You textin' to me? Then who the hell else are you textin' to?

The year is 2023. Over the previous ten or so years, I had put countless dollars into various improv and sketch comedy classes. Certainly, without them, I wouldn’t be the writer, performer, or thinker that I am today. (Is a post like this one news? That’s debatable but, please, hold that debate somewhere private.) However, I began to think that I need to dump money into a different passion and I decided that filmmaking would be that thing by enrolling in a continuing education class at New York’s School of Visual Arts. I had been making my video sketches for three years at that point and wanted to bring them to the next level. I chose the cinematography class they were offering and spent a few months learning how to better use lighting, be more intentional in picking my angles, and practicing with much nicer equipment than my own.

Our midterm exams were to create short films in groups. My group used my camera* for our film—inexplicably to everyone in the class, the school did not lend out cameras to continuing ed. students—and rented a room in a warehouse in Brooklyn used for shooting this kind of thing. I used the occasion to buy a new lens for my camera, a lens that’s the primary one I use today. I learned a lot about lenses in that class, mainly that good films need good lenses. I had the cheap lens that came with my camera.

When it came to the final exam, though the teacher flip-flopped into letting us work in groups again, I went the lonely route of shooting something by myself, starring myself. I had done this countless times before, why not do it again with some extra mastery of the craft? The class was not for comedians, the makeup of the class was quite diverse in purpose, but I knew I needed to shoot a comedy. I had started writing “Group Text” a few months earlier and decided that it would be the thing to make.

I was, as always, nervous to show off what I thought was funny. It turns out, the class agreed! People laughed, they guffawed, they got it. While I was still a couple of years from coming up with the midlife crisis idea of Aromando Pictures, I consider The Group Chat to be our first capital “f,” Film.

P.S. The Group Chat is also an award winning film, being named Best of the Fest: Video at the 2024 Denver Sketch Festival!

* Panasonic Lumix DMC-G7