No Dollars For The Dead

This short film is the second I’ve ever made, and I approached it as both a creative challenge and a personal education. I leaned into the familiar tropes of the western as a framework. Not to imitate them, but to test myself against them. I treated this short as a self-directed film school, learning by throwing myself into the deep end and allowing mistakes, revisions, and discoveries to shape the final work. We shot the film in a single day, but I lived with it for years in the edit. Returning to the material over time allowed me to see my own growth reflected back at me, and to understand how much filmmaking is shaped by patience and determination. This film represents not just my next step as a filmmaker, but a conversation with a genre that continues to influence how I see storytelling and myself as a filmmaker.