Daniel Colella is a filmmaker from Norfolk, Virginia. After receiving a B.A. in English at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Daniel moved cross country to Los Angeles to pursue an M.F.A. in Film and Television Production at top-ranked Loyola Marymount University’s School of Film and Television. One of Daniel's biggest influences as a filmmaker is David Lynch. Although Daniel's stories do not delve as deep into the subconscious and surreal, he finds alignment with Lynch’s perspectives on finding light and love underneath the surface of a cruel and disparate world. Daniel has also found profound inspiration in the transcendental and finding strength from within, a concept he values deeply in his art. Joseph Campbell states, “The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.”
“Cinema is a language. It can say things—big, abstract things. And I love that about it. I’m not always good with words. Some people are poets and have a beautiful way of saying things with words. But cinema is its own language. And with it you can say so many things, because you’ve got time and sequences. You’ve got dialogue. You’ve got music. You’ve got sound effects. You have so many tools. And you can express a feeling and a thought that can’t be conveyed any other way. Its a magical medium. For me, it’s so beautiful to think about these pictures and sounds flowing together in time and in sequence, making something that can be done only through cinema. Its not just words or music-it’s a whole range of elements coming together and making something that didn’t exist before. It’s telling stories. It’s devising a world, an experience, that people cannot have unless they see that film. When I catch an idea for a film, I fall in love with the way cinema can express it. I like a story that holds abstractions, and that’s what cinema can do.” - David Lynch