I'm a senior at Burr and Burton Academy. I'm currently taking mostly academic classes, with the exception of cinematography. One of my concerns this semester is being overloaded with academic work. Right now I'm taking 3 AP courses and an independent study, and I hope that I have enough time to still focus most of my energy on cinema, because it's something I really enjoy doing. My favorite academic subject in school is English, and it really always has been. Writing and creating stories is something that I love to do, which has transferred over to cinema because I can write scripts. I used to want to be an author, but being able to film the story and present it in a way that can take someone's breath away became a dream for me. 

Some of my hobbies include reading, writing, acting, travel, and photography. I incorperated acting into my community service for the past two years, performing in Elf Express. Elf Express is a 10 show performance for children and their families around the holiday time, and around 200 people attend each showing. Travel is huge part of my life, and last year I took part in the Heart of Europe trip put on by my school with 49 of my peers. We spent two weeks traveling around Austria, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Germany. I actually took a bunch of videos which I edited into a travel montage, embedded below. I found my love of travel through my family. Over the past 12 years, my sister, my parents and I have visited all 50 state capitals, and we're planning to move forwards with visiting other countries, starting with England next summer. On my travels, I read a lot more than I tend to do during the school year. My favorite genre of books to read are science fiction or fantasy novels. One of my favorite book series of all time is the Maximum Ride series by James Patterson. On these travels, my dad was always taking pictures. He let me borrow his canon camera a few times, which lead me to love photography. On our most recent trip to Florida, I actually took charge and took most of the pictures, which was a really exciting thing for me to do (I got to practice with focus and light levels, it was really fun). I think that my love for photography actually lead me to love cinematography, and all pictures below (unless labeled otherwise) were taken by me of my friends, family, and places I've visited. 

I hope to attend a liberal arts college, where I want to major in psychology and eventually complete schooling to become a clinical psychologist. However, I also want to minor in cinematography or photography. After taking cinematography, it kind of flipped my plan upside down. I wanted to become a clinical psychologist and minor in writing, to write books. Now I want to write scripts, and work on film sets and take pictures. I want to work with cameras in some way, but I've gotten advice on majoring in something else to have a backup in case working in the film business doesn't work out. 

The biggest character turn off for me is when people can't focus. My first semester of junior year it took my group and I weeks to do one project, because our director kept getting distracted and didn't have a finished plan before we started filming. It was really frustrating for me because I had other projects I wanted to work on, and it really shouldn't have taken us as long as it did. 

This is my third semester taking cinematography, after falling in love with film making. Before I came into cinema, I was really interesting in acting on screen. However, after being able to work with the camera, I realized I much prefered being the DP compared to being on camera. I had so much fun learning about the camera and creating ideas and collaborating with other people, that I dropped drama to retake cinema for the second time. 

I've always been a really hard worker, and that didn't change when I took cinema. When I first took this class, I was really scared to do anything because I didn't want to screw up. I didn't want to try because I didn't want to see my ideas flop and not turn out the way I wanted them to, so I spent most of my time working on scripts and ideas until I felt ready to film. However, over my second semester, I feel like I grew, took chances, and learned that it's okay to do the same scene again because there was an error in the first shoot. 

My goal for this class is to finish up my scripts I started writing last semester, and work with my peers to turn those ideas into movies. I want to learn more about lenses, and how to light scenes. I'm really interested in using colored lights, because I love the effects it has on everything in the scene and how it can display emotion. I watched this movie the other weekend, most of it was about a dancer. They had a montage during it, where she was practicing dancing after overcoming her injury. They used a lot of cool lighting, and I was in awe of the lighting team and the dp. This semester I already have a list of ideas I want to do. The bulimia PSA will be shot while the actors come up from Jim's class, and I have a horror type movie and a really cinematic movie that I just have to finish the scripts for. I'm hoping that these, and the other films that I worked on last semester might make it to the gawliks.