About
About Dave
It was nearly 20 years ago when I produced and edited my first feature film and fell completely in love with visual storytelling. I’ve been fortunate enough to turn my greatest passion into a career spanning over a decade.
Over the course of my career, I’ve worked on projects of all shapes and sizes. While I appreciate all opportunities to do good work, I’ve had the privilege of working on projects for some of the biggest and most prestigious brands (Facebook, Amazon, Audi), educational institutions (Harvard, Northwestern, Georgetown), non-profits (Conservation International, GMHC, AARP), media companies (Discovery, NBC, CNN), and TV series (Deadliest Catch, Hell’s Kitchen, Who Do You Think You Are) in the world.
The leadership titles I’ve held- Director, various kinds of Producer- have been broad and can mean different things to different people. While the details of my roles have varied, they have all included the same core principles-
- Creative Direction: Shaping the content and style of projects to create compelling work and meet strategic goals.
- Crew Management: Leading Pre, Production, and Post crews as well as non-video staff.
- Project and Department Management: Everything from timelines and budgets to interdepartmental communication.
I attribute much of my success as a leader in both production and post-production to my experience as an editor. I am able to create effective workflows and find creative solutions because of my intimate knowledge of the post process. During production, my experience allows me to be more efficient and effective because I understand how everything will fit together and know exactly what needs to be shot. In post production, I am able to use a shared language with editors and have a comprehensive understanding of the capabilities of tools and techniques as well as gauge how challenging a particular request may be to execute.
My leadership philosophy is simple but it has served me well. I create an effective, efficient, low-stress environment conducive to creating great work and stay calm and in control in a crisis. I do my best to get my crews everything they need to do their jobs and fight for their interests. In short, my crews will fight for me because I fight for them.
I’ve made an effort to pass down the expertise that I’ve learned by speaking at industry events, mentoring individuals, developing curriculum for online courses, as well as writing articles for and giving interviews to industry publications (ProductionHUB, Inc., Filmmaking Journal).
Over my career I’ve maintained 100% client retention, which I consider the most meaningful measure of my success and attribute to my unfailing reliability and high-quality, creative work.
Skills
- On-Set Directing
- Interviewing
- Talent Direction
- Post-Production Collaboration
- Concepting
- Copywriting
- Project Development
- Budgeting
- Timeline Oversight
- Project Trafficking
- Logistics
- Scopes
- Contracts
- Resource Management
- Recruitment
- Field Production
- Post Producing
- Remote Management
- Premiere
- Avid
- Final Cut
- DaVinci Resolve
- After Effects
- Audio Editing
- Color Grading
- Codecs
- File Delivery Specs,
- Adobe Creative Cloud, including: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
- Asana
- Frame.io
- Smartsheets
- Airtable
- Shortcut
- Studio Binder
- 4k-8k Workflows
- File Systems
- Proxies
- Broadcast Hardware
- Compression
- Footage Archival
- Codecs
- File Delivery Specs