I Want It All

JANUARY 21, 2008.

All my film experience to-date has been centred in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada. I shot and edited a music video for my friend, Mike El-Gohary in February 2004. Two years later I dropped out of my Religious Studies graduate programme after I completed a basic filmmaking course through NIFCO and knew I wanted to work in film. (NIFCO is the Newfoundland Independent Filmmakers Co-Operative. Everything I’ve experienced and learned about filmmaking has been through NIFCO or people I got to know through NIFCO.) I immediately cobbled together a simple and easy-to-shoot script and applied to make a film short (basically for free) through NIFCO’s First Time Filmmaker Programme.

With Roger Maunder as my mentor, I directed my first film short, I Want It All, in my apartment in St. John’s on April 9th, 2006. With Justin Simms as my second mentor, I completed post-production on the film just in time for it to play at the Nickel Independent Film Festival in July 2006 where it received a positive response.

I would like to make another film, but I don’t have a script I’m happy with yet. I’m content to learn more of the trade first. (I would also love to work on some documentaries, which I think I might enjoy even more than regular film work.)

I have no plans to post I Want It All to this website or any other. As much as I enjoyed the process of making the film, it was my first attempt at filmmaking, at a time when I knew virtually nothing about the craft — and it shows. So I’m not going to post it, but I will offer these raw footage clips from the shoot to give you an idea of what it was like:

A pre-production video of me building part of the set can be viewed on my video page. Behind-the-scenes photos can be view on my Picasa web album — or just press play on this slide show: