I am a pure film geek.

I started making movies at a very young age.  Most of them were funny rip-offs of Movies or TV Shows to entertain my mother on Mother’s Day.

I was lucky enough to go to New Canaan High School in Connecticut where I was first taught professional filmmaking/storytelling under Peter Kingsbury.  My first short film “Rockstars” won a National Gold Award from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.  I have to find a way to throw it up here one of these days.  Good for a laugh!  Soon I was at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, making a bunch of 16mm shorts.  A great learning experience.  For a short time I was also enrolled in The Lee Strasburg Institute to study acting.  But I am a terrible actor.  Just awful.  Ha.  I also had a stint as a Development Assistant under producer Jonathon Komack Martin at Ryan Reynold’s production company: Dark Trick Films.  Good times.

Eventually I joined the best at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts where, under the guidance of Elizabeth Allen, David Maquiling, Kenny Hall, Michael Peyser, and Bob Jones, I was able to write and direct many shorts, ads, and music videos.  Fight on.  One of my shorts, 00:05’01, was selected for fourteen film festivals worldwide.

Now I have this super fun production company, WinterGass, with my partners: Kyle Gass of Tenacious D and father Bruce.  We make anything and everything that is awesome.  We created the world’s first online variety show about guitars: “Guitarings”.  Gave it to Fret12.com to produce further.  It now has over 3 million views.  I also did a few Pixar-style animations for AdKeeper.com, a ridiculous music video for CNN, and a viral Hockey video for Coca-Cola’s new energy drink: Burn.  Pretty exciting.

I just finished up a short film called “Simply Jazz” in the vein of Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz”.  It documents one special night in which Tenacious D performed a JAZZ Show.  Yup.  Jazz.