Today we’d like to introduce you to Robert Speewack Bojorquez
Hi Robert Speewack, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Let’s go way back: for starters, I grew up in a very kid-friendly neighborhood in Spokane, WA that allowed for all kinds of post-Tony Hawk/Jackass mid-00s mischief: ding-dong-ditching, appliance smashing in the local abandoned movie theater, riding bikes under power line towers, and TP-ing a house every now and then. There was no shortage of after-dark sneaking out to do and we were hungry for goofing at those early teen ages. All that’s to say: I was super close with my neighborhood friends (still am!) and we had energy to spare. My first video project ever was for 8th grade social studies about the three branches of the US government and we basically used it as an excuse for a sleepover where every dumb idea made it into the final video. Learning how to point and shoot on a DV camera and edit in Adobe Premiere (I think CS3?) woke something up in the creative space of my brain, because that was the jumping off point. Soon after came a DV camera as a birthday present and with YouTube innovating video on the internet and plenty of creators just starting down the road of posting sketches online with The Lonely Island leading the way with SNL’s Digital Shorts and our own local Spokane mini-YouTube celebs in Luke Barats and Joe Bereta, it felt like a tipping point of accessibility where we could make a video that just might get some random internet algorithm traction and blow up. What ultimately defined my teenagehood is making videos as a way for us all in the neighborhood to get together and goof off with pretty satisfying results most of the time, and that led to plenty of high school video projects and eventually joining the Yearbook staff for two years to create the annual yearbook DVD that would go in every book. Like many young filmmakers finding their feet in high school, I was one of the few “video guys” around the school.
Leading into college, I knew film school may eventually be a far-off goal, but staying in-state was a budget limit I had to abide by, which led to Western Washington University (WWU) in Bellingham, WA. WWU had an office in its Associated Students called KVIK (WWU’s mascot is a viking) that started as the student-led campus closed circuit TV station and had evolved in just a few years into a digital video production collective with several “shows” pitched and produced by students with the title “Executive Producer,” that would culminate in on-campus premiere events put on for the student body to attend for free. I plugged into this basically on Day One, diving into whatever they had cooking: sketch comedy, entertainment news, short films, and more. I couldn’t get enough: this was exactly what I was looking for: like-minded community with gas in the tank for producing whatever we wanted without “adult supervision” and free access to the DIY camera gear that was defining the early YouTube aesthetic. Any time that I wasn’t in class or when I was actively skipping class, I was filming something, writing something, or hanging out with other students doing the same, and this went on for the first half of college until the opportunity to run this office opened up my Junior year and I took it, and ran the office until I graduated. We premiered new shows and restarted WWU’s 48-Hour Film Festival, which brought together all the niche filmmaking students across the campus, some of which had no idea KVIK existed and discovered it through the festival. My college film career was the perfect learning ground for understanding how self-motivated a lot of creative work post-grad looked like: if you wanted to get some shit done, you had to start some shit and find people in the same boat.
During the summer of my senior year, I was able to connect with a VERY casual internship working on a web series for a company called Cinesaurus in Seattle; they were responsible for the pretty viral Gritty Reboots on YouTube that brought millennial childhood IP into a gritty movie trailer format (i.e. Pokemon Snap meets Jurassic Park). They were cooking on some high quality stuff that seemed right in line with the direction I hoped my career would go in and I was fortunate enough to be able to move down to Seattle shortly after graduating and plugged right back in with them working on a post-apocalyptic Adventure Time trailer right when they were looking to add a Production Manager to their team, so there I was. I spent a couple very fun years working with Cinesaurus before we parted ways. That parting led me to really wonder what I enjoyed so much about filmmaking and it all circles back to community-building and bringing people together for me, which led me to NFFTY (the National Film Festival for Talented Youth).
NFFTY is an international film festival for filmmakers under the age of 25 (when I joined the cut-off age was 23), and submitting to this Seattle festival was a goal for a lot of our college film projects each year. I had worked on a few things that had gotten in and we road-tripped down to attend those screenings and some parties, and my Senior year I had co-directed a Batman-Spider-Man parody short called “Gothingham” that got into the fest too, so I had been around the festival for a few years. Each year they hired a seasonal Festival Manager and 2016 was the year I got the job. I can’t say enough about the magic of this festival: the creative inspiration and energy of 200 young hungry filmmakers coming together for four days is truly awe-inspiring and I worked on the staff and programmed for two years, starting producing the NFFTY Podcast in 2018, and have been on NFFTY’s Board of Directors since 2021. NFFTY is in many ways the peak of what I would hope to produce and a dedicated industry platform for young filmmakers of all stripes continues to be so important for diversity and accessibility. It’s a joy and an honor to continue to be able to be involved.
That does bring me to a small crossroads in my career: after working for NFFTY, I did what any Seattle filmmaker has to do at some point to pay the bills: I did a bunch of boring corporate work for Microsoft for a couple years. At this point, these were the largest and most complicated video projects I’d worked on, so looking back, these were good formative production years that gave me the start of creative agency-adjacent experience and were able to fund my initial start in podcasting and kept me busy while still putting out a couple films for the Seattle 48 Hour Film Project each year too. 2018 was the official start of Partyfish Media, which is my attempt at community building in the podcast space in Seattle and I run this very similarly to KVIK: independent producers making their shows with my low-touch Executive Producer hand on the best practices wheel and a community recording space. Like the entire world, this was all derailed by COVID, but we still continue to produce a handful of regular podcast programming with everyone recording remotely and it remains a project I’m proud of by the fact that the runway from idea to finished product is shorter and cheaper than filmmaking and still a lot of fun to work on.
Around the same time we started Partyfish, I moved on into general creative and design agencies for my day job, which still scratches my creative producer itch but offers way more project diversity and is generally more challenging that corporate video production (which is basically all that Seattle offers the industry). Like any industry I experienced some bouncing around finding the right culture fit, but happy to have landed at House of Sorcery/Electric Coffin, which is a super hype environmental design agency/art studio and that affords me the luxury of being able to produce films and podcasts outside of work purely for fun. I’m extremely thankful for the creative equilibrium I’ve been able to find in recent years and the path that’s led me here has had ups and downs, but built me into the Producer and Project Manager with a real range of experience to draw on that comes in handy often.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The main thing that comes to mind is that I did very little research into what kind of film offerings WWU had before applying and accepting admission for undergrad. I basically followed the close friends that weren’t going to the University of Washington in Seattle, which was too spendy for me. I assumed there would be some kind of film club I could join and that would scratch my video-making itch and maybe a major or minor to focus on overall: and I was basically right, which in retrospect was extremely lucky.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am always interested in opportunities to learn new creative industries, even if that means starting from square one. Over the past few years, I’ve reflected on what makes me appreciate work I do the most and being able to collaborate in new fields and learn new processes, skills, or crafts while still being able to contribute expertise on an organizational front has emerged as a long-term career goal for me. This pops up all the time, sometimes out of necessity, but it’s kind of a feature of work in any creative industry. I have creative practices for so many things at this point: I’m super active on Letterboxd writing film crit (@robspeewack), which also fuels the couple film podcasts I’ve produced (24 Flames Per Second and Oops All Franchises), I produce/direct two 48 Hour Films every year which stretches my no-budget film producing muscles, and work in creative project management day-to-day. At this point, I don’t get stressed, I get focused, and at the end of the day, I just want to collaborate with friends and have fun orienting around a mindset where both the journey and the destination are equally important and intentional.
To that end, it feels like there’s always plenty to continue to sink my teeth into: I love playing music so keeping up on playing guitar (hoping to learn to build one soon too) and hoping to pick up new instruments in the coming years is a goal, I’m rebuilding and restoring a vintage motorcycle I was gifted after helping a past co-worker at his custom shop last year (Kitbash Studio iykyk), and I’m on a steady diet of video games and record-collecting too. Everything feels like a new hobby to fit into the puzzle somewhere and a guiding curiosity is getting me there.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
My mom’s side of the family were cattle ranchers and I did my fair share of growing up on the Jaynbee Angus Ranch in northern Idaho, spending full summers working alongside my grandparents and raising my own cattle as well. As the years go by, I’ve come to be extraordinarily thankful for this being part of my upbringing: that context of understanding hard work, a rural walk of life, and being brought up through animal husbandry is something I’m not sure you’d expect for a real city slicker filmmaker anymore. The devotion of my grandparents to instilling the tenets of daily farm chores, digging post holes, fixing fence, and keeping a herd healthy and moving is actually incredible training for having a creative regimen and having to be a self-starter, so that’s life experience I wouldn’t trade for the world.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.partyfish.media
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rob_speewack
- Other: https://www.linktr.ee/robspeewack
Image Credits
Robert Bojorquez, Kwesi Phillips, Stefanie Malone, Juliette Machado, Penelope Kipps, Krk Nordenstrom, Felix Tan