From as early as I can remember, I was a sports kid. I started with soccer for a year then went to baseball where I’d spend the rest of my sport playing “career”. Once I got to 5th grade, I decided to see if I could play an instrument well since that’s the age you could start band at school. I decided to play the trumpet to prove that I could play it better than my sister did when she was in 5th grade. Putting that fact aside, I truly fell in love with playing music instantly. Since then, I’ve been in many different types of performing groups, both in and out of school. When not playing music, sports or fighting to keep my grades up, I would love to eat, draw, and watch movies. When I was a freshman in high school taking classes online because of COVID-19, I had a few assignments in my English class where I had to create original short stories. I can’t give any specific examples, but I was very much trying to recreate the effect that the storyline in certain movies had on me. Although each time the stories didn’t flow at first, once I came up with an idea that I liked, I couldn’t stop providing details and dressing up the story until I was happy with the story I had told. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that is the first time I can remember the joy that writing stories brought me. Fast forward to my junior year in high school. I was just relaxing at home and so see on Instagram that a friend of mine had just released a short horror film with friends that I knew. It wasn’t the most produced or technically skilled production, but it was created with care and passion. I thought it was the coolest thing that my friends had made such a thing and I wished I had been part of it. Eventually I reached out saying that I loved the film and I would love to be a part of one in the future as an actor if he ever needed one. He did decide to make another one and I was part of the cast, but unfortunately that project never got made. Although I loved what he was doing and thought it was super cool, I couldn’t help but believe that I could do it better. With no experience, I somehow gave myself the idea that I could create a great film. It’s an important fact to note that I grew up very protected. In other words, I had kind but strict parents that would never be separate from me. Anyways, I don’t know what else influenced me other than “Stranger Things”, but I decided that I wanted to create a movie that portrayed my ideal life as a teen, which is very similar to “Stranger Things”. A life where I had a few close friends and we could walk or ride bikes anywhere we wanted outside of the house at any time of day and have the most fun adventures you could think of. From that point, to probably the end of my senior year, I spent almost all of my free time and meal time watching hour upon hours upon hours of free filmmaking tutorials or how-to videos. I watched videos on all aspects from shot composition, lighting, and editing, to financing; directing, story pacing and so on. I immersed myself in these videos every chance I got. One would think that I was creating projects throughout that whole period but I actually wasn’t. I practically went through two years of free filmmaking school while only creating one film, which is a project I made at school called “The Foot-age Chase”, originally titled, “Caught”. This film is on my channel by the way. Anyways, now that I had a baseline knowledge of film and how films were created, I slowly gathered friends to act in or help me create these films. At first it was a one man crew and two actors, and it has grown to a multi person crew and various amounts of actors. On May 24th, it will be the one year anniversary of JEM Films’ creation.