Loyola Marymount grad student Jorge Posada is working on Azure Eclipse, a film project he has envisioned since he was a toddler. A longtime admirer of the Posada family (father Jorge, a New York Yankees legend, mother Laura, a Puerto Rican television host and younger sister Paulina), I took the opportunity to interview him about the film, his family, travels and a birth condition that could have derailed all of it.

For his thesis project, Jorge, a third-year grad student, is bringing to life a world he first imagined when he was 5. Since then, he has built the Azure Eclipse world in his mind while filling notebooks and folders with his thoughts and drawings.

Mother Laura describes toddler Jorge as energetic with a large imagination. That imagination kept young Jorge smiling despite several stretches in the hospital.

Jorge was born with craniosynostosis, a rare birth condition in which one or more of the sutures in an infant’s skull fuses prematurely into bone. Treatment is needed over several years to relieve intracranial pressure and prevent or reduce residual effects. Jorge’s story is wonderfully captured in The Beauty of Love, a book written by Jorge’s parents. It’s a book I hold dearly, as I, too, was born with CS, and I related to so much in the book.

Jorge’s early imagination kept growing, ultimately into seeing his childhood story come to fruition in the form of this Azure Eclipse project. It doesn’t stop there, though. Jorge has visions and plans of continuing the story in some fashion.

Jorge’s journey and the project could have easily been covered in separate, individual interviews, yet we also discussed travel. Although his condition limited travel in his early years, Jorge has a love of and appreciation for it. He lights up when talking about his family’s trip to China. Likewise, he speaks glowingly of the original Yankee Stadium, where his father played the first few seasons of his career.

Like the Azure Eclipse project, Jorge’s story is really just beginning. I look forward to watching his career develop and the Azure Eclipse universe expanded.

Talking Travel is an interview series on Global Traveler. Subscribe to the GT YouTube channel to be notified of all future interviews and other travel-related videos.

— John Wroblewski, online writer