Ryan Griffiths

Born and raised in the small midwestern city of Taylorville, I grew up absorbed in my own imagination: reading all the fantasy stories I could get my hands on, watching all of the adventure movies that came through the local theater, and trying my own hand at the craft of storytelling...as evidenced by a bedroom cluttered with spiral notebooks containing dozens of half-finished stories. It was good that my interests lay in the creative sphere, as there was never much else to do in a city surrounded on all sides by undulating vistas of cornfields. My love for Star Wars movies, Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Disney animated classics inspired me to become a filmmaker, and I made it all the way to my senior year of high school in possession of some vague notion that I would probably go to film school. A handful of circumstances, however, dissuaded me from that notion. First, I grew frustrated that my amateur attempts at filming were constantly thwarted due to unreliable/unmotivated actors (which, in retrospect, is entirely understandable...after all, the casts consisted entirely of my unpaid circle of friends who had nothing else to do on the …