expects this beautiful, wholesome experience with this alien and instead gets no answers and way more questions. It's an oldschool sci-fi ideology you see with great writers like HG Wells and HP Lovecraft (he's the guy who created Cthulu and the Necronomicon). The universe has no existential purpose and is probably way scarier and more bizarre than out feeble human brains can comprehend.

I heard Neil Degrasse Tyson once propose the thought of a creature that's DNA is only 1% more advanced than ours, the same as what separates us from chimpanzees. The smartest chimpanzees ever observed learn to draw pictures or play Pacman, something human children can do, and we find it adorable. What if an alien species was just 1% of DNA more advanced than us? Would quantum physics, the internet, and our great artistic achievements be childsplay to them? In the grand scheme of the universe, it seems very possible. That's bananas. Also the idea of dimensions above the third dimension, which our brains can't comprehend, but I'm not gonna bother trying to explain that. Anyways, not super related, but it's in the same ballpark of where the idea for my thesis comes from, that these aliens look down on us and disregard us because we're dumb humans who haven't figured out interdimensional travel yet.

So yeah, that's the inspiration for the movie. It's got some cool stuff going on that will hopefully be a notable feat for an indie student film, such as a life-like robot costume, some cool special effects, and a doggo. I'm gonna be putting up the kickstarter in a few days, so if anyone's actually reading this, please, for the love of god, donate. Movies are awesome, but the thing about awesome movies is that they cost money. We have to feed people, house them, transport them, get fancy equipment, rent a location, all that good stuff. If we reach the goal in time for the deadline, the movie will be dope. If we don't, we get no money and I make no movie, and that'll mean the loan I took out to come back to BU this semester will have been for nothing, and that would be sad.

I still can't get over the fact that this is gonna be my final semester of college, even of school in general. After this, I do some online bullshit (cause BU is expensive and scammed me out of financial aid) and get my degree. Then I've got the rest of my life. Still don't know what I'm doing about that, but to quote my boss from Studio71 in LA: "Jimmy, I feel like I could just throw you out into the world, just on your own, and, like, you would be okay."

I guess I've made it this far, I think I'll probably be fine.

Four months have passed, Imma talk about it.

Interning with The Rock Vol, 2: Summer is Coming

I meant to write another blog right after I returned home from LA, but clearly, that didn't happen, so I'll sum up those last few weeks briefly. I went to Six Flags, slinked around Disney's creative headquarters, had no more success with voice acting, and can now say I was technically creatively involved with a song produced by Dwayne Johnson and Jean Baptiste (he wrote a bunch of songs for The Black Eyed Peas). When I say that, I of course mean our director/one of the writers asked me what I though of the lyrics and the song and I gave input. I helped!

The song is appropriately called "Song of the Summer", you can check it out on The Rock's Youtube channel, it's not hard to find. It features YouTube vlogging sensation Logan Paul and some crazy guy named Desiigner. Oh yeah, also Desiigner invited us to one of his shows in Orange County after we shot his part of the music video. someone made fun of my shoes but I rolled up and got in the to VIP section for free. Showed him.

I got to go into Disney's creative campus which was insane, but I can't really talk about. I met DJ again (that's what his friends call him, we're basically best friends at this point), and also got to meet Alex Daddario. I met some more cool people through my classes, sent out my demo reel (with not many replies lol), and made some friends I'll hopefully get to see again soon. Some other stuff happened as well.

LA was awesome. It wasn't until I was packed and heading for the airport that it really felt like I had been at a party and the party was over. I think it's not a matter of if I go back as much as it is WHEN I go back. In my line of work, I think it's kind of obligatory to go out there if you actually want to make a decent living. The whole time I was out there, I thought of my return to finish my degree as apart of my hero's journey, the premature return to the known world before completing my final act, but now that I've been back for a while, I've realized how much I would be leaving behind here, and I'm not sure when I'll be ready to do that. We'll just have to see what happens.

Summer Time, Super Nice, Everything Better with Dunkin Ice

Anyways, I'm living in Boston for the summer working for BU as an Events and Conferences room attendant. I'm basically a glorified maid, I clean toilets and make beds. But with a free summer apartment and $40/week for food on top of our pay, I'm not complaining. It's made things a lot easier for me given that my family has just finished moving recently.

Speaking of which, it's still kind of weird for me to think that I no longer live in Walpole. My corgis are no longer the Walpole Corgis (but you should still follow them @thewalpolecorgis on Instagram right now). For personal reasons, I think it's for the best for everyone involved, but it has definitely shaken up my own sense of security on the home front. Kind of a nice wakeup call to get my shit together and figure out a career path, something that I'm slowly progressing towards (at least I hope)

I got the directing job for BU's thesis film class! The directing job is pretty tough to get, as everyone wants to be the head honcho, so I'm really excited that my screenplay (and in turn, my creative vision) was picked! Real talk, I spent six months stressing in the back of my mind about what my thesis screenplay would be about, and everyone knows that creative people do cool stuff when they're relaxed. I was not relaxed, and had a means case of writer's block for a majority of that time. I settled on an idea and wrotie the screenplay about two days before the deadline :P I honestly did not think it would get chosen, but it seems like I thrive under pressure. Many great songs were written overnight: among them, The Who's "My Generation" and The Legend of Zelda theme. Fun facts. I'm hyped for this short film, I'll be bringing to life a character I've had in mind for a while, and with the right people around me, I think it has the potential to be a really fun time. The thought of how I'm going to do it terrifies me, but we'll see what happens. Early stages.

I've been having a lot of twenty-fun this summer too, which probably for the worse, has taken me away from creative projects I wanted to work on, like some screenplays, and two albums I'm working on. Tryna pick up the slack now, but I think a break from art to have a little fun was needed, I like to do other stuff too.

Anyway, I think that's all the new I got for now. In case you're one of the two mysterious people who regularly look at this website, I promise  I'll start posting more stuff soon.