Art has always been a bit of a phantom presence in my family, and it spanned over a wide spectrum of subcategories. My maternal aunts, for example, were writers and illustrators. In her youth, my mother dabbled in poetry, while my father nurtured my love for music from the very earliest of my days with his passion for playing the keyboards. I suppose everyone has some form of artistic talent or another that tends to either wither away and die with disinterest, or grow and flourish to become something more than just a fleeting hobby.

My artistic roots began in 4th grade when my enthusiastic English teacher noticed that I had a knack for storytelling. With his encouragement, I wrote my first novel, generically entitled The Return of Death. It focused, chapter by chapter, on the horrible and gruesome murders of each victim of a serial killer known as Sammy Addams (Addams being spelt with two Ds in a nod to The Addams Family film which had come out earlier that year). The knack for a 4th grader’s imagination to concoct such gruesomeness for each chapter’s killing notwithstanding, writing took first place among my teachers’ priorities while educating me in my second tongue.

A few years later, having moved schools at the age of 14, music took its toll. To cut a long story short, music was the main driving force of my high school years up to perhaps the year 2004 when I finished my first (and thus far) only musical release. A true labour of love, A Clarion Silence was the name of my venture into the world of progressive death metal, and it was written and performed almost entirely by myself. While it made some very small ripples in the world’s underground metal scene, there was still something missing. There needed to be a link.

I speak of a link of course because my university years were spent for hours each day behind the lens of a camera or above the projectors of a darkroom. I was a late bloomer, discovering that law school was never the right path for me, it took me a year after graduating high school to realise that Art was no longer a phantom presence in my life, that I needed to embrace it fully and unequivocally. Starting off at The American University in Dubai and graduating finally with a degree in Visual Communication from The American Intercontinental University in London, Art was the Road, the Journey, and the Destination. I embraced photography, often to the ire of both my instructors and my parents, neither whom understood my work. This was especially so when attempting to combine photographic work with music in the form of installations or photomontages. There had to be a better symbiotic link…

It takes quite a long time for people to find their niche in life, and I have to say that my passion for making films never manifested itself in my life until the summer of 2003 on my summer term at AIU in London. Out of interest, curiosity…perhaps even boredom, I enrolled in an elective course in filmmaking. The thrill of going out to shoot your own material and editing it to form a story seemed the ultimate gratification to all three of my main artistic categories. Where else could you combine storytelling, music, and motion photography to create the ultimate canvas of emotion? I had the answer, and I needed to work on it.

Fast forward a few years to 2005, my last few terms at AIU have seen me go through all my courses and I’m ready to graduate, but I’m not done yet! I may have finished all my requirements for my BFA in Visual Communication but I was still to get to my goal of directing a proper film. Thankfully, my university allowed me to cross over to the Media department for 2 terms while I worked on my first short, Black Coffee. I filmed this with my university’s equipment with the help of a few friends and acquaintances, finished the postproduction process…and received the first ‘A’ of my university career.

And the only other media course I had done before that was in 2003? I knew there was something I needed to tap into there. I had found my niche. It was about time, too!

That year I decided that filmmaking was going to be much more than just a side-project, that I was willing to make it a career and not a job, that I was NOT going to sit myself down behind a desk staring at a computer screen with some Microsoft or Adobe product staring back at me until I lost all my hair and my teeth were falling out. I needed to take action, bite the bullet, and be the most stubborn that I ever could be. I took an internship with CNN International in London, went back to Dubai to work in advertising for a while before I became a TV Producer for a local music channel. The more and more I stayed in television, the more I loathed it. This was not where I wanted to be, but it was paying the bills nonetheless.

Luckily by then Black Coffee had been picked up by the local media scene and the press devoured it for a few weeks which gave me a bit of publicity that helped boost my credentials in the Middle East. I felt that it was time to move on. There was no real film scene to speak of in the United Arab Emirates, and our family’s immigration status to Canada had been approved. Canada it was, and I was determined to make the elements work for me this time. In the words of my former boss “you’re not employee material, you’re too strong for that.”

He’s right, and I’m prepared to share my vision with the rest of the world. Care to follow me?