I have been around movies one way or another my whole life. Though I lived the first 12 years of my life without a television at home, I was introduced to movies early on. My parents are both fans of classic Hitchcock and Cary Grant movies and I can remember sitting in my living room with them watching Bringing Up Baby, North By Northwest and many others. My first real interest in filmmaking came when I was in my early teens, through a friend of my sister. He brought a video camera over to our house one afternoon and had my sister and I act in a short film he was making. I was skeptical at first, but after finishing it, I was hooked. I started writing my own scripts and convinced my parents to get a video camera so I could shoot them. I used my friends in the neighborhood as actors and made a handful of short films while I was in high school. They weren’t exactly Oscar-worthy stuff, but it was a start.

As my high school career progressed, my desire to make movies took a backseat to the rest of my life. I became more preoccupied with graduating and going to college and forgot about filmmaking for a while. I majored in engineering at Northeastern University because I was good at math and thought that meant I should be an engineer (wrong). By the end of my freshman year at Northeastern I had received my first “F”, which was accompanied by my second and third “F”, and was left without a major and a GPA that would get me turned away from most community colleges.

I decided I needed a break and took a semester off to live with my aunt and uncle in Cape Town, South Africa. It was here that I rediscovered creating writing and remembered how much I enjoyed storytelling. I started with a few short stories and a couple years down the line, I found myself 30 pages into a full length script. At that point, I showed the script to Ramon and we ended up finishing it together. This was really the beginning of Sentinel Films, though it would be a few years before we starting calling ourselves by that name. The script became Watch Your Back, a film we are still hoping to make at some point. After finishing the script, we decided we wanted to take the next step and actually shoot it. This decision put us on the path that has taken us to where we are now.

I don’t come to this the traditional way. Film school was never really on my radar and though I have had a small amount of technical training, most of what I know about the business and the art of filmmaking I’ve picked up on my own. My desire to build this company stems from both my interest in filmmaking and the enjoyment I get out of building something on my own. I don’t know where this is going to go, or when it’s going to end, but I’ve enjoyed where it’s taken me so far and look forward to whatever comes next.