Umbra

I was born in Jamaica the son of a banker, and as a child I struggled with a lot of social issues. One issue that I reconciled with constantly was the fact that I felt like I had no talents. All my friends were good at sports, I was terrible at sports, all my friends could draw well, I could only draw stickmen. My mother tried to help me find my passion for years but nothing would ever stick. One thing I did have a knack for and didn’t realize until I decided to pursue the path of filmmaking was stories. I loved writing them, acting them out, pretending I was a hero in a medieval story or a space ranger flying through space. When I was a teenager, I finally found a talent and a passion, music. I played in a band and decided I wanted to pursue a career in music as part of a rock band. I had finally found a talent that I could be proud of and excel in.
From here, I had a sort of renaissance of love in the arts and began to watch and critique films I would watch. Suddenly, I became a sort of cinephile and became quite obsessed with everything about film. But it wasn’t until I left Jamaica and went to Chicago to further my music studies that I decided I wanted to pivot from music and pursue film. It felt right, it felt like I could be more creative but also I fell in love with the idea of visually telling a story. With creating a world with characters, settings, plots all from my imagination and putting them on a screen for people to see. I soon began making very short films with an old VHS camera, the first of which was a campy vampire film that was a homage to Universal horror films called “Son Of Nosferatu”. It had no budget, I used my roommates as actors, and did the monster makeup myself. It was…rough, but I still felt proud, I had made a film. My college unfortunately didn’t have a film program so I finished my four years, moved to Florida and decided to go to film school there at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. It was here that I learned the foundations of my filmmaking skills and began understanding not only how to make films, but what my specific voice was with filmmaking. I met like-minded filmmakers, made a ton of short movies that won numerous awards and finished off my journey there with a film titled “DAYKILLERS”, which won me to highest honor in my graduating class.
After Art Institute, I pursued my masters at the University of Miami where I honed my skills even further, but while Art Institute helped me develop my technical skills, UM helped me craft more of my artistic abilities, especially with direction and screenwriting. It was there at UM that I began to truly make films not just to make them, but because I felt an innate need to tell a story that I thought needed to be told. At UM, I directed and wrote seven shorts films, all of which did extremely well on the festival circuits, and my thesis film “HALLIE” won me the “Best Director” prize at my school’s end of year film festival and it was also chosen to be shown in LA as part of a showcase of the top films from UM. Now I am living in LA to pursue the next level of my career, which I believe entails making a big budget feature film and distributing it accordingly.