This week’s featured filmmaker is Brandon McCormick.  Brandon is the mastermind behind Atlanta-based Whitestone Motion Pictures. Brandon is one of the most productive people I know. He’s constantly producing high quality shorts with amazing visual style.  Check out our interview with Brandon.

1. How did you get into filmmaking?
I got started about 10 years ago at the age of 15. I just started playing around with my parent’s camera and making little projects for class. Then my local church had a camera and encouraged me to play with it, and from there I started winning some small film festivals and realized, that maybe I wanted to do this for a living. I had this idea for a film company, and that idea turned into resolve as Whitestone Motion Pictures started to take shape. Now I get to make films with my delightfully brilliant team and I could not possibly be any happier.

2. How does your faith influence your craft?
My faith and what I believe highly influences my craft. I think any artists creates from their own personal worldview, whether it’s optimistic or pessimistic, redemptive or destructive. I believe in this idea of redemption, which is why I make fairy tales. I believe the moral of the story is that there is alway a moral to the story.

I believe in the bigger story of life, which is why every single story is practically the same sequence. Creation. Fall. Salvation. Redemption.

That last part, redemption, is why we go to the movies in the first place. We crave it like food or water. We pay for it, we seek it out, and we hope deep down it’s true. That’s what I want my films to be about, and that is why myths and fairytales fit so perfectly into how I understand the world.

3. Favorite Director
I was the perfect target audience growing up for Stephen Spielberg. It seemed growing up that he was making movies just for me. As I got older I discovered the likes of Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, who’s worlds I love spending time in. I try to be influenced by as much as I can, I constantly seek out new sources and study old sources. I enjoy Joseph Campbell and Kurt Vonnegut as much as any of these filmmakers. At this point in my craft, it’s still a compliment to be compared to those you love. When people say, ‘Hey, your stuff looks like Tim Burton meets Dr. Suess,” I just say, ‘thanks’.

4. Favorite Film
I’ve watched Shawshank Redemption a few dozen times and to this day have yet to find a real flaw with that film. I think it’s as close to perfection in the craft of filmmaking as anyone can get. A close second would be O Brother Where Art Thou. I’m enamored with Lord of the Rings, which is one of my favorite worlds to spend time in. It’s one of the most epic of stories delivered in a brilliant way.

5. Favorite scene in a movie
It’s hard to say which scene would be my favorite. My mind is filled with brilliant character scenes like the ‘Red Was Here’ scene from Shawshank Redemption. Although I’ll focus in on one scene from the second Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers. The very end of the film, when all is lost, Helms Deep is being over run and there seems like no escape. We remember Gandalf saying ‘Look to the East, when the sun rises on the third day.” Gandalf and his army comes over the mountain top, destroying the orcs below.

Call me a dork. I friggin love that scene.

6. Last film to make you cry
Pixar’s up had me choked up within the first few minutes of the film. Those guys know how to tell one heck of a story. They’re my heros.

7. What advice do you have for someone looking to break into filmmaking?
I think the key is make whatever you can as often as you can with whatever you have. Make lots and lots of bad films and someday, some good films will emerge. Don’t but too much emphasis on budgets or equipment, those things show up with time. Just go and become a maker of things. The rest will follow suite.

8. What are you currently working on?
We’re currently in post production for a film called “Heartless: The Story of the Tinman”. I’m painfully excited about this film, and it’s something we’ve been working on for a very long time. The short film follows the origin story of a young woodsman and how he became the Tinman. It’s a tragic story, and a modern myth for the time we live in. We release it in April, and it’s our biggest story yet.

We have a few other films in development right now, and yes, we’re working on our first feature film script.

You can follow the story of Whitestone on our website where we try to keep people updated to our journey as storytellers and filmmakers.