When Rachael Kuecher gets on the phone, you can hear the cacophony of New York in the background — the constant blaring of car horns from the swarm of taxi cabs that populate the city that never sleeps. But Kuecher (pronounced ‘keek-er’) is unbothered by the noise, even though New York City is a long way from her hometown of Oregon.

She and fellow Oregon native Jake Vriezelaar are currently hard at work mounting a short film called The Stress of IT! but the story of how they got to this point is anything but ordinary.

A 28-year-old filmmaker and graduate of Clay High School and Bowling Green State University, Kuecher moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 2019 to fulfill her lifelong ambition of making films. And she’s determined to make her celluloid mark upon this world.

Kuecher’s own story could be a movie, sort of a real life version of Reality Bites, the 1994 Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, and Winona Ryder vehicle about an aspiring videographer.

“I knew ever since I was a kid I wanted to make movies but I didn’t know what that really looked like. Toledo isn’t adjacent to the industry and I didn’t have any extended family members that were involved in it, so I was in college and I knew I wanted to do it,” said Kuecher.

After graduating from BGSU with an English literature major and a minor in theater, Kuecher made her move and relocated to Brooklyn without having a job lined up and having few contacts.

“I literally packed up all my stuff and put it all into a moving truck and moved to Brooklyn,” said Kuecher. “In the first apartment I shared, I didn’t even have my own room. I was just sleeping in a corner in the living room.”

At the same time, Vriezelaar was making a path of his own.

Vriezelaar, like Kuecher, attended Clay High School.

At the moment though, he was on the West Coast in Los Angeles and not loving it.

“I really wasn’t connecting with the pace of things in L.A.,” Vriezelaar, a videographer, said. “There’s was a lot of driving and it felt isolating.”

In high school, the two didn’t know each other that well (Kuecher graduated in 2015 and Vriezelaar graduated in 2016) but they would soon bump into one another in New York, leading to their creative partnership.

Making a way

Breaking into film production was no easy task for the pair, though they each found varying degrees of success. Not too long after Kuecher arrived in New York, the coronavirus pandemic hit, which shut down the film industry, forcing Kuecher to turn to other means to support herself.

Vriezelaar spent a similar spell adrift during the coronavirus pandemic in the Toledo area.

Kuecher worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office.

“I didn’t have any connections. It was like freefalling,” said Kuecher.

But the plucky young would-be filmmaker soon found her niche in the decidedly unglamorous world of production assistance. It turned out she had a skill that was in much demand in New York City: Driving. Unlike many other New Yorkers, Kuecher could drive, which led to several jobs.

“On the first film set I was on, both me and the producer watched as the other P.A. crashed the box truck right in front of him and the producer said ‘I can never find a P.A. who I can drive.’ So I literally turned to the producer and said, ‘I can drive.’ The producer said, ‘You’re hired for our next job because we need a driver,’ even though I had never driven a box truck in my life,” said Kuecher.

Kuecher suddenly found herself in the cab of a big box truck, navigating the crowded, unpredictable streets of the Big Apple.

“I was in the middle of Manhattan and I had to call my dad because I wasn’t even sure how to turn the wheel and I was like ‘Hey Dad, I’m in this really big truck, how do I do this?” He was like ‘Slow and steady’” said Kuecher.

The fatherly advice could also describe Kuecher’s progress in the film industry.

Driving jobs gave way to other production jobs such as working on commercials. Then came the day she was asked to be a personal assistant to actor Colman Domingo on the set of the independent film Sing Sing. The film, directed by Greg Kwedar and released by A24, chronicles the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program at Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison, in which inmates act in theater productions.

The film was an awards season darling, nominated three times at the Oscars earlier this month

“It was a pretty surreal experience. for two weeks I was Colman Domingo’s P.A. It was stuff like walking him from his holding room to set, making sure he was comfortable — but the biggest joy I got was driving the actual members of the RTA program, who acted in the film,” Kuecher said. “It was me in my passenger van with 10 to 15 of these guys and I’d pick them up in the morning and drop them off at night. The whole crew was so lovely.”

Kuecher said she liked getting to know the former Sing Sing inmates and that Domingo encouraged her to continue her quest to make movies.

“I have Colman Domingo’s voice in my head telling me ‘Don’t stop writing.’”

Not to be outdone, Vriezelaar is now a director of photography at VEVO, where he has shot videos with pop stars like Gracie Abrams and Renee Rapp.

He has also taken part in many small film productions in various locations including The Lives We Make, an entry in the Maumee Film Festival last year.

After graduating from Clay, Vriezelaar attended Taylor University, a small liberal arts college in Indiana, and did an entertainment industry internship in Los Angeles. But he soon realized success would involve leaving California.

“I’d always dreamed of moving to L.A. but through that experience, I realized that’s not where I wanted to end up,” said Vriezelaar.

So Vriezelaar decided to try his hand in New York. Once the pandemic lifted, he moved to New Jersey where he started doing professional camera work and eventually he moved to the Bushwick area of Brooklyn.

Kuecher and Vriezelaar ran into each other in Brooklyn and bonded over being two Clay High School grads in the middle of a city of 8 million people.

“I remember saying to her ‘I didn’t realize you were here and I didn’t realize you were getting into production,’” said Vriezelaar.

The pair connected but a little bit of time went by before the like-minded individuals would get to working together.

“About a year-and-a-half later, she reached out, saying ‘Hey, I have this script. Would you like to read it?’” said Vriezelaar.

That script was for The Stress of IT!, a short film about two young lovers.

“After Lia discovers she may be pregnant, she hunts down Jason — her last partner and a one-night stand — to level the playing field,” the production’s website describes. “Only for them to discover together, there’s a nationwide recall of pregnancy tests.”

A look through the cast and crew listed for the movie shows a lot of young, eager faces looking to prove themselves.

Kuecher noted that she already feels like the material for the project is really strong.

“Every time I talk to somebody about this project, they say the idea evokes something in them from their own lived experiences. So that’s really encouraging,” said Kuecher.

The movie officially went into pre-production in February and Kuecher is aiming to film The Stress of IT! this summer — with Vriezelaar acting as director of photography. An online fund-raiser for the film on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo is launching on Saturday.

Kuecher noted that, still being so early in her filmmaking career, such support is much appreciated.

“A lot of filmmaking has a lot of unknowns and to have people resonating with the material before I’ve actually capitalized on it keeps restoring my faith every time I feel shaky about it,” said Kuecher.

For more information on Kuecher, visit rachaelkuecher.com and thestressofit.com. For more information on Vriezelaar, visit vriez.com.

First Published March 15, 2025, 3:10 p.m.