Where I'm From and Where I'm Going

I grew up in many cities across Canada, and at each stop I looked for something exceptional to accomplish to leave behind me.

In my youth, this tendency manifested itself in adventurous projects; I built a 22-foot boat out of plastic bottles and shot the rapids on the Ottawa river many times before my mother recycled it; I made my own bungee cords and took my friends bungee jumping off bridges (over water, of course); at 16 years old, I jumped a freight train to travel across Canada with friends and in the end traveled for 40 days on about 200 dollars in funds.

After university, these tendencies naturally matured into a love of entrepreneurism. I was challenged by the idea that “movies are risky and unprofitable” and set out to overcome the obstacles and succeed, and produced several profitable films.

Producing feature films is like planning weddings. The participants all need to know exactly what to do on a precise schedule; costumes, makeup, food, crowd control, parking, transportation, sound systems, lighting, cameras...  everything is expensive and has to go perfectly or it's a disaster. Now, take that and imagine planning and executing 40 weddings in 40 straight days, and that's movie production. Then add post-production and sales and distribution, and that's film producing.

After producing films, I settled down and raised funds to create a software studio, and released online massively multiplayer games. I still run the game studio, and the games took on hundreds of thousands of players which is a satisfying result. But it didn't seem like my "stopping place"...

Then, to round out my business skills and make sure I could see and know the "big picture", as they say, I enrolled in a full-time MBA program at a fairly prestigious university and am nearly finished my degree...

Having done that, I found myself returning to making feature films. Why is that? I have a personal compelling need to tell stories, and to move from project to project with a new story to tell each time.

And that all adds up to my current endeavor. I'm going to make a lot of movies this year, six or more is my 2012 goal. And I'm going to tell that story here, on my blog, in gory detail.

I love a challenge. I love telling stories. I love making movies.