Picardi graduated from the Los Angeles Film School in 2006 at the age of 19 and jumped into the industry as an editor for Television. Picardi continued to pursue his directing career by independently producing his own projects. In 2007, Picardi created a short film called "His Day to Remember," which was the Grand Prize Winner in the Cinematic Film2Music online competition. Using the raw, percussive chant-driven track "Steel & Sky," he created a visually compelling drama about a young man who is apparently a suicide bomber. The film was also screened at the Sundance Film Festival 2007 and got him featured on MTVu.com as "Best Filmmaker on Campus" in December 2007. Additionally, In 2007, he won the "Audience Award" for Myspace's John Woo Film Tribute contest for the Chow Yun-fat videogame "Stranglehold". For his second short, "His Final Hit", it placed into the top ten finalists of the IFC Film "Assassin's Creed" Film Contest. Soon after, Picardi and his team created a low budgetweb series called "The Resistance" which started off as 4 short online teasers featured on YouTube. Before filming the actual web show, the series was picked up by Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures and Starz Media, after executives at Starz and Ghost House viewed "The Resistance" teasers online. The web show aired on October 4, 2010, on the SyFy channel as a one-hour television pilot along with being released in its original 8 episodic form on iTunes, Xbox Live, and the PlayStation Network. "The Resistance" is executive produced by Ben Ketai, Scott Bayless, Scott Rogers, with producers Aaron Lam, and Associate Producer Don Le. The pilot will reportedly make history, as it's the first time a series created originally for the web will first premiere on television. Picardi won the Universal Music / Decca Recordsonline music video contest hosted by Talenthouse, for the band ERA,. He also took home the Grand Prize award for the New York Times best-selling author Scott Sigler’s "Ancestor" film contest. He also wrapped two more music videos, one for the band Automatic Love Letter and Sony Music Entertainment / Epic Records, and another for the band Evans Blue.
2012–present
In 2012, Picardi and Airsoft GI created a fan film based on the videogame series Left 4 Dead. Within 4 days of releasing the initial teaser, the clip amassed over 2.5 million views and massive buzz online, including outlets such as PC Gamer, Complex, Game Informer, and Valve. In early 2013, Picardi had created a production company Aureus Grex alongside his long time best friend, Sunny Jain. Recently 2016 Aureus Grex and Corridor Digital teamed up to release a series of live-action spots for Ubisoft and Tom Clancy's The Division"entitled. Picardi directed, shot, and edited three of the four episodes titled "Escape", "Ashes", and ‘Conspiracies". Currently Picardi is developing two feature films, as well as a project with Warner Brother's digital arm, Blue Ribbon Content.
