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

David, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

This is an interesting question. I’ve always been a creative kid and leaned into music going into high school and college. So the plan was always to try and find a way to make a living doing the creative things I enjoyed doing. I moved out to Los Angeles after working at a movie theater in Central Pennsylvania and decided that if I was going to do anything creative as a career, it probably wasn’t going to happen there. Not to say that there aren’t some spectacular musicians and artists making a living in Central PA; I just new that if I wanted to go for success I knew there were more opportunities to make that happen in Los Angeles and New York. I just happened to have one of my best friends from High School that decided to move out to Los Angeles. He visited a friend out here to scope things out and he had a similar epiphany. I offered to drive out to Los Angeles and we even roomed together for a while when we got out here. I gave myself 6 months to see if I could get it happening and it was much easier than I thought it would be. The times were a little different and the networking was much easier and I was definitely a lot more open to exploring opportunities that were tangential to my creative goals. I interviewed for a composers assistant job down in Hermosa Beach which was a trek from our Koreatown apartment and I had to turn it down because I wasn’t going to be able to pay the bills and afford the commute. It was pretty crushing to have to turn down since it was a direct pipeline to performing percussion and writing cues for an established composer. So I went back to the temp job hustle and was temping in the legal department at Harmony Gold. One of the attorneys pulled me aside and asked me what I wanted to do for a career and I told them that I was a musician and I was trying to get into composing. She mentioned that all the former musicians she knew eventually got into post production and that Harmony Gold had a post production branch, Intersound , Inc. and that she would set up an interview for me there. I interviewed the following week and then starting working there as a facilities scheduler the next month. It was our lead sound mixer, Mike Mancini, that reiterated that so many musicians are great at post production editorial because (at the time) time code was all triplet time. If you could count triplets then you could sync dialogue, sound effects, check for phase and that was that. Having that bridge from my music world to television and eventually film was what really solidified it for me. That was back in 1998.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Well, I am a film, television and music producer that is based out of Los Angeles. I mostly work on independent narrative projects but am working toward my first major television series as a producer. My studio, D Studios Productions, LLC, is currently putting slates of films together for the coming years and will be responsible for development and production services for those films. On the music side, I mostly produce the soundtracks for the films I also produce, but I also enjoy my roots as a classical musician. I released a lyrical soprano album in 2022 for Tory McKenna titled “Awakening: A Song Cycle of Lullabies”and am currently working on the Orchestral Percussion based solo album “Walk Around the Planets”. I select projects that are narrative fiction, genre-bending, and ultimately fun to watch.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Of all the rewarding aspects of being a creative minded individual, I think the most appealing to me is the collective efforts of a creative team. I experienced this as a kid and young adult, performing in various bands, orchestras and ensembles. When you get a group of like-minded creative people all working toward a singular vision, whatever that art is becomes a living thing. Feeling that power and realizing what is happening is a feeling that I always search for and it is one of the best parts of being a producer. Building that team that is going to bring the project together and finding that collective moment when everyone is working at their best and everything from every department is performing at their highest levels really hits me. When I experience it performing in small 3 piece bands or producing 100 member staffed feature films, I often refer to those projects as “my favorite projects that I’ve worked on”. It is so rewarding to consistently achieve this on each new project I produce.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Ha! Great question and I think moving to a city like Los Angeles builds that resilience very early on. I moved to Los Angeles in 1997 and earlier that year, a fellow projectionist at the theater I was working in decided he was going to move to L.A. to become a famous director. He packed up, we had a little good-bye party for him and I remember thinking, “wow, THAT is how you go from small-town Central Pennsylvania theater projectionist to big-time L.A. director”. Of course, six months later he strolls into the movie theater and I asked him if he was visiting and he said “nope, I’m back”. I remember thinking, six months and this guy who had all this confidence, all this swagger and vision, and he’s back in small-town Central Pennsylvania looking for a projectionist job again. So when I moved out to Los Angeles I made a promise to myself that no matter what happened, I was going to give it everything I had to have a shot at success in this industry. I temped, I saved money, I interviewed for dream jobs with a composer, at Digital Domain, and saved some more. I ate very little when I had to and treated myself when I felt like I earned it. I had a best friend for a roommate and we split a $550 a month apartment in Koreatown unitl we started to get going. When I finally got settled in post production work, I moved into a modest apartment in West Hollywood for $750 a month 3 miles from my work. This was a year and a half after I had made the move but I never forgot that if I just kept working hard for my dreams that I would last another six months and not wind up back in Central Pennsylvania as a film projectionist.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://dstudiosproductions.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidschatanoffjr/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschatanoffjr/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidSchatanoff

Image Credits
Helenna Santos