The Camcorder That Started Everything
PUBLISHED MAY 2026
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.
That conviction led to the creation of WarriorsGate Entertainment, which today includes WGEPlus.tv among its divisions — every project, every partnership, and every late-night session spent solving production problems that others thought were unnecessary.
It all started with a camcorder I wasn't even supposed to touch. Some things are simply meant to find you.