We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Christopher Sheffield. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Christopher below.

Christopher, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

When it comes to being a successful working artist, I believe there has and will always be a huge inherent risk to your livelihood with every project you truly love. This is even more apparent if you’re someone who is dead set on escalating the quality of your art, even if the means with which you’re creating hasn’t necessarily escalated for you yet. When it comes to Independent film this is absolutely true. When I was first starting out and I Directed my first feature, “Run For your Life”, we had the lovely buffer of being young enough to be a novelty. When we asked for something for free, whether that was labor or shooting locations, it was viewed as admirable, like a youthful adventure, and in most cases we got what we asked for. All that being said, the risk was low, and if i’m being honest, so was the quality of the finished product. Fast forward to my second feature film, now as a slightly more established filmmaker living in Los Angeles, and the risk suddenly felt so much more present, despite the fact that my means were virtually the same. I was still trying to ‘punch’ well above my ‘weight class’, this time taking on my first Action Thriller with ‘Split Lip’, but I was still operating with a personal budget considered laughable by most standards, and propped up wholly by the grace and kindness of the friends in the cast and crew who joined me. No longer operating as a freshly graduated film student, the risk of failure had become much more real, both to myself and to the artists around me who were now trusting me to find a way forward each day. The funny thing about risk, however, is that in the right circumstances it has the power to motivate like no other. I felt a responsibility to them to not fail, and so it worked out that a film made over the course of two years of disparate shooting dates and some maxed credit cards found its way into a theater, and even further still to a successful wide release. Even now, as I stare down the production of my sixth feature film as a Director, A Horror film called ‘Eigengrau’, the risk of absolute failure remains in its comfortable spot in my brain, where I’m sure It’ll sit like an old friend for the rest of my career. It hasn’t stopped me yet!

Christopher, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Indie Filmmaking has always been my life. I first fell in love with filmmaking as a young child playing with two broken video cameras my mother bought at a yard sale, and I feel like I haven’t stopped playing with video cameras since. I graduated from a small film school in 2011 and set out to make my first feature right away, and before I had even officially finished it I was already packing my life up with a few friends and moving out to make my way in Los Angeles. One of the first things I realized when I got into the Industry out here was that the head of every department always had the same complaints; that budgets were getting smaller, and shooting schedules were getting shorter. I realized early on that, despite all of my still held aspirations of Directing huge movies, it seemed like the Film Industry I had stepped into was going to shrink to my size before I was going to grow to it. That realization ended up being more of a comfort to me than anything though, because at the time I didn’t know exactly how to make a multi-million dollar movie, but I certainly knew how to make an Indie film. I had this feeling like I was in this wild shifting territory, like the structure I was taught was all up in the air, so I decided that the course I had set for myself way back in film school was the course I would stay; Continue to make Indie films, no matter what resources you lack, and the career you want would form under your feet as you went. In the last ten years living and working in LA, that has definitely proven true, and specializing in Independent sized productions has kept me busy and thankfully surrounded by incredible friendships. There are bonds that forms on small productions that I have come to cherish as much as the finished product. My career aspirations have certainly never gotten smaller, and indeed I continue to push conversations of Directing much larger studio productions, a role I would now feel very comfortable in. I can confidently say, however, that my love of the ‘Indies’ will never wain, and that no matter what I’m working on throughout my career, I’ll always carve out time to work on smaller features with my friends.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

We’re in a very interesting time as filmmakers right now, particularly in regards to the shifting interests of audiences. It feels like we might be in the death throes of the great IP explosion that has driven movies and television almost exclusively for the last decade, and honestly that might be a very good thing for creatives. I know I speak for thousands of artists when I say that, if given the opportunity, none of us would willingly touch anyone else’s art, be it a novel, a comic book, or a video game. We’re much more excited about telling our original stories. If audiences are sick of the same stories being retold and the rebooting of the same IP’s, we as creatives are more than happy to bring original films and television to them. So to audiences I say, emphatically, vote with your wallets. Go see the movies you’ve never heard of, watch the foreign shows you don’t recognize, peruse the smaller streaming platforms and find movies with actors you don’t know. I guarantee you’ll find your love for movies and TV again.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I think my goal as a filmmaker has always been to find my audience. In any given film that audience is bound to shift, but I think sometimes we find artists out there that we, for lack of a better phrase, just ‘get’. I know that I have a distinct style and a distinct voice when I tell stories, and I’m hoping that as my films gain a larger and larger platform I’ll be able to find that consistent thread of audience members that understand my filmmaking language, and enjoys it enough to follow me on to the next adventure and the next after that.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.christopherSheffield.com
• Instagram: @Sheff_Shoots_Indie
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGTtb8D839fxWHSGdIHMGLw
• Other: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/eigengrau-horror-film-monster-fund/x/10289446#/

Image Credits
Ed Russell Stephanie Resler Tara Price