The Camcorder That Started Everything

Before WarriorsGate. Before the films. Before any of it — there was this moment, this couch, and a camcorder that wasn't supposed to be in his hands.

I didn’t dream of becoming a filmmaker growing up. Instead, I was captivated by my father’s old camcorder. Something about it spoke to me in a way that other things didn’t.

I was born Deaf into a hearing family, so the world was loud in ways I couldn’t understand, and quiet in ways that people didn’t grasp. But a camera doesn’t care about any of that. You just point it, frame it, and tell the story. The image is the image.

By the time I was a teenager at the Alabama School for the Deaf, I had already made my first short film. By the time I got to RIT/NTID, I was co-founding a studio with six other students who shared my belief that Deaf creators didn’t need to seek a place at the table. Instead, we needed to build our own table.

This conviction led to the creation of WarriorsGate Entertainment (WGE), which later became WGEPlus.tv. It included every project, every partnership, and every late-night session spent solving production problems that others thought were unnecessary.

It all started with a camcorder that I wasn’t even supposed to touch... Some things are simply meant to find you, you heard me.