It all started one fateful day for me, Pam, on the Clubhouse app in early January 2021. Latina showrunner Gloria Calderon Kellett was leading her first room, and Latinas and WOC across the industry were clamoring to hear her speak and to ask their questions. Up until that point, I had nothing going on in my filmmaking career and was hoping to get back into my filmmaking/directing career. I had an idea for a Latina lead pilot episode to hopefully use to break into TV as a director and was eager to get advice from Tia Glo about it!
When the time came for me to ask her my question, Gloria gave me some serious no-BS advice. I told her that writing wasn’t my strong suit, but I wanted to direct. She told me that if writing wasn't my thing, then to not focus on that and to instead build a team of writers who could help me create what I'm looking to direct. A little bummed, I knew she was right. Writing is a chore for me, whereas directing and producing fills my soul.
A few minutes later, I received a message on Instagram. Enter Desiree Ewing. She was in the Clubhouse room and heard me speaking with Tia Glo. In her message to me, she told me she had connections with a small short script competition in the UK. From there, I connected with the head of the short script program, Tom Hilton-Hart. Tom and I met via zoom and we agreed to dedicate the month of February of his competition to helping me find three kick-ass scripts to direct and produce! So I set the parameters of what I wanted the writers to write; genre, theme, characters and location and off the writers went to come up with something to get a chance to be chosen to have their script get produced!
By the end of that month, I had three amazing scripts, and was ready to officially dive into pre-production on all three short films. Through Clubhouse, I was able to find Desiree Ewing, who not only connected me to Tom, but was selected as one of the winners of the screenwriting challenge and later came on as a Co-Producer. I also found and met Crystal, my other Co-Producer and many, many other people willing to assist and support! Talk about the power of social media!
