This was the first piece for my directors reel. With “I AM,” I wanted to make a short piece about believing in yourself, since your toughest opponent is often yourself. I visualized how I wanted the film piece to look, and from there I created the storyboards. It was shot on location in San Francisco (exteriors) and Napa, California (boxing gym). It was shot using Super 16mm Aaton LTR with Kodak color negative film and transferred on a Cintel C-reality telecine machine to mini-digital video. With the mini-DV, I edited on a Mac G4 using Final Cut Pro (FCP). All the compositing, video effects and the audio were executed in that program. The only element not generated in FCP was the type, which was created in Photoshop 5.5 and imported into FCP for final manipulation. The desktop digital medium enabled me to create “I AM” at a fraction of the cost of what it would have been if I had used conventional methods.