Mario Di Leonardo

I hope it's OK for you if I don't write about myself in the third person. I'm just not ready for that. Here we go:

I'm interested in everything that has to do with creativity. It's hard to talk like that about myself but I dare say that I'm a multi skilled artist. I'm good at learning somehow. I speak three languages without ever having proper lessons in any of them. English, for example is my third language. If you can still follow my writing here, I think I do pretty well. You could call me an autodidact.

As a boy I played guitar and sung in a folk and rock band. We were the only band in town that had a complete stage program consisting solely of own songs.
I started drawing and painting from an early age as well and there were actually people who bought my stuff.

Since I can think I was dreaming of making movies. In 1985 I started shooting a movie with some friends but it didn't end well as I wasn't able to buy the equipment needed and it wasn't possible to maintain the enthusiasm of the group because I only could lay my hands on the gear every six weeks. As we all wanted to create the next blockbuster out of nothing it took us 7 hours to shoot a three minute scene with some simple dialogues. And as I said, the project died because the group fell apart.
After that I joined the Army and later I studied economics. After that a new creative hobby laid hands on me: programming computer games on Commodore Amgia computers. Some of you will remember them. The two 'shooters' I programmed reached the national magazines for that brand in Germany and it didn't took long that I had a job as programmer for the more serious stuff in the Music Industry. This was a very time consuming job what caused me to put aside my interest in the creative work.
When this job was over I had a new one in the IT. This also was way too time consuming to really concentrate on creative hobbies or professions.

Once I lost my job I decided to take some time off and write a novel. Something that I also had on my bucket list. In the end I had written two novels in the Dutch languages and both ended in the libraries and are still there. They are also taken into the Royal Dutch Library as kind of Dutch heritage or however they name it.
My second novel was also stared in the most important thriller guide of the Netherlands what felt a little bit honorable at that time.

Years later I studied my b..t off on photography and via the live workshops over at CreativeLive I had access to lessons from the best photographers and retouchers in the industry. I ended up living in a photo studio and my main interest in that regards are portraits and epic composites.

Needles to say that all I learned in photography were in some way meant to lead me to the step where it all begun even though I'm 30 years older now: my interest in making movies..

I just finished my first movie (LONERS) what is now available here:
I hope to meet some like minded people here and if anyone of you needs help or suggestions I can provide please don't even think about hesitating. I'm always happy to help and before I kick the bucket I want to be involved in as many movie projects I possibly can imagine.

So, I hope that describes in some way what you wanted to know about me.

Thank you very much for reading all this.
Mario