What have you been up to since graduating from ONE Creator Lab?

I was doing freelance work for Monks for a while, but since they are officially the social agency of record for T-Mobile, they decided to hire me full-time a few months ago so I could continue to write quirky scripts and social content for them.

That’s great they decided to bring you on full-time! How is it going?

I'm super happy! Right now, we’re working on these scripts for what I think is our biggest production yet with T-Mobile. I’ve been told the budget is pretty exciting, and they’re giving us a lot of leeway to be funny with this content, which means getting to be very creative.

In ONE Creator Lab, it was just me and an iPhone. And now I have a whole production crew, talent, and a big budget, along with several days of shooting. I feel like I got the ground rules in OCL. And I have my screenwriting background to back me up. And now I’m getting to do that on a bigger stage, which is exciting.

“I feel like I got the ground rules in OCL. And I have my screenwriting background to back me up. And now I’m getting to do that on a bigger stage, which is exciting.”

Are you still working with some of the same people you were with before?

Yes, not much has changed in terms of the core team. It’s cool because I was in the kitchen at the LA office the other day, and someone came up to me and said, “Aren’t you the guy who made those funny T-Mobile ads in that fellowship program a year ago?” She wasn’t even part of OCL, but she sat in on one of the presentations and remembered my project, which was fun.

That’s awesome! It feels good when your work resonates with someone – does your team go into the LA office a lot?

Yeah, every Wednesday, people go in. It’s once a week, but it’s kind of a nice balance to work from home most of the time and then see people, make new friends, and be able to collaborate in person.

Aside from your relatively new job at Monks, what have you been up to? 

My wife and I write films together, and we just shot our second Lifetime movie over the summer. It’s a murder mystery set at a fancy hotel. We had to frantically rewrite the movie to fit the location we got in Los Angeles — it’s Phil Spector’s house. He was a music producer who murdered someone in this house. There are actual secret passageways and a hatch in the floor and everything.

Are you going for a “White Lotus” vibe?

That was what we pitched! We’re going for a “White Lotus” meets Agatha Christie kind of vibe. We were like, “Please tell the director, he has to watch White Lotus.” So hopefully, it’s kind of like a bonus episode of White Lotus. The dailies have been looking amazing.

So how did you get in with Lifetime?

We met a Lifetime producer at a house party. Our first film with Lifetime, “The Killer Is Calling,” came out last January and you can watch it on Amazon Prime!

What are some of the differences you’ve noticed working in both short form and long form content?

One thing I learned in OCL is that short and long-form content are similar skillsets, but I didn’t expect how different it would be to try to sell something in under a minute.

During OCL, I learned you have to get the reasons to believe in a product across in the first couple of seconds. When you’re writing a movie, you have a hundred pages to get buy-in. When you’re writing a 15-second ad, you have maybe three sentences in the whole thing. So, just being able to get across the reason why someone might want to buy a product in a way that’s fun and feels organic to that social platform is a different paradigm than telling a story as a movie.

“When you’re writing a movie, you have a hundred pages to get buy-in. When you’re writing a 15-second ad, you have maybe three sentences in the whole thing.”

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I don’t know if this is a five-year goal, maybe that’s a little optimistic, but it could be a ten-year plan. I want to be a creative director. I want to take my copywriting knowledge that I’ve gained from OCL and 10 years of writing movies, filming ads for brands, and being a marketing manager at a startup, and combine it with the digital know-how that I am strengthening at Monks, so that I can be at the forefront of this new content frontier and help brands bring their stories to social media.

“I want to take my copywriting knowledge that I’ve gained from OCL and 10 years of writing movies... and combine it with the digital know-how that I am strengthening at Monks, so that I can be at the forefront of this new content frontier and help brands bring their stories to social media.”