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“Well, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Since March I’ve been working on getting a short film made. It’s gone through an incredible amount of revisions and seen many, many personnel changes. The one thing that has remained consistent is that I was going to be its Director.

I’ve had the thought that I wanted to direct a film for quite a long time and I saw this short as an opportunity to take a step toward that.

After the latest round of script changes it came up from my DP, Tommy, that perhaps being the Director wasn’t my best role in my film. It was an interesting statement made at an interesting time.

Lately I’ve been fielding a particular question fairly consistently: “What do you plan on doing with your film?” I would have thought I would say that I would use it to direct the next film, as I had originally thought. But my answer wasn’t that.

I realized that my dream job is not to direct films, though doing that would certainly be fun I’m sure. My dream job is actually to sit in rooms with people that need great ideas and help shape them.

It makes sense that I feel that way because I’ve been doing it a lot lately for friends that are working on various projects. Anything from websites, to blogs, to advertising and marketing, to iPhone games, to businesses. They tell me about their idea and I feed them directions and suggestions to consider to bolster their idea.

Now, none of this is really official and I don’t really have a metric to gage if my ideas relate directly to improved success of any of these projects, but I’ve yet to leave one of those conversations feeling like it was a waste.

So, when Tommy approached me about stepping out of the Director role and into the Producer role, I was resistant at first, but open to hearing his thoughts. His explanation made sense—I have a talent for getting people together, getting resources in order, and making sure it all goes down correctly. And most importantly, I have great taste.

I know if what I am looking at is good or not.

We decided to run with it. Blackbird will be a Joe Aimonetti production, directed by Tommy Harrington. The two of us share an extremely similar creative vision for the project and at the end of the day I will have final cut privileges. 

It should be an interesting journey, so stay tuned for updates along the way, including how you can help support our project.

+Joe+

—sidenote: quotes are from Swingers.