15: "They call him Dr. Love"

I've spoken many times about how watching movies with my dad growing up was the original inspiration for my career path, but in any such story there is invariably one point where the dream began to see the light of day, where an idea became practice.  For me, that point was the introduction to film and television production course I took at Michigan my sophomore year, and as a whole, that class is my number 15 college memory.

Long before I knew that Gene Simmons was the real "Dr. Love" I wrote and directed a movie called "The Adventures of Dr. Love" with some classmates. It was my first real exposure to making a short film, and I loved it so much, I haven't looked back since.

It began the first day I went to class, which was actually the second day of class because I was taking the class only after dropping another one. The instructor, Alexis, was assigning groups for the first project (the short video) and that's how I met my friend Gabi. Gabi doesn't know this, but I actually was really hoping to be paired with her because she was easily the prettiest girl in the room, but she ended up being so much more than that that I feel really bad for thinking that.

The writing process was so cool.  The four of us in the group (Paul and Vicki were the other two) met up and spit out ideas.  The "Dr. Love" idea was mine originally, but we all contributed ideas before I finalized the script. Gabi played casting director and brought in a few of her friends to be our stars, and I asked my buddy Ben Trout to play the last role.

The movie wasn't great, but you can see it here.  The biggest issue was a boom pole in the corner of one of the shots.  But, it was a lot of fun to make and the experience - as I said - was a contributing factor in me declaring my major.

The class, as a whole, was a lot of fun.  I got my first taste of acting in a couple of short interview projects (here and here), and produced our whole-class film project.

Like many of these older memories, the aftermath is also a big deal. Gabi later appeared in two projects I did (stay tuned...) and Minhdzuy, one of our classmates who directed one of the interviews I was in (the pokemon one) cast me in my first play, which led to many great things later on.