GERRY O'BRIEN - SELF TAUGHT STORYTELLING

Jerry, thank you so much for coming on the show.

I would love to start by talking about how did you get into filmmaking?

Okay, so actually that I owe to my wonderful, wonderful fiance, Mila, who's a pretty accomplished actor.

Um, like we were talking about, we, there was, there was sort of a rule.

She, she had said she would, you know, never date an actor, never date somebody in film.

And, uh, um, well, here I am now, I guess I'm officially a filmmaker because I've, I've made my first film.

Um, and thank you to you for, for being such an awesome director and, and being so patient because nothing worked out the way it was supposed to in that, in that first, uh, you know, film that we made.

Um, but yeah, I, I actually, one day she was, they were doing the 48 hour film festival and I dropped her off at location, which was just around the corner from the house, luckily.

And they, they ran into lighting issues, so they didn't have a gaffer.

And we had, we had lighting equipment from her doing herself tapes and I have like construction lighting.

And so she called me, she's like, can you please bring all this stuff over? So, you know, I jumped in the car and I headed over and then they were like, Hey, how about you be our stand in gaffer? So I was like, Oh heck yeah.

So it was neat because like, I, you know, I was never allowed to be on sets with her either.

So I was like, I get to see her inner element.

Right.

So yeah, I set up the lighting and hung around and I immediately fell in love with it.

I don't know how somebody could ever get on a film set and not fall in love with the process.

And it's so addicting.

it's, it's hard to describe.

It's, it's like as addictive as smoke or smoking cigarettes.

Like you, you, you get it and you don't ever want it to go away.

You know, it's once, once that shoot is over, you're, you're kind of sad.

Cause you're like, Oh, I want there to be more.

Um, so, uh, yeah, right away I was addicted.

And then we, uh, we'd explored, um, you know, different things.

I put, I put ads out, you know, as a gaffer, cause I bought more equipment and, I didn't really land anything from the public, but that film group kept reaching out to me for, which are a group of friends, kept pulling me in for different projects.