Skinwalker

I had the pleasure of being the cinematographer, editor, and composer of this film.

Principle photography was captured back in February of 2025. This production was as skeletal as it gets: just me behind the camera, Jake directing and keeping track of the schedule, and Matt and Nick acting their hearts out. (Note: only camera audio was recorded on set!)

After shooting, Jake assembled the rough and fine cut and the film was put on the back-burner until later that summer when we recorded the voice-over and ADR. I set up the director with the actors for these separate recording sessions in Logic Pro and a condenser microphone. ADR was especially challenging and it was the first time I had undergone the process, but it was worth it.

Editing Skinwalker was all-encompassing: the final cut, sound design, voice-over, ADR, color, graphics, and composition. I was also lucky to have a director that knew what he wanted but still let me exercise a lot of freedoms. I felt this the most when writing my first ever attempt at a composition.

I know next to nothing about musical theory or language, however it’s just too damn fun to make noise until is starts to sound like something I enjoy. The score for Skinwalkers is disjointed, unstable, off tempo. All qualities naturally produced by my lack of experience. But instead of perfecting my performances or rigidly quantizing all my MIDI data, I found that playing with ambient drones, textured synthesizers, and a few interesting delays, the score began to fit the emotional tension Jake and I were looking for.