Derek Kopet was born and raised in a small town just outside of Toronto. He excelled in artistic skills, including painting, sketching, and creative story telling throughout elementary school. At the age of thirteen, Derek started making short films with the help of his friends and the use of his father's VHS camcorder. He was largely inspired by horror movies, B-films, and drive-in monster flicks. He began experimenting with stop-motion photography, positioning his Godzilla toy over homemade cityscapes and animating it frame by frame. He then recreated scenes from "Friday the 13th," recruiting his friend Dave Teixeira to play Jason, and his younger brother, Adam Kopet, to play Jason's victim.

During high school, Derek made a few short films, but never took it seriously. Although he showed a strong passion towards film, he was more focused in utilizing his artistic and creative talents for painting, sketching, and graphic design. He graduated high school with hopes of becoming an animator or a painter.

Derek went on to attend Georgian College, in Barrie Ontario, where he studied graphic design. During his three years at Georgian College, Derek re-discovered his passion for film and storytelling when he started working on a commercial for a class project.

He soon began work on his first short film called “Forlorn”, a short horror film that pays homage to classic zombie films, which he wrote and directed with co-creator and long time friend Dave Teixeira. Forlorn was accepted into the Barrie Film Festival, the Ottawa Youth Festival, the Toronto Filmmakers Festival, and is also on the Zed Canada Web site. The film generated quite a bit of interest and traffic on the internet and gave Derek the confidence to continue pursuing his dream of becoming a filmmaker.

In 2004, Derek began work on his second self produced short film called “Go West”. In Go West Derek encompassed some of his own life experience lending the taste of small town life, small town thinking, and small town apathy. Sadly, because of its personal content, Go West wasn’t accepted into many film festivals. To Derek, many aspects of the film were seen as failures. However, he was able to take the experience gained from Go West and used it as motivation to further educate himself on both the inner workings of the film industry and the process involved in filmmaking.

He spent the next year and a half gaining knowledge and experience working on other projects for small Toronto based production companies. He worked on numerous film sets in many various positions. One of those sets was a short Bravo Fact film called Somber Zombie, directed by Adam McDonnald, where he worked as second assistant director.

Derek then took that knowledge from working on film sets, and returned to his horror film roots, in creating his next short film, Mary Worth.

Mary Worth is Derek’s third short film.