I started in high school, when a class assignment made me realize that filmmaking encompassed a lot of different disciplines that I was interested in - photography, drama, music/audio, etc. I went to film school, got an internship on Baywatch, and realized that I really had little interest in working in the film industry. The day after graduation I was PAing on a corporate video shoot, and over the next few years built a solid freelance career shooting and editing training and promotional videos, local tv shows, etc. After a while I started to get burned out, and I realized I was doing very little original work because of all the time and effort I was expending on the professional stuff.
Meanwhile I'd begun to grow interested in the multimedia side of things, so I went back to school to study that while I continued to freelance. I gradually transitioned my professional work to focus more on web and interactive development and sort of lost interest in filmmaking, but I also started teaching video production on the side. After a few years of that a group of my regular students helped rekindle my interest in filmmaking, and
It Donned On Me was born - a project with no goals other than to have fun making films. After 6 years of that I've amassed a decent body of work and begun thinking long term again about pursuing independent filmmaking more seriously - not as a career though, just as a serious amateur pursuit.
I'm at a point now where I make a comfortable living as a developer with a company that I co-founded and which looks to have unbelievable growth potential over the next few years. My plan is to use some of the resources that's bringing in to fund my filmmaking pursuits in a completely independent manner - small scale production, no outside investment, fully self-distributed and marketed, and with a goal of achieving sustainability entirely outside of the traditional industry. Additionally I plan to leverage my skills and experience as a developer to build tools and platforms to help enable others to do the same. It's a long term goal, to be sure - I'm thinking in terms of the next decade here - but it's sort of the culmination of everything I've been working on for the last two decades.