July 1st through the 14th I directed and produced a documentary in and about St. Cloud Minnesota. I had a great three person crew, Nadine Luebbeling and Michael Kefeyalew, and met so many new people from my hometown. It was an amazing experience and we are now in our first post production cycle and hoping to return to Minnesota to do follow up filming this fall. Below are project details.

Over the past decade or so, St. Cloud, MN has gained a lot of Somali citizens. As our small community becomes more diverse, community tensions and misunderstandings have increased. However, efforts at unity and intercultural dialogue have also rapidly sprung up. This documentary is looking to tell the story of St. Cloud in a fair and people-centered way. Our hope is to show both sides of this situation as humans, and hopefully open a productive intercultural dialogue.

The working title, "Division Street" references a main street that runs through St. Cloud. If you follow the street far enough, it becomes a bridge and connects the East and West sides of St. Cloud, uniting the city.

Lola the Great

Since I recently finished up our thesis film, I thought I'd throw up some of my production designs from the big ol' Pre-Pro book! It's cool to see the ideas side by side with what we actually made, and to see how the ideas evolved from their inception. I was originally wanting to go with a more literal Georges Melies look (painted sets with forced perspective etc.) but after talking to my thesis partner and DP, Rachel Leigh Shirley, we decided real locations would be more dynamic for the action-y elements and overall look. All hail the AMAZING Nicola Newton, our insane Production Designer, for taking on and executing this monster of a project like a freakin super hero.

Space Babes

Space Babes is a semi-recent project I worked on for Freddy Poey and Rafi Lorie. For their senior honors project, they put together an encyclopedia of their own universe and I illustrated some of their creations. Above are a few of the "Space Babes," one of which was never used but was a first draft for a later version.