What is a Production Artist?

Over the last 15 years I have worked in many varying roles from event volunteer to director.  I felt it was necessary to take on as many different tasks  in all sizes of production as I could so that when I needed to ask someone to do a job I would have experienced what it would be like to do that job, what is possible and what is not.  Along the way I have been able to work alongside very talented people and have absorbed what I liked from their workflows and left behind what I didn't.  This learning curve is something that never ends in the world of video production and with the ever shifting way content is produced, delivered, shared & consumed it is important to have a large reference pool of experience to fall back on while still getting a thrill out of expanding my horizon.  I can  lead a team, be part of a team and work independently.

I have a high level of proficiency with Adobe Premiere & Apple FCPX for editing.  I use DaVinci Resolve for colour grading.  I am an expert with action cameras and have a high level of proficiency working with DSLR and Digital Cinema cameras.   Below is a brief list of the skills and experiences I have gained in my career.

How I got into film making:

Each year I was setting myself new goals and skills to learn.  By producing my own movies, from financing to mastering the DVD's to organising the premieres and marketing I was free to make as many mistakes as I liked.  That freedom allowed me to better understand when to break the basic rules of film making and when to bend them.  Very early on I met a great cinematographer called Rob Norman a fellow Aussie who was shooting on 16mm and a DVX 1000 at the time.  Rob instilled some great knowledge on me and was constantly opening doors and expanding my network. While working as a cook in a Mexican restaurant in the mid 2000's in the mountains of Australia I was given the opportunity to work as a production assistant at the Stylewars snowboarding event.  I took a week off work and my heart raced as we had to ingest & log footage to turn around an edit for a  news cut to send out  via a satellite link.  It was so exciting and I was hooked but also fascinated by the workflow.   After meeting Rob and learning so much at that one event I was convinced that this would be my film school.  I would donate my time in exchange for knowledge.   Attending the world Heli Challenge in New Zealand in 2009 I met a video editor call Trinity Ludlow, she had such a clean and organised workflow.  I learned so much about file organisation from her and how to tackle longer format shows for broadcast.

After my best personal marketing stunt of dressing up in a banana costume, building a make shift bar at the bottom of the half pipe at the European Freeski Open in LAAX and giving away shots for free to all the athletes, team managers and on lookers I had been offered a full time position as the Downdays.eu video guy.  It was fantastic, I had finally got to the point where I was shooting all of the big names in freeskiing and snowboarding.  Working with all the big brands and shooting for full length action sports movies and going on the premiere tours around Europe.  It had been a hard journey and just as I was starting to enjoy the success the entire format disappeared.    

The way we consumed media changed, it went from being secretive about what you were shooting all year and having one big movie premiere to fast turn around edits for delivery on the web.  There were new skills to learn and shortcuts to be discovered.   I pitched, wrote, hosted, shot, edited and delivered a bi-weekly news show based around freeskiing.  This was a whole new adventure and at first I had bitten off more than I could chew.  I had to research the stories, find the matching content etc.  It was a wonderful challenge and taught me a lot of things especially on the importance of a streamlined workflow, good logging, audio & lighting.

After 5 years at The Distillery in Innsbruck I was ready for a break form the snow and accepted a job in Munich working in-house for GoPro.  There I worked under Seamus Makim as the head of the Outdoor / Adventure vertical in EMEA which gave me connection to brilliant athletes and other content creators in all of the sports you can do on a mountain without snow.  I got to cover the Tour De France which was an absolute highlight.  It was a film nerds dream, I have never seen such and impressive mobile broadcast setup, there probably isn't a better one in the world.  In my time at GoPro I really got to fine tune my Post Production & Story Telling skills.  Having a fixed 8mm lens really pushes the story telling to the front and forces you to rethink some of the lazy options of a focus pull and some mega slow motion.  I got introduced to DaVinci Resolve and the dark art of colour grading and got deep into sounds design.  Sadly after 2 years at GoPro the Entertainment division was shuttered as the company pivoted back to creating hardware so I set up a studio in a spare building at my house in Perchtoldsdorf just outside Vienna.  I currently still freelance for The Distillery & GoPro.   I am open for all kinds of jobs.  I am great with people, love to laugh and I am looking forward to working with you.