JOE'S JOURNEY
My passion for video production began when I was 7 years old. I played youth football growing up and at the end of each season my coach created a DVD highlight reel for the players. The first time I loaded one of those discs into the DVD player, I was fascinated with the various features of the film: impressive menu options to choose which particular game you were looking to review, flashy transitions between downs, play-by-play text headings that highlighted specific moves made by players. I was fascinated by the construction of it all. My curiosity of film combined with football and an upbeat rock soundtrack had me hooked. After the football season, I asked my parents for a video editing software for Christmas. It was called Nero 7 and I would invest days figuring out how to add text overlays and soundtracks to old family videos. My family’s old camcorder was handed down to me and I used it to film comedic videos with friends during summers off from school. Once I was good enough, I was the one who was making individualized season highlight DVD’s for my teammates. My parents thought my obsession of video production was a temporary phase, but it never was.
Once high school came around, I learned of the video production program and enrolled in every class Fenton High School allowed me to. I also went to the Genesee Area Skill Center, a career institute/early college option for students in the surrounding area, to take advanced video production courses. I couldn’t get enough of it. By the time I left high school I had 15+ projects that were recognized in local and statewide film competitions. I felt accomplished, but nowhere near finished.
After graduation, I started at Lansing Community College my first year out of high school and took 2 semesters worth of prerequisites and video production classes. I learned so much in those video courses. I then transferred to Central Michigan University for a Bachelors in Broadcasting and Cinematic Arts. Although Broadcasting wasn’t my passion, I learned about other important aspects of video production outside of just shooting and editing. The summer following my first semester at CMU (2015) is when C-It-Now Productions was born, and I’ve been living out this lifelong passion ever since.
