Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Schreck

Hi Kevin, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

I always gravitated toward visual storytelling. Whether it was drawing from a very early age, designing board games, creating picture books, and eventually making movies on a Hi-8 camcorder with puppets or my family, I always felt most at home with expressing myself through visual stories. Music, language, sound effects, and all of these other elements mattered to me, too, of course. That was the exciting thing about cinema: it’s a “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a total, cohesive work of art that is brought together through many different creative disciplines.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?

I was very lucky to always find myself in an environment in which my creative impulses were encouraged. That’s not always the case for everyone, so that is a privilege worth acknowledging. But it was only recently that I realized how you can wind up being isolated as a very independent, zero-budget filmmaker running your own projects. Thankfully, I have been more intentional about creating support networks and a sense of community with others, and I have friends who have done the same for me. I don’t believe in perpetuating elitism or gatekeeping. Just because I faced challenges in filmmaking, it doesn’t mean that others deserve that treatment, too. Whether you have been in the business for decades or are just starting your journey, you are a peer who is welcome to the conversation. Because filmmaking is such an involved process that requires the contributions of various skillsets and disciplines, it is inherently collaborative. Building that community with genuine people is vital and benefits everyone.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?

I’m a documentary filmmaker. I have been very fortunate to do this for over a decade, and I’ve realized in hindsight that all of my films are imbued with very personal elements (hopefully, for the better). I relate to my subjects in a lot of ways, even a little with the non-human protagonists.

My first big project, “Persistence of Vision” (2012), was about the legendary, London-based animator, Richard Williams, and his three-decade quest to create what he believed would be the greatest animated motion picture of all time, best known as “The Thief and the Cobbler.” My documentary really was a student film run amok. I look back on it and see it as being something very old and removed from me, but I’m thankful that it gave me a career, and that people still enjoy it and ask me about it after so many years.

After that, I made what is probably my most personal (and unusual) project, “Tangent Realms: The Worlds of C.M. Kösemen” (2018). It was a biographical film about a brilliant, and truly unique, Turkish surrealist artist, C.M. “Memo” Kösemen, who is inspired by zoology, paleontology, mythology – a lot of different “-ologies” – and creates these spellbinding, haunting worlds through his paintings.

A few years later, I released an extremely low-budget short, “The Duck of New York” (2023). A duck that is rarely seen in this hemisphere spontaneously appeared in Central Park, creating a media sensation. Not knowing how long the bird would be there, my former student, Marcus Cochran, and I filmed it and the people around the animal, with equal spontaneity.

My latest film, “Antarctic Voyage” (2024), was filmed aboard a scientific research expedition to the island of South Georgia. The film stars a charismatic field biologist, Samantha Monier, as she studies the marine ecology of this rarely-visited sub-Antarctic region of our planet. Like every project, it had some unique challenges, but I am extremely thankful for the creative freedom that I was allowed, while being funded by the National Science Foundation. That movie will begin its film festival run very soon, and we are so excited to share it with the world.

I’m also working on a long-gestating biographical film, “Enongo.” It is about a remarkable rapper/producer/Ph.D. candidate, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, and part of it is animated by an amazing team of young Black women animators who connect with her story in very meaningful ways. It’s an attempt at capturing a significant portion of one’s life, but I think we’re getting close to finishing production. There’s another, enormous project that I can’t yet announce…

Making films and screening them have taken me to six continents and meeting some extraordinary people. It isn’t always lucrative or glamorous, but it is a life well-lived. Werner Herzog said in the penultimate chapter of his Masterclass video series that the average lifespan of an independent filmmaking career is 10-15 years. This is because it is such an expensive process, can really take a toll on your health, and involves more rejections and disappointments than successes. A select few exceed that projected timeframe and weather those challenges. I’ve been doing this professional independent filmmaking thing 14 years, so I’m something of a senior citizen now. But I’m only 35, I have no other skill sets, and I want to keep doing this. Hopefully, I can…

What was your favorite childhood memory?

I can’t think of just one moment, but any time I could be out in nature was a special moment. Catching (and releasing) frogs and turtles where I grew up in Minnesota and Wisconsin, identifying ducks and other waterfowl, waking up early enough to heard the dawn chorus and staying up late to see the nocturnal world unfold, with bats flying overhead and distant calls from unseen animals in the distance. The natural world is endlessly inspiring. I have an interest in science that nearly equals that of cinema. It’s a theme that shows up in a lot of my work, and I’m thankful that my newest project, “Antarctic Voyage,” is the most exciting extension of that passion realized so far. I’m thrilled to finally share this project with the world.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.KevinSchreck.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/KevinSchreckProductions
• Other: https://linktr.ee/kevinschreck