It took years for him to get the picture, but once alum Peter Garafalo (‘09) found his role as a filmmaker, he never looked back.

Garafalo, who graduated from the University of Maryland last spring with a degree in film study, currently works on many different projects as a freelance film production assistant in New York City. His body of work includes a feature film, several short films and an ongoing web series called “A Man Walks into a Bar.”

Although Garafalo enjoyed watching films in high school, he never tried filmmaking until his senior year.

“A couple of my friends and I tried to make a film and that ended up crashing and burning and becoming this horrible project that we never ended up finishing,” he said. “We learned a ton by just doing it, and the more mistakes you make early on, the more you learn from them.”

During his freshman year at Maryland, he joined the Filmmakers Club and worked as a production assistant on a short film. He then realized that he wanted to pursue filmmaking for the rest of his life, he said.

He began with what he calls his “passion project,” an 85-minute film he wrote, shot, directed, produced and edited by himself.

“Aesthetic” tells the story of a college freshman who struggles to adjust to his new environment and cope with a traumatic experience with a girl. The freshman deals with his stress by creating his own fantasy world.

Garafalo wrote the film after his freshman year, and said the script is loosely based on his freshman experience.

It took him all of his sophomore year to shoot the film, and all of his junior year to edit it. Making the film helped him learn how much work he could handle, he said.

“I realized after that project how collaborative of an art film is, and the more people you have on a project the better it is, the easier it is and less stressful,” he said.

After releasing his film and working as a tech coordinator for the American Film Institute festival, he took over as director of photography for the documentary, “Mount Lawrence.” The project follows the journey of a young man named Chandler Wild from New York City to the westernmost point of Alaska to name a mountain after his father, who committed suicide in 2007.

Garafalo was called in due to the tragic injuries of the previous camera operator and cinematographers half-way through the journey. Wild was impressed with his shooting, and promoted him to director of photography, he said.

One of the documentary’s producers found job opportunities for Garafalo in New York, which is where he currently lives and works. Since he now has more time, he has been releasing weekly episodes from his web series, “A Man Walks into a Bar.”

Each episode is shot in the same location with the same actors and basic story, but in the style of a different director, Garafalo said.

“The overall arc of the series tells the story of American cinema from its birth, Thomas Edison, D.W. Griffith, all the way through Hitchcock, Spielberg and to today where everyone has a camera on their phone,” he said. “We’re almost getting to the point where everyone is a filmmaker.”

While Garafalo studied and admired films growing up, he wishes he had taken advantage of all the opportunities he had, he said.

“If I could go back in time, I would take advantage of all the photography and TV production courses Whitman had to offer,” he said.