I’ll start:
I’m a junior in high school and will hopefully be getting my first job this summer, so I don’t have a “career” yet. For a long time I’ve wanted to be a filmmaker, and at this time I’m really planning on making it happen, at least to some degree. I’d like to start independent, and I want to write/co-write my own screenplays to direct, though my writing ability is going to need some work. I don’t plan on going to film school, though that would be nice. Film is a passion of mine, and it has always been a big part of my life as entertainment and an art form.
To say when I really started wanting to make films would probably have started with Raiders of the Lost Ark back when I was maybe seven years old or so. Raiders was one of my favorite films (along with the rest of the trilogy), and my local Cash Wise video rental store had a DVD set of all three films with bonus feature discs. Watching the behind-the-scenes of Raiders intrigued and entertained me so much, that it made me wish I could do that stuff too. I wanted to be Spielberg blowing a hair-dryer on the wax and gelatin head of Major Toht.
Take that idea and fastforward to when I watched The Evil Dead for the first time last year, and I was greatly inspired to make my dream career become the reality of my future. Just reading about how Sam Raimi and co. got the Evil Dead films made inspired me to just make something. I’d say that Sam Raimi is, at this point, my biggest inspiration in general. After Raimi, I would have to say that Quentin Tarantino is also a huge inspiration. I love listening to interviews with them, and especially Tarantino, since I think of myself as a less extreme version of him; I just love film.
I’ve shot a shortfilm with some friends during this past winter (unfinished due to lack of shooting time), and getting even a little bit of unprofessional experience helped me understand some things about filmmaking, especially in editing.
I’m who you might call a “film purist,” or very nearly one, I should say. I want to get to the point of shooting on film, processing on film and generally using as few digital intermediates as possible in every process of making the film.
When it comes to hobbies, it’s mostly just film stuff. 😛 And I like bike-riding as well.