CHRIS TOBIA

As a kid, I devoured books. I read whatever I could get my hands on and would often make up stories of my own. Most of the time this mimicked the literature of what it was that I was currently reading (I can’t tell you how many of my stories began with a kid living in a cupboard under the stairs, but I digress… I guess I learned to “steal like an artist” at a young age). I will never be able to thank my Dad enough for sharing with me the magical world of storytelling – it is a magic that has never quite left me.

It just so happened that when I went off at college at Saint Joseph’s University (THWND!) I would take my first class on screenwriting. Something about this class in particular would change the course of my life forever. Something clicked from the moment I sat down and read my first screenplay. Until this point, movies were just…movies. Sure, I loved them, but until now, it had not even occurred to me that movies were something I could make. They were no longer this immovable object where you had to travel to the mystical land of Hollywood, or through the sea of swirly, twirly gumdrops before exiting the Lincoln Tunnel in New York to find. No. Movies now had meaning. They had structure and a form, and a way of doing things. Better yet, they had a real person behind them- someone who actually sat down and came up with what it was that I was witnessing on the larger-than-life silver screen… and now I was the one learning how to do it. This class taught me a lot about life, and writing; about how you should never be scared of the blank page. It game the the knowledge that one day, that same blank page could be used to move a story thorugh time and space. I was hooked.

At the same time that this magic was happening, I enrolled in a course on film photography. I was unable to get into the course on digital photography, which ended up being a blessing in disguise. This course allowed me to build my skills from the ground up, away from the relative “easiness” of the digital age. I took my first still photos on a real roll of film which I then put into a chemical bath and developed in a dark room that contained nothing but a dim, red light. It was amazing. I couldn’t get enough. I learned everything that I could about the exposure triangle and composition. I tried my hand at  night photography (and failed). I consumed as much as I could, as quickly as I could do it, and I realized just then, that being behind a camera was another way of telling a story and that it was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

But that’s easier said than done, and I let life get in the way.

Sure enough, I graduated college and saw all of my friends going about their lives.

I took odd job, went back to school for Accounting, went through COVID, started making videos on my own… but no matter how many skis I sold, tables I waited, or boxing videos I filmed, at the end of the day, it always came back to this one thing: wanting to tell stories and make films about real people with real problems.

So here I am, giving this directing thing a real shot and finally answering the question that everyone’s been asking of me “so…what are you doing?”

I’m making movies. What are you doing?

JTWO has given me the opportunity of my dreams- to be around like-minded people and collaborate on a multitude of different projects in the film industry. I’m blessed to be in this position and I could not be more grateful.

As part of my blog post, I’ve been tasked with writing a “filmmaker’s synopsis” for myself, but much like my focus in life now, instead of looking back on my past, I think it’s better to look forward to my future and what I hope to accomplish.

So here goes nothing: