I am Korea. I am England. I am America. These three cultures have shaped me into the filmmaker that I am today. I have lived equal amounts in these three countries. It was the stories that I heard along the way that inspired me to pursue exploration as a big part of my filmmaking journey. I became a filmmaker on my road trip with friends across California, Utah, and Arizona. I scavenged the inner depths of my mom's dusty closet to find the small old sony camera that belonged to my mom. It was my first time using an "actual" camera. But I wanted to tell a story. A story about four friends who traveled day and night to experience the beauty of life. A story about four friends who saw the wonders of the universe with their own eyes - Grand Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, Antelope's canyon, and more. A story about four friends who conquered their fear of heights by hiking the feared and respected Angel's Landing at Zion National Park. A story that will last a lifetime. I found a passion. A passion to create stories through my travel. I brought my camera to Cambodia for a service trip with my church. Through the lens, I captured the brokenness in the people's eyes as they grappled with recovery after a mass genocide of the country's past. But I also captured the children's smiles. The beauty in the broken. I made new friends with the high school students at the local school that our church volunteered at. It was some of the best days of my life. It was all captured for me to craft a story that was one of pain. But hope, healing, and recovery of a nation. I bring my camera everywhere I go. To the streets of San Francisco, to the trips, I go with family, and even around the suburban small city of my home town Alameda. I am a filmmaker. I am a traveler. I want to capture the stories around the world to show people the beauty of life.

Walking around the halls there were many students eating alone at lunch. I was reminded of the loneliness and desire for friendships I experienced in my first year in England at an all-boys private school. So in my sophomore year, my friends and I started a campaign where every week we ate with a student eating alone. I was hesitant at first as I was scared of rejection. But every “Hello, can I eat with you?” became easier each week. Meeting new people, I got to hear stories of their lives outside of school. One student I met seemed closed off at first but through lunch every week we became close friends. Another student I met was new to the school and we talked about our love of films. Even though many of my friends started to drop out of the challenge, I continued each week to the end of my junior year and recruited some underclassmen so that they could continue the tradition after I graduated. In junior year, I started going to Berkeley with my friend to talk to the homeless every Wednesday. I saw this as an extension to the campaign we started at school, just in a new environment. We bought food for the homeless and spent time talking with them. I built unlikely friendships. I prayed for Louis each week whose wife was separated from him. Mr. George would greet me with, “Hello, Mr. Jonathan,” and would talk about life. Through these times I experienced the power of proximity, as I saw how our interactions with them brought a smile to their face after every encounter. While I couldn’t change the world in my four years of high school, I’ve started a small movement in my community. I hope to see a world where everyone makes inclusivity a priority.

"And that's how they escaped the tiger, by climbing up a rope to the sky," my grandma said. In Korea, my grandma would sit me down on her lap and tell me Korean folktales like Sister Sun and Brother Moon. I became lost in these fantasy worlds as I translated the words from my grandma into moving scenes in my head. As soon as the stories were over, I ran to my room and spent hours drawing and coloring how I imagined the characters and environments from these make-belief stories to look. Eventually, I started to create my own characters and gave them backstories of how they got their powers, or what factors shaped them into the scarred faced villain that I created. With these newfound heroes and villains, some ordinary, some extraordinary, I pranced around my small two-bedroom apartment floor playing out these stories in my head, acting as if I was the protagonist of the story. In first grade, I moved from Korea to England. I was placed in an all-boys private school where I struggled to communicate as I only spoke Korean. But even if I could not verbally communicate, I expressed my emotions and feelings through my art. The characters I painted became reflections of myself as they were outcasts and misfits who tried to adjust to new lives. In third grade, I got introduced to Lego stop-motion and it was a revelation for me. This was the perfect balance between traditional art and visual storytelling where I could translate the stories from my head and my sketchbooks, to moving images that my family and friends could watch. I continued to create characters that were different from societal norms by painting over and adding colored clay on factory-made lego figures to create my own unique ones. Meticulously I staged the scenes and took pictures frame by frame that would come together in the end. This became my first experience with filmmaking. I got my first DSLR camera in eighth grade. I took it everywhere I went, like my road trip to Zion with friends, the mission trip to Cambodia, and even around mundane Alameda. I worked on my craft through Youtube tutorials, learning from film directors at church, and hands-on experience where I learned more about the process of filmmaking through scriptwriting, directing, cinematography, and editing. My fascination with characters who are broken and seen as outcasts continued throughout my filmmaking projects in high school. Now older, I encountered more real-life experiences that I drew pieces of my film’s stories and characters from. Through the homeless that I reached out to every Wednesday of junior year, I encountered artists who showcased handmade stickers, storytellers who shared adventures from their youth, and lovers who couldn’t stop talking about their family. They became my unlikely friends who were misunderstood by everyone else. This experience influenced projects like my short film Little Boy, where a little girl encounters and becomes unlikely friends with a hunted and rejected ghost. Through the hurts from my short-tempered dad, I learned the painful costs of love and forgiveness. Through sitting with a student eating alone at lunch every week at school, I listen to their stories of struggles with mental health and family tensions at home. The brokenness inside myself and the students I met, translated to projects like the Summer Retreat Promotional Short Film which followed three characters with contrasting lives who experienced the same longing for purpose on the inside. Another was a short film that I started to develop titled A Last Goodbye where a father and son with a strained relationship find themselves in the middle of a stranded island. A story about reconciliation and healing of internal wounds inspired by my own relationship with my dad. With these experiences, I also gravitated towards many film projects for the church because it consisted of showcasing stories of broken people who found hope. I communicated these stories through creative biographies like the Know the Truth : a Spoken Word where high school students shared their stories of the struggles they faced in high school, such as the constant pressure to achieve the unattainable beauty standards the world sets out for teens, and how they overcame them. The stories I tell are filled with fragments taken from my own experiences and hurts from my life. It has been an outlet where when I struggled as an immigrant in a foreign country, I could relate to the characters I created and resonate with the stories I saw in films like Edward Scissorhands by Tim Burton. It has been the medium where I could explore the stories of brokenness that are evident in my and loved ones’ lives. I hope to become a filmmaker who will create universal stories that can be relatable to a little immigrant boy, or a daughter with a short-tempered dad, or a college student who feels empty inside, where people of different circumstances and places in their lives can find even a small reflection of themselves inside. Through my films, I want to help people stay in touch with what makes us human. Brokenness. But beauty and hope amidst it all. My journey has only begun, and I look forward to learning even more and growing in the craft of filmmaking.