Hi, I'm Nathan Leonard, the writer and director of "That Little Voice" and "Treat Yourself."
I was born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa. It's a great place to grow up, and my childhood there was spent drawing comic book characters, going sledding in the winter, playing baseball in the summer, and watching movies all year round.
Me, my older brother and my mom and dad would all frequently cram into their bedroom to watch the latest and sometimes most random films off of DVDs we picked up at our local library. I can't remember a time before I started watching movies, but I was hooked, and I was even more fascinated in the process that went behind making them.
I'm sure every aspiring director has stories of how they made crappy home movies at a young age... yeah well me too, but I didn't start diving into the practical aspects of making them (particularly editing), until my senior year of high school, when I took the one video production class the school offered. This was also about the same time when I got a pretty strong urge to get out of Iowa and see what else was out there. It came down to the end of the school year and I still had no real idea of where I would go to college, but my best friend had just recently visited California and he told me about this great school called Santa Barbara City College, and they just so happened to have a film program.
So a mere 3 weeks before the school year began, me and my mom flew out there to find a place for me to live, and from the moment I stepped off the plane, I was in love.
After stepping foot in the ocean for the first time and then getting settled in, I started getting to work with film classes, eventually writing and directing three short films.
Delving deeper and deeper into the technical aspects of filmmaking some of the magic has definitely been shed, but throughout all the ups and downs of this path so far there's one thing that I know for sure at the age of 27: I just want to keep telling stoires.