There’s nothing quite like the thrill of sitting in the director’s chair.

Back in 8th grade, I joined a student television program in Bloomington, Minnesota. My favorite memories from that time were being in the “hot seat” - the director’s chair. I chose the camera angles; I directed our audience’s attention to the trumpet solo in the back row, the show choir soloist walking down the stage while belting out the first few lines of Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker”, and the instant replay of the soul crushing touchdown by the visiting team. Even though it was a live TV format, I was very much a storyteller - using a switcher (likely two to three generations out of date) to convey emotion, and put the friends and family watching at home in the front row of the auditorium or the fifty yard line inches away from the head coach.

At the same time, I was also directing in a very different way. Even before joining the television program I had been messing around with tape recorders and a mid-2000s USB webcam with awful picture quality. But as our family camcorders evolved, so did my storytelling, and the rest of my filmmaking journey is a familiar one. I spent hours doing painstaking stop-motion animation with my LEGO figures. “Hall-E-Wood Productions” was born. I got my first video gigs editing home videos and promotional videos for my extended family. I started a filmmaking club with some friends, and we slowly put together a (respectable?) collection of live-action short films, emphasis on the “action”.

Today, my directing and writing credits include the short films Cityscape and Ash, and the feature film To Be a Man, which I shot the summer before I went to college. I have produced, edited, and directed several children’s web series for Eagle Brook Church, including showrunning and writing the pilot for their current show Comics Café, which thousands of kids watch in church and online each week.

Even though I’m over a decade removed from that TV program, I still love the thrill of being in the hot seat. But today, I see that seat as both a privilege and a responsibility; to offer my audience hope, and show them a more fulfilling way to live.

I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Media Production from the University of Northwestern-St. Paul, and have done additional film and motion design studies at Hennepin Technical College and the Los Angeles Film Studies Center (LAFSC).