MY STORY
I first fell in love with the idea of filmmaking the first time I visited Universal Studios in Hollywood when I was 10 years old. It was my first look into the magic behind making movies and encouraged me to being watching movies as a passion. I fell in love with the practice of filmmaking when my gut told me to take Intro to Video Production as my senior year elective in high school. I had made a few micro sketches shot on a flip phone and edited with the in-camera pause function in the past, but it wasn't until I began to learn the craft from Mrs. Forbes (shout out!) that I really began to appreciate how intricate of an art form it really was.
It took a fraction of that first semester of Intro to Video Production to know that I wanted to create videos for the rest of my life. I began studying Media Entertainment Arts at College of the Canyons following my graduation, where I learned more in-depth skills and concepts as I also dove deeper into making videos just for fun with my friends. My friends from high school (and still some of my closest friends to this day) and I made a video called "Sh*t Dubstep Fans Say." We were hopping on a popular trend at the time so we expected it to get some views, but we never expected it to reach 20,000 views (hey, it was 20,000 more than I'd ever gotten before) after the singer of one of our favorite bands, Rou Reynolds of Enter Shikari, tweeted a link to it while quoting one of the lines from the video. The thrill I got when I saw that first "Rou Reynolds just tweeted this video" comment... whew. That's when I knew that creating videos wasn't just about the love of of filmmaking for me, but also about the love of entertaining others.
I earned my Associate's Degree before transferring to California State University, Los Angeles. My time at Cal State LA was some of the most fun I've ever had creating videos. I met many talented and passionate creators, and was able to work with some of them on a short film called Finders Creepers that a friend and I had come up with a couple years earlier. Collaborating with my peers just for the love of the game gave me some memories and experiences that I'll remember forever, and it was capped off with Finders Creepers winning four awards at the school's Golden Eagle Film Festival. Sitting in a theater hearing more than a hundred people laugh and cheer as they watched a film I had so much fun making with my friends was an absolute highlight of my life... and a bit of an ego booster, but what can I say?
A little over a year after graduating from Cal State LA, I was able to PA on set for a couple TV shows thanks to some connections looking out for me. One of those shows was America's Funniest Home Videos. It was an historic show that I had grown up watching, and thankfully the producers liked me enough to offer me a temporary role as a Screener to assess clips sent in to the show. That role became full time a few months later, and I'm proud to have grown with the company since then; transferring over to the Digital department in 2021 and performing a few different roles before becoming the show's Social Producer in 2024. Each day I get to make videos with the goal of entertaining viewers. I get to edit clips in ways I think makes them funnier, give a spin on the latest social media trend, and show a video concept to my coworkers and say, "okay, I know this is totally dumb, but what do we think?".
I still find some time to work on personal projects. Each year I love to make a funny video with my family at our annual reunion. I love to pop open TikTok and make a quick video of whatever dumb joke popped into my head. I love try out new editing techniques then overuse them in my next several videos. And I still love to entertain people with my videos.
This whole story is just my long-winded (and on-brand) way of saying that I couldn't imagine myself in any other industry than entertainment and media, and I plan on staying in it for as long as it will have me.
And yes, Sh*t Dubstep Fans Say is still up on my YouTube.
You just have to scroll a bit to find it 😉