Film Connection mentor Kevin Sharpley
“No knocks to traditional film schools—I went to a film school. I got a lot from it…but there’s one thing that I didn’t get from the film school that I graduated from, which is the real world experience. More often than not, especially in this industry, it’s the real world experience that counts.
ON HOW HE STARTED HIS OWN PRODUCTION COMPANY:
“While I was [in school], I really wanted to do real work, so after my first couple of months I got a gig to do a music video. Low budget, maybe seven grand or five grand or something like that. I hired a producer, I just wanted to direct. I hired a whole team. No one did what they were supposed to do, and I ended up doing so many things. The editors that I had they tried to squeeze more money out of me because they had a little more knowledge than me. I’d only been in film school for a couple months. It was just not a good situation.
“My next project, I really pulled my britches up and produced, directed it, sold it…From that point after I produced that second project, I just said, ‘Look, if I can produce a project, let me just start my own production company.’ That’s when…I formed my company to be able to work in that type of environment.”
CHATTING ABOUT ONE OF HIS PET PROJECTS:
“I’ve always been a big believer in storytelling across multiple media platforms, being able to tell the story in time and space. You can tell a story in two minutes, you can tell a story in five minutes, 10, 15 a half an hour, 10 hours or 12 hours which would be a television show—but you can also tell it in the written word. You can tell the story auditorily. You can tell it just visually with a comic book. I’ve always been a big believer in this. We formulated a project to showcase this ability. That project is called
The Beach Chronicles. It’s one of- now my company’s bigger projects. It was a small little tiny, baby project and it just exploded.
“That one I wrote as a novel first. My creative director did these animated graphic novels vignettes…We put four of them together, entered them in film festivals, they got picked. That short got passed around to a bunch of celebrities, next thing you know we had all these celebrities on board…We set about actualizing those pieces and they kind of happened organically…David Lynch has his non-profit organization, so the music faction of his non-profit organization had a radio show, [and] they asked us to make a show…We did six episodes. In those, we have everyone from Tommy Flanagan from
Sons of Anarchy, Nancy Sinatra, Jimmy Jean-Louis from
Heroes…Then the decision was made to do the comic books…so now we’re working with the comic book company and we debuted the comic at Florida Supercon…The list goes on.”
ON THE INDUSTRY EXPOSURE HE’S ABLE TO GIVE HIS STUDENTS:
Film Connection apprentice Brian Kennedy
with Jimmy Jean-Louis of Heroes
“I do a lot of different things. I run two non-profit organizations, I’m the chairman of the Miami-Dade County Film and Entertainment Advisory Board…And then I run my production company. I do a few different things, and I have had the ability to involve my students in a lot of different areas…I’ve had students that have worked on projects with celebrities that are in a lot of my company’s projects. I have a student [Rocky Shores] who is a producer on a documentary short that’s part of a big documentary series that my company has [
Ayikodans Rise]. One of them is narrated by Danny Glover. The other one, we have footage of Josh Brolin and Diane Lane and Paul Haggis and Madeleine Stowe and Maria Bello, Jimmy Jean-Louis from
Heroes…
“[At the Miami International Film Festival,] I had Omar [Johnson] shadow me the entire time, so he was able to do a lot of different things…He was able to have a face to face with Cheryl Boone Isaacs herself. And even though she runs the Academy Awards, she was one of the biggest marketing executives in Hollywood, period. When you have that kind of situation, and you’re able to have a direct one-on-one with the woman that runs the Academy Awards—he had the ability to ask anything that he wanted to ask.”
ON THE IMPORTANCE OF NETWORKING IN THE INDUSTRY:
“Networking is more important now than ever, than it’s ever been…The industry is changing so much everyday. It’s like stepping on a floor that has squares on it, and then the squares [are] just kind of collapsing and moving every time you take a step. You have to have people that you can…If your square is moving too far, you can jump on somebody else’s square, hold on for a second then move to the next square. Put two squares together and then three and four and then you have something. That’s what this day and age is all about…I tell my students networking is as important as talent. I don’t want to say it’s more important, because if you don’t have any talent and you got all the networking skills in the world you’re still not going to go anywhere.”
ON WHAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN STUDENTS TAKE THE INITIATIVE:
Rocky Shores on a shoot for
The Reel Miami Project
“[When] you involve and engage your students in what you’re doing, they will surprise you…I give Rocky Shores as an example. The reason why he became a producer, on this project [
Ayikodans Rise] is because he came out with me to shoot some stuff when we were starting up the second Haiti documentary… He asked me to send him that material, along with the interview and he cut together something that was really awesome. He did it on his own. Because of that, I went and I interviewed the president of the performing arts center, the biggest one in South Florida. They brought this dance company back four times. It helped them to rebuild their dance studio after the earthquake in Haiti. That story itself was so powerful that my team decided to make it a third documentary, a third stand-alone piece. Rocky, what he did was a part of making that decision…It will go on a feature length documentary. Rocky still gets the producer credit because he shot footage, he helped to shape the foundation of that piece.”
AND ANOTHER STUDENT THAT HAS DONE WELL…
“Tommy Kuzmiak—I’ve hired him on a few different things. He was a boxer before he got into the program. He’s developed into a fine professional…He’s writing a really incredible script. And we’ll produce that and move forward. I’ve hired him on numerous things. I may bring him on full-time at some point.”
HIS THOUGHTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF MENTORING:
“In this mentorship program which is more of a one-on-one type of program, you know you really have the ability to connect with the students and try to figure out what they want to do….Most of my mentors come from other areas…In the film industry, not so much…I took the initiative while I was at film school because I knew what I wanted to do and I had already been in the industry on the other side of the camera…I’m more in support of the mentorship. If someone would have said, ‘Hey Kevin, I’m going to take you and I’m going to turn you into a producer or I’m going to turn you into a director or I’m going to turn you into a cinematographer, I’m going to help you to get to that place’…I would have loved that.”
