I’m a screenwriter, filmmaker, video editor, and film journalist. For nearly two decades I’ve worked with children’s media companies and others to develop their original properties and create all kinds of engaging content, from working on what may become the first kids’ show in Honduras to writing dialogue, scripts, and other material for Miko, an interactive toy robot from Mumbai. I served on the Children’s Media Association’s New York board of directors for over two years.

My current goal is to work on a series in production as a writer, PA, or in other roles. My master’s degree from the London Film School, while covering all aspects of film and video production, emphasized postproduction, and I’m adept at editing on 16 and 35mm film, Avid, Final Cut, and Premiere, as well as using the rest of Adobe Creative Suite. I’ve worked with schedules, budgets, sound, cameras, asset management, and many other aspects of the filmmaking process, besides writing a book of film history and covering emerging media like VR and AR for Filmmaker magazine for over a decade.

Clients include:

  • Believe Animation, Green Bay

  • Cardamon Assets, Dubai

  • CHF Entertainment, Bristol

  • Hey Daisy Moon Productions, Edinburgh

  • KidsCOOK Productions, Boston

  • Kinzoo Technologies, Vancouver

  • Kushi Productions, Boston

  • Landslide Entertainment, Regina

I wrote the original bible of Pip Ahoy! for Cosgrove Hall Fitzpatrick Entertainment, which ran for three seasons in the UK.

  • Mana-T Studios, San Juan

  • Miko, Mumbai

  • Milkshake Music, Baltimore

  • Nouva, Tegucigalpa

  • Sharp Image, Karachi

  • Star Gazer Productions, Kansas City

  • Suction Cup Animation, Tampa

  • Thinxworks Pictures, Bangalore

Here are some samples of some of my scripts, bibles, articles, and other material:

CAPTAIN CARRIE AND THE MONSTER SHIP (television)

  • Bible - This is a preschool adventure show co-created with Remy Labaki of Hey Daisy Moon Productions in Edinburgh about a young girl who captains a crew of monsters on a ship. They sail the Great Monster Bay in search of of monsters to help, with a social curriculum featuring traits like cooperation and perseverance. This is a traditional bible for a linear program.

  • Pilot treatment: “Bearied Treasure”

INES THE BRAVE (television)

  • Bible - This is a 4-8 comedy adventure that I created for Nouva Company in Tegucigalpa. The production company is currently pitching the concept to broadcasters, and if produced it will be the first animated series from Honduras. The story is about the adventures of a girl, her two best friends, and the magical ghosts of her great-great-great grandparents as they bumble their way through modern Honduras.

LUCKY DIP (television)

  • Pilot script: “Blue Magic” - This pilot script is for a 6-10-year-old comedy series created by Remy Labaki of Hey Daisy Moon Productions and developed by her and myself, about five mythological creatures, considered lucky in different world cultures, who live in a town full of monsters, magic, mayhem and, well, some really bad luck.

HEY, THAT’S MY BONE (interactive)

  • Outline/flowchart - This is a text-based game for 7-10 year olds, written for Kinzoo Technologies in Vancouver, which has been played by over 7,000 users. It’s about a dog trying to get his bone back from a group of magical time-traveling Vikings. Each block represents a bit of text that the dog sends to the child through a phone text, after which the child has a binary choice that changes the direction of the story. Thus most blocks have one input and two outputs. The reader/player will progress through a unique narrative path depending on their choices. I wanted Act III, as the dog approaches his goal, to be particularly funny and chaotic; this is the mass of yellow and green blocks near the right-hand side, where inputs and outputs are much less ordered and include any number of possibilities. (The coloring was to assist me with continuity—keeping track of the MacGuffin, the dog’s bone, as it continually changes hands, so that in each text block either the Vikings grab it from the dog or he grabs it back from them.)

  • Script - This is the actual script, 184,000 words total, which matches the 418 text blocks above. For children playing the game each piece of the narrative is delivered like a phone text as though it’s a linear experience, with no numbering. Readers of the script as formatted here can follow the story through the numbers at the top of each segment and those attached to each choice at the bottom—just by scrolling or searching for the next numbered block (which is why I entered the numbers manually as well, making them appear twice—so that the coding team could use Word’s search function to jump around, since the automatically generated numbers are invisible to searching). Thus you can read it with the flowchart open to track your trajectory through the branches and see a bit of my creative process, or just follow the numbers in this document like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. The script occasionally indicates a pause because Kinzoo Technologies wanted breaks built into the narrative so that it would take a few days for children to complete; I structured these narratively like the dog was going off to do something and would get back to the player in a while.

MIKO PROLOGUE (short film embedded within interactive elements)

  • Script - I wrote and edited material for the interactive toy robot Miko for two years, including writing narrative and educational animated films, spoken games, interactive dialogue, jokes and riddles, and educational “missions,” as well as reviewing content for pedagogical standards, United States vernacular (the company is based in Mumbai), and age-appropriateness for three age demographics between 3-10. This script is part of the onboarding when a child first starts up a new Miko: it begins with dialogue and movement for the robot while starting up all of its functions, then transitions into a linear film that tells the robot’s backstory; I designed the script so that it could be fully animated, partially animated, or presented as an animatic, depending on the budget. At the story’s end the film ends and the dialogue segues into audio-only instructional information about how to operate the robot; these interactive scripts, including the hundreds of lessons that I worked on, are formatted on a spreadsheet to incorporate the child’s responses to Miko’s questions.

VIDEO SAMPLES (television)

  • Who’s Watching Conrad Farcus? - This is the opening scene of my pilot script “Thanks for Choosin’ Ubergoosen,” done in low-resolution animation as a teaser for the series. The concept is an animated 11-minute comedy for 6-9 year olds about a mischievous vulture in the Louisiana bayou, for Believe Animation in Green Bay.

  • Kickin’ Kitchen - I wrote the episode “Cafeteria Takeover,” which begins this video, for KidsCOOK Productions in Boston. This live-action tween series features a health and nutrition curriculum, and this episode aired on WNYE, Boston City TV, and in 13,000 New York City taxicabs.

OLDER SPEC SCRIPTS OF EXISTING SHOWS (television)

FILM CRITICISM

I’ve also written film criticism and history since the early 2000s. Drawing on my background in Mormonism and interest in developing narrative technology, I’ve published the book Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952, which won the 2018 Association for Mormon Letters’ Award in Criticism, as well as hundreds of articles for Filmmaker magazine—about independent film and new media—and academic journals—generally about the confluence of Mormonism and cinema. All of my online Filmmaker articles are here, and here are a few samples.

I created the 6-9 property Captain Carrie and the Monster Ship with Remy Labaki of Hey Daisy Moon Productions