Showcase

All my life, I have naturally gravitated towards the role of an entertainer. Whether in my personal life or as a profession, I have always worked to invoke emotion from the people around me. That, as well as my interest in the extraordinary and unique things in life, always left me as the odd man out. Since the age of eight, I have had an undying passion for professional wrestling. In the area where I live, professional wrestling is a very foreign and strange thing to be interested in, but the glory of the energy and the emotion in the performances always made me feel a way nothing else did. What I loved about wrestling, I also found as an actor. The thrill of using my own energy to invoke energy into a mass of people always gave me such a euphoric feeling. Growing into my teenage years, I learned to truly embrace my own style and passions that I used to put my own unique flair into every aspect of my life. Being in high school, where there is such a mob mentality in a lot of teens, I always felt like a lone wolf going through the motions. I always felt like I was on a different wavelength than everyone around me. I was stuck in an endless rut of classes that didn’t interest me without an environment where someone like me can really thrive. Everything changed when I came into Freestyle Academy in my junior year. With a strong sense of myself, I immediately loved the freedom of getting to create art that I felt personally connected to. It was an environment that my being was born to thrive in. Coming to the end of my Senior year at Freestyle, I have put in so much work to express who I am in a way that people can experience. Regardless of whether people want to take the time to get to know me or not, I feel that through what I create through art or performance, I will always get the chance to inspire others. With this mentality that I developed from creating at Freestyle, I have excelled as an actor as well a budding professional wrestler. At this stage of my life, I feel I have fully come into my own as an individual. I am excited to go out into the world and test myself in the worlds of acting and professional wrestling, however, I will always cherish the fact that Freestyle helped make me the proud man I am today.

This was the first film that I ever produced at Freestyle. We were tasked with creating an experimental film that had to represent random words we chose out of a hat. The word I chose was “sacrifice”, and I wanted to come right out of the gates with something extraordinarily weird and unique to truly showcase that side of my imagination right off the bat. Given little to no instruction on how to produce this film made for a very interesting product, and one of the rare films I made that I was allowed to star in.

This film was the last film that I created at Freestyle for my Zenith Celebration project. I was tasked with spending around two and a half months designing and creating my own project that showcases my passions as well as what I have learned throughout the past two years. I infused all of my passion for both professional wrestling as well as acting into this film. I wanted to showcase to the world who I am and where my journey is headed in the wrestling world. Through this film, I put a collection of personal experiences as well as bits and pieces of plenty of stories to create a visual representation of my struggle between what I love and the harsh underside of what I want to do and where I want to go.

I wanted to pair my very first film at Freestyle to my very last film I will ever make at Freestyle. Being able to visually see my growth throughout my time at Freestyle gives a very amazing contrast between what I produced with no training, and what I was able to produce with two years of experience and instruction under my belt. The first film displays a young kid, eager to express his vibrant personality and limitless imagination, while the last film displays a young man, who has truly solidified his identity and wishes to share his irrepressible passion with the world.