This film, “David Isn’t Here Anymore”, was made from a place of pure, unadulterated love for films that inspired my youth. Horror being my favorite genre, I cite “Evil Dead 2”, “Beetlejuice” and “Insidious” as influences for this film. Pre-production was an incredibly daunting task, this being my most ambitious project to date. From actors dropping out, to last second location changing, to only having a two-day window to shoot 17 pages, the pressure was on. When the news broke of the first house being suddenly unable to let us shoot, I immediately switched gears and went to the next house I had in mind. A historic bed & breakfast, The Stanford Inn. It was used as the funeral home for the film “My Girl” and ironically has a long, storied history of being truly haunted. The locals will tell you all about it. Without much time to negotiate, I simply drove over, knocked on the door and pitched myself and the project to complete strangers. They admired my passion and tenacity and agreed to help us out. Location locked, I still had to wrangle all the talent to help bring this script to life. After sending out countless emails, I was fortunate enough to be able to have 6 incredibly talented actors come from all over the state to work on my set, not to mention, for free. Once all the pieces lined up, the fun part began, shooting. Those two shoot dates went at a breakneck speed. Because of our limited time, we had to run and gun, never getting more than 2-3 takes per shot. The film had to be done within a nine-week period for our school, adding another level of urgency. When we wrapped, I knew we had something special. My excitement was short lived though. Coming into post-production and realizing so much of the film had audio problems was totally devastating at first. Our sound person accidently had the audio input set too high. I internalized my negative feelings towards the situation and projected them into working to fix the unthinkable, clipped and distorted audio. The problem only made me more emboldened to complete the film successfully because I knew we hadn’t come this far to be stopped, period. Thankfully, my actress, Tracy Wiu is also a professor at Full Sail University. After hearing about my problem, she offered to let me come in and use the ADR room with the rest of the actors. So I drove to Orlando and captured as much ADR as I could. Ultimately, I think it saved the film. If I mentioned all the rest of the problems I had on this project, we’d be here all day. But I will say, working on this film I learned this art, this craft, is all about being forced to troubleshoot unthinkable obstacles. Problems that many others would've thrown in the towel on, I faced with a nearly foolish sense of unbridled confidence. I didn’t know how it was going to happen, it was just going to happen. That same confidence I hope to carry onto every future film set. I’m thankful for this experience enabling me to make greater strides towards my long-term goal and teaching me invaluable lessons about life and my passion.