I spent 17 years in Los Angeles working in the film and TV industry. As a set dresser and prop master I was called on to hang lights, pictures, chandeliers, make carnations wilt off lapels on cue and cuckoo birds fly out of clocks on fire. I earned an MFA in film directing from the American Film Institute in 1994. Between 2003 and 2007 I wrote, directed and edited a feature film called Dirty Habit while working at Warner Brothers on The George Lopez Show.
Since moving to Trumansburg in 2007 I have done a variety of jobs like designing The Grass Roots Festival T-shirts, making product labels, designing an online store and directing commercials. I directed music videos and was a full-time filmmaker for a website called FingerLakesUnplugged.com.
This is a pneumatic messaging system that I built for the cable TV show The Middle Man. -->
My father, who was an evolutionary ecologist, always told me to"specialize at something." And I have to confess I've struggled my whole life to reconcile that good advice with a congenitally short attention span.
So it was a tremendous relief to me when, late in his life, my dad confided to me that he too, in his field, was considered to be "a generalist" and that ecologists are considered "the handymen of the biological sciences." So you could say that my specialty, like my father, is seeing the big picture and grasping the common threads to many different disciplines -- seeing the connective tissue between them and making informed creative decisions based on that unique perspective. It's what a film director should be. That's what I tell myself anyway, when I have trouble sleeping.
