When Houston native Juan Carlos Mazorra was in high school, he thought it would be cool to be in a music video. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that opportunity never materialized. However, he’s one of the lucky few to find a home on the other side of the camera, as he got the chance to make his music video directorial debut with Ashanti’s Snow Angel, slated to air on MTV and BET during the holiday season.

Funny story: the idea for Snow Angel came to Mazorra while he was in the shower. “When my boss told me I was doing the video, I knew – I gotta do something magical… Something more than just Santa Claus in front of the fireplace. I had envisioned one of those snow globes, the kind you shake and the snow falls on some little scene. That was the first thing that popped into my head.”

After that initial inspiration, the treatment flowed as magically as the story itself. “This little girl’s walking home from school,” he explains, “and she finds a snow globe on the grass. She picks it up, kind of like finding a genie in the bottle. As she shakes the snow globe, it starts to glow and she gets taken into it, where she finds Ashanti. She’s in this winter wonderland. And for the transition to each of three songs, I have Ashanti blow fairy dust toward the girl to take them to the next song.” Snow Angel consists of a medley of three songs from Ashanti’s recent Christmas release Ashanti’s Christmas - "Christmas Time Again," "The Christmas Song," and "Hey Santa."

Step back eighteen months to when Irv Gotti, CEO of New York-based The Inc. Records (formerly Murder Inc.), offered Mazorra a job in the video production and promotion department. At the time, he said Mazorra could direct a video for The Inc. when the time was right. Juan Carlos jumped at the chance because the label has a proven track record of successful albums, including multi-platinum winners such as Ashanti, Ja Rule’s Pain Is Love and Rule 3:36, and The Fast and the Furious soundtrack.

So Mazorra is paying his dues, shooting video in Miami when his shot comes. “Irv calls me up and says, ‘Okay, you’re up. You’re doing the whole thing. You gotta go out to California. You gotta do the sets. I want three different looks. This is your chance. You better not screw up. I’m giving you Ashanti’s Christmas video.’”

Typically, a budget for a music video can be as much as $250,000. But since Snow Angel was a seasonal project, the budget was $100,000, and Mazorra was given only 9 days of pre-production. The limitations were disappointing at first, but with his producer’s encouragement, Mazorra tightened up his concept, stripped it down to bare bones, and pulled it off without losing the magic he envisioned. “As soon as Ashanti and her mom came on the set, they got excited,” he says. “They weren’t expecting this winter wonderland with snow falling. The pace picked up. Everyone in my whole crew went above and beyond, and we finished on time. Everyone was telling me it turned out great. That was one of the highest highs.”

Building the skills to get to this point was a long process, and it all started at Full Sail. “I learned a lot at Full Sail,” Mazorra says. “I learned the language and how to do films. The technology.” After graduation, he moved to L.A. to work on independent films, then headed to New York to shoot a documentary. The project fell through, but in a serendipitous turn of events, he ended up meeting and hitting it off with Irv Gotti. The rest, as they say, is history.

“I’ve been here about a year and a half,” he says. “Ashanti’s Snow Angel kind of came up overnight. Up until then I was doing a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. I assistant directed a DVD we did. I went on tour with The Inc., London. Basically I shot footage behind the scenes with a digital camcorder, taping everything.”

His work at The Inc. Records has been nothing if not diverse, so Snow Angel isn’t his first experience on a music video shoot. “I’ve been doing second unit directing on five different music videos,” Mazorra says. “I worked the Ja Rule/Bobby Brown song, “Thug Lovin”, shot down on Hollywood Boulevard. I did all the second unit on Ja Rule and Ashanti’s “Mesmerize” video.”

Eventually Mazorra hopes to direct movies, but for now, the allure of music videos is too much to resist. “I want to do [videos] now and do movies later. You’ve got to be patient. You’ve got to know what you want to do. You’ve got have a plan.”

The payoff of Mazorra’s plan is obvious when he sees one of his goals realized in directing Snow Angel. “That was the biggest rush to me,” he says, “to have something I had envisioned in my head come to life. It was beautiful.”