Yo!

Konnichiwa! My name is Oli (pronounced “Ollie”), and I am in fact an early entry high school student hailing from a tiny town from Maryland. Everything art fascinates me, and I want to learn as much of it as I can.

I guess in a way I’ve been a storyteller all my life, telling stories through my toys when I was small up to now through pictures and through words. I also remember wanting to be in the movies when I was little.

In my eyes, though, the mark of the beginning of my serious writing began on Labor Day weekend of 2007 (this past weekend marking my 4-year writing anniversary! :D), where I in fact started plans for a Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys fan fiction with one of my friends. (The story has now evolved into something that is entirely ours and not copyrighted, haha.)

And in fact I’ve always been into movies but never thought of it as a career until the summer of 2010 when I went to a summer camp for in fact making movies. This camp really opened my eyes to remember my childhood dream once forgotten and see that it’s really very possible to make movies immediately with the technology available.

People here are also saying what film inspired them the most, what movie brought them here to desire filmmaking as a career. I’m a different case. Books inspired me to become a filmmaker. What I mean by this is that books inspired me to write. But when I went to that summer camp and started writing my first movie script, I realized that I wasn’t writing books all this time. I had been writing movies. My books always laid out like movies in my head. When I wrote, I never saw words; I saw my characters in motion. That’s what inspired me to make movies.

Movies and TV I love are Firefly, Castle, and manga and anime, and anything fantasy or mystery. I’m actually so fascinated by anime that I’m going so far as to teach myself Japanese. (Konnichiwa, what I said above, means, “Good afternoon!” ) The movies that inspire me the most are the ones with strong characters.

I’m not interested in Hollywood. I don’t want to live in Hollywood; I don’t want to be as famous as Angelina Jolie. (Although rubbing elbows with Johnny Depp does sound extremely appealing….) I’m interested in telling stories, and being able to be a part of that story, and I’m interested simply in the hope that people can enjoy them as much as I do.