Born and raised in New York, I am an editor at heart and a storyteller by nature. I enjoy the process of crafting a story as well as the task of taking care of the minute technical details to make it possible to deliver that story to an audience. I have spent many years working simultaneously as an independent filmmaker and as a college professor, allowing each role to inform the other. Though much of my work is based in New York, I have been fortunate to have had opportunities to participate in screenings in both film and television festivals across the United States and in Italy, as well as in aircrafts at 38,000 feet. Collaborating with a variety of clients has granted me opportunities to learn how to balance the storytelling side of a project with the technical side of production.
As my career in filmmaking progressed, I incrementally began to shift the majority of my energy toward post-production. Editing has always been my passion, and as my craft has evolved, I have maintained my focus on storytelling while continuously developing new skillsets to address the technical side of many things post-related. My technical skills include organizing external drives, understanding the wide range of codecs and camera-to-software workflows, building and maintaining project structures in Adobe Premiere and Avid Media Composer, knowledge of color use and color grading, troubleshooting errors (did you restart?) and anything else that a project demands.
Working as a freelancer has allowed me to bring my professional production skills, post-production skills and knowledge of the filmmaking process into the classroom. From 2011-2021, I taught a number of undergraduate and graduate level courses in the Communication Arts Department at New York Institute of Technology. My lectures and presentations went beyond the requirements of each course I taught as I strove to inspire the next generation of filmmakers and demonstrate two crucial aspects of filmmaking - the story and its technical synthesis.
Happy viewing.
PD
PD