Edition. Ashley, tell us about your trajectory as a filmmaker. What inspired you to express yourself in this medium? Thank you for this opportunity to discuss my work! I’ve always been obsessed with film and moving images, the stories they tell and the people that make them, that live inside of them. Film has always mirrored an accessible fantasy world for me—a place where I can really explore alternate perceptions of reality and the basic fundamentals of being a human, especially the emotion and transformation we experience in the real world. When I was a little girl I’d sit in front of a huge television box and soak in films and music videos for hours and hours. If I wasn’t sitting, I was dancing… Fantasies I didn’t even know I had were introduced to me on the big screen and it made my
childhood that much more of a thrill ride. Movies made my simple, suburban life so much more exciting. It was like huge lightbulbs were constantly going off inside of my little juvenile mind, so I fell in love with visual storytelling as a very young, very curious little girl. In May 2007 I was 22 and moved to San Francisco. I was the definition of a wandering soul and didn’t really know what I wanted to do but what I did know was that I wanted to learn how to more creatively express myself and make films. In January 2009 I joined a small film collective called Scary Cow that was a group of 160 then and now has 285 active members. Being in this collective taught me the ropes about producing films, assembling teams. This collective was basically my film production school. Around that same time I started studying