Turning the Corner

I’ve been feeling something shift lately, a small but steady sense that I’m rounding a corner that’s been waiting for me. One project is finally leaving my hands and heading toward festivals, which brings its own kind of exposure. You spend so long living with a piece, shaping it with people you trust, and then suddenly you’re asking strangers to look at it and understand what you were trying to do, and the pride sits right beside a quiet vulnerability that’s hard to ignore.

At the same time, a new project is already pulling me in, and that pull always seems to arrive the moment something wraps. I don’t rest for long, mostly because beginning something new feels easier than sitting in the stillness that follows finishing. Starting again gives me structure and direction, a way to move without having to explain myself. Projects have edges. They make sense.

What still surprises me is how personal the work can be when I rarely talk about any of it in my day-to-day life. I can put a feeling into a video or a poem or a piece of sound and feel completely at home in that language, yet if someone asked me directly how I’m doing, I’d probably give a short, tired, positive answer and let the moment pass. It’s not hiding. It’s more that the work knows how to hold what I can’t always say out loud or with as much clarity.

Maybe that’s why collaboration feels so right. I get to know people by building something with them, by seeing how they think and what they care about, by letting our ideas sit next to each other until they find a rhythm. I’m not the most social person, but when there’s a project between us, the connection feels clear and honest in a way that regular conversation sometimes doesn’t.

The ground under me still shifts from time to time, carrying a bit of that existential uncertainty about where I’m headed, yet the work steadies me. I believe in what I’m making, and I believe in the people I’m meeting along the way, and that belief softens the feeling that everything could tilt at any moment.

I’m not sure when I’ll rest long enough to celebrate with people in the way I imagine, since slowing down still feels a little out of reach, yet I can picture a version of myself that eventually gets there. For now, I’m moving into whatever comes next while sending this other project out into the world, letting it travel on its own terms, and trusting that the work will find who it needs to find. Maybe someone will see what I was trying to say. Maybe I’ll feel that recognition too. Either way, the momentum feels right, and I’m following it.

I Can't Escape Non-Fiction

There’s this momentum that hasn’t let up for two years. STORY DRIVE keeps pulling me forward, the anthology Voices Unveiled stretching out like a constellation, producers and animators and Full Spectrum Features orbiting in from across time zones, all of us piecing something bigger together. Then there are the entries themselves, little transmissions, experimental vignettes stitched with voicemail static. Somewhere along the way I realized I had accidentally filmed a feature-length diary, like my own archive wanted to reveal itself whether I planned it or not. And now I’m casting for a documentary about people living with chronic illness and autoimmune conditions, diving into another scale of reality.

I keep throwing myself into non-fiction. Maybe because it calls to me in ways fiction hasn’t yet. It feels like a light I can’t look away from, flickering with everything that matters: real voices, real conditions, real perspectives. I want so badly to slip into a genre-heavy space, to play in pure invention, but non-fiction keeps tugging me back. Even my freelance work, the stuff that’s supposed to be “just jobs,” ends up rooted in the journalistic. A PSA about Pennsylvania transit got me connected with assignments, and even that was born out of the same pull: showing, revealing, archiving what’s happening right now.

My imagination still lives in experimental art and animation. That’s the core of how I make. But my eyes keep landing on reality, and it feels impossible not to respond. I keep thinking, if I filter it through what I do, maybe someone else will see it too. Maybe someone will feel that flicker of recognition. Maybe someone will realize they’re part of the same conversation.

There’s this rhythm to it all: make, move, think, repeat. It doesn’t leave me much space to rest. Even STORY DRIVE, as Voices Unveiled reaches its completion, feels like it’s waiting for me to decide whether it stays paused longer, shifts, or grows. I daydream about expanding it, bringing in more animators, offering compensation, giving it structure so it doesn’t just begin and end with me.

But until then, I’ll keep making. I have to make. That’s the only thing I know for sure.