Rochester Filmmaking gets some Press

This week’s City Newspaper has a good overview of the local film community, written by Susie Hume.

Susie is the reporter who spoke with me last year for the Rochester Insider. This time, she took on the entire film scene and talked to tons of people. John Vincent and Matt Ehlers get some facetime, as well as The MAD DOG MOVIES Podcast, Rochester Movie Makers, and Rochester Film Lab.

An excerpt:

Vincent, a Rochester native, worked in both New York City and Los Angeles before eventually settling back here, his hometown. His long list of film credits includes visual effects work on cult classics like “Freaked” and sci-fi favorites like “Robot Wars” and “Prehysteria.” He now works full-time as a writer, director, and effects artist, and as president of his own production company, Philrose Productions, which provides effects and production management for industrial videos, commercials, and feature films.

“There are other smaller cities with big film communities, like Austin and Portland, that are really promoting their work, and it pumps millions of dollars into their economies,” Vincent says. “We need to promote that here. We’re not Hollywood, and we never will be, so to people here it’s very intangible to think of Rochester as a film city. But to us, it is what we do already, so we need to change the way they’re thinking.”

Vincent also remains involved with a core group of local filmmakers committed to boosting the Rochester film scene. He co-hosts a podcast on local writer/filmmaker/animator Mike Boas’ website, maddogmovies.com, and will shoot a lower budget film (“100 grand or less,” he says) with Boas this year with the working title “Lake Midnight.” In addition, Vincent acted as second unit director to Matt Ehlers’ recently premiered film, “Smoking Laws.”

“People like Matt and others could be working in L.A. or New York, but the great thing here is that we just help each other out or work for free on each other’s films,” Vincent says. “It’s a ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ mentality, because we’re all in this together.”

Read the entire article online here: “Rochester’s local filmmaking scene” By Susie Hume.

Thanks for the press, Susie!

Links:

The MAD DOG MOVIES Podcast

Lake Midnight

Smoking Laws