Oakley Anderson-Moore // How a Terrible Meal at an All-Night Diner Started My Film Career

[IamOakley]

Hello people!

 Oakley here. I’m a filmmaker. It’s the collaborative nature that drew me to filmmaking, so I’m excited to join this new SonyCine community.

 I’ll start by sharing a little about myself. I’m a bit of a strange creature in that I grew up between Apple orchards where my dad was a Fruit Tramp, and overseas, where my youth was spread out across South America, Europe, and Asia.

 At some point after I moved back to the States to go to college, wondering what to do with my life, I discovered the magical world of filmmaking.

 The first time I showed up to a set, it was some no-budget student 400 Blows ripoff where we were all pretending we knew what we were doing, myself included. I think I was assigned to hold a square-shaped Styrofoam cutout that someone whispered to me was the “bounce.” I held the damned thing up for so long that my arms started shaking. (No one told me to put it down between takes.) Afterwards, we went to some awful all-night diner; the food was terrible, but I had never laughed so hard or felt so much camaraderie.

I could tell this was the path for me.

Many grueling years after that, my first feature documentary Brave New Wild landed me in the IFP Independent Filmmakers Lab. I felt like I had won the lottery. I took my film to the Lab, which takes place in New York City, and it was the first time I met other filmmakers who were out there making films, just like me, in the real world. Years went in to making that first feature, and after it was released, Brave New Wild (and it’s companion Wild New Brave) went on to find a small cult following with a certain type of maniac, have a surprising film festival run across the world, a grassroots theatrical tour, a broadcast premiere on Public Television, and now lives comfortably on AppleTV.

For the last decade, I have been living the filmmaking life here in Northern Arizona. (It’s 7000 feet elevation, so it snows in the winter but you get sunburned even faster than Florida.) My current exciting project is a large-format filmmakers dream: I’m directing films for a brand-new 8K LED immersive cinema in Flagstaff, where the screen wraps around the audience at 100 feet x 30 feet. I’m even on the design team building the theater from the ground-up.

I also teach young indigenous teenagers from Navajo Nation and Hopi how to make films in an after school program called Kinlani Film Project. I can honestly say that I learn as much from them as they learn from me.

For many years, I have profiled directors, DPs, and editors for No Film School. It was there that I first got my hands on the first release of the Sony #FX3. I fell in love with the camera, and this led me to SonyCine.

Just last week I had a chance to test out the brand-new FX30. I grabbed two fellow filmmakers, hopped into a 1976 VW van, and took the camera for a spin. Here’s what we shot:

 

TLDR: I am Oakley. Filmmaking is the magic that keeps me alive. I look forward to meeting some of you on the forums who feel the same. My camera of choice at the moment is the FX3, paired with a GM 50mm. I love watching people’s work and hearing your stories. So share your work or post an introduction with who you are!