Michael Picarella

Michael Picarella's fascination with movies began when he got a super 8 camera on his 10th birthday. He shot everything from sights at Disneyland to commercials that advertised an amusement park called Fun Mountain that he and his brother imagined. In his first year of high school, Picarella made animated cartoons using school equipment. He eventually convinced his parents to buy him a video camera of his own so he could make more cartoons outside of school. In between cartoons, Picarella made live action skits on video. His audience grew after each piece and, eventually, making live action movies became more important than making animated cartoons. In 1995, Picarella began his first semester at the Academy of Art in San Francisco with a goal to be a motion picture director. It was there that he met filmmaker Steven Napolitan. In 1998, Picarella was making a short movie and asked Napolitan if he was interested in operating camera. That was the first serious collaboration between the two filmmakers. The next year, Picarella wrote and directed a short movie that Napolitan produced and edited. The collaboration was more successful than the first and it lead to the making of the feature-length movie "1 2 3." Picarella wrote and directed the movie and Napolitan produced and edited. In 1999, Picarella graduated from the Academy of Art and moved to Southern California to work in the motion picture industry. Almost every weekend during that time, Picarella drove up to Northern California to work with Napolitan to finish "1 2 3." Following the completion of "1 2 3," Picarella and Napolitan began work on a second feature-length movie called "Punchcard Player." Picarella continues to work in the film industry, he writes a family humor column for various publications and he writes screenplays. He lives with his wife and son.