We were lucky to catch up with Kurt Hoffmann recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kurt, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?
Although I feel that I’m still really early in my journey as a filmmaker, I can already look back on countless pivotal points in my path. Each point was prompted by a roadblock that discouraged, grounded, and educated me. The first big roadblock I ran into occurred on one of my very first shoots, and that experience has affected how I’ve approached my journey since.
I have been making videos since I was in middle school. It all started when I hit record on my iPod Nano to film my friends and me trying frontflips on the grass at lunch, slamming our backs into the ground. I was hooked. After showing my excitement and passion for filming for a few years, I was blessed with a GoPro Hero 3. I ran that thing into the ground until eventually, in high school, I worked my way up to a Canon DSLR. I played with that camera every day, in love with the endless potential it provided for videos and photos. Though I still had little grasp on what I was doing, I was occasionally asked by family friends to shoot their events and family portraits. One late afternoon, I was doing a family photo shoot at a beach park. It was going smoothly and I felt confident directing the family– It was the first time I felt like a shoot was “clicking.” Out of excitement to squeeze out every last bit of the sunset, I left my gear on the ground and ran with the family to scout out another part of the beach. Upon returning about five minutes later, my bag of gear– which contained my phone, my DSLR, and its kit lenses– was nowhere to be found. No one else was around aside from the family and me, so it was clear everything got stolen. At first, I was embarrassed the family wouldn’t get their photos. Then, I was crushed. I remember thinking, “Welp, that’s it. My days of shooting are over.” Being a senior in high school, I felt maybe it was time to rethink what I pursue once I graduate.
I carried on with my minimum-wage job, saving up money to buy a new phone, feeling directionless with where I wanted to take my life after high school. Then after hearing about my misfortune, my friend Kapena handed me his go-to DSLR, similar to the one I had stolen from me. He told me he was getting a new camera, and that I deserved to keep pushing myself. After that point, I remember shooting more than I ever had before. When high school graduation was nearing, I registered for a television production program at a community college. Once I had saved enough money to upgrade cameras, I passed the DSLR to another friend who was getting interested in filmmaking.
Fast forward to now– six years after the day I lost all my gear. Apart from the filmmaking work I do professionally, I try to spend a big chunk of my free time making short films with our company’s gear, and a few weeks ago I was shooting one with my best friend. Despite what the weather app and a good long look at the sky told us, a storm started rolling in. Our scene was taking place a few miles deep in the forest, and I had failed to bring garbage bags or any other type of raincover for my gear. I grabbed the ziploc bag of apples we brought, dumped out the apples, covered a sliver of my camera with the bag, and powered through for the rest of the shoot. After a scene that involved both my friend and me acting, we walked back to the soaked camera only to see the screen completely black. I shut down the camera and when I turned it back on the screen went wild– colorful lines glitched and danced for about five seconds, then the camera shut down again. We were now sitting in the pouring rain with a broken camera, soaked phones, and an incomplete film. The morale wasn’t high on the hike back up– I once again felt defeated.
That night, I called my camera’s manufacturer company and found out how expensive it would be to repair the screen and motherboard. I then had some time to reflect while looking at my camera and phone sitting in a bowl of rice. I felt like I was at a level where I shouldn’t be making ammature mistakes like these anymore, and that brought me down for a little while. After a few days, I thought about how I felt when I was seventeen and got my phone and camera stolen. I realized how much more devastated I was then, and that if I could push past it then, I can push past it now. The next day, I started salvaging the footage and editing it into a short film, realizing I could still make something out of it. Then, I went to pack up my camera to send it to the manufacturer to repair it. On a whim, I decided to give my camera one last check– I put the battery in and the screen turned on like normal, as if nothing happened! While I feel I got extremely lucky, it was a very strong reminder for me to appreciate, laugh at, and move forward from each roadblock I encounter in my journey.
Kurt, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Hi, I’m Kurt! I’m a freelance filmmaker based out of Oahu, Hawaii. I moved here with my family from Colorado right before I started high school. I already had a strong interest in making parkour videos on Youtube, which I developed from a community of people who did it in Colorado. I carried that interest with me to Hawaii until I found a solid group of kids my age who were making videos of parkour mixed in with what most kids growing up on an island do– surfing, cliff jumping, and camping on the beach. I dove headfirst into that life and made countless videos along the way. It became crystal clear that filmmaking was one of my favorite things to do in the world, and that I wanted to pursue it and somehow make a living off of it.
After graduating from community college with an associates degree in television production, I now find myself split in three different worlds of filmmaking, all of which I love– I’m a contracted editor for television shows, I co-own a wedding video company, and I make short films that I put on Youtube for free. In school I had an overwhelming realization of how many avenues can be taken in filmmaking, and right now I’m having a blast discovering where I see myself.
In my first semester of the college program, I began collaborating on multiple projects with a girl named Cody since I felt creatively it always “clicked” for us and we had a great time on every project we worked on. By the third and final semester of the program, we began dating. A few months later, we shot a wedding video to assist my mom, who does wedding photography. After we graduated, we had time to build up our gear and our craft as we made more wedding videos and established ourselves as a company, which we named Retrosight Studios. When the pandemic hit a few months later, our work was put on pause. After some time, it dawned on us that this was the perfect opportunity to learn how to build a website, make business cards, and develop our branding so we could be in full swing after things mellowed out. That gap in work was very challenging but we feel blessed to be able to shoot weddings consistently again! We’re excited to see what the future years lay ahead as we keep building out Retrosight Studios and honing our craft.
That gap between work in 2020 jump-started other things for us as well– Out of boredom I wrote a script for a ten-minute short film. I shot, starred in, and edited it between April and June. It’s called Paul Solves and it’s on my Youtube channel, Kurt Hoffilms. This film kept me sane during the lockdown and gave me a creative outlet to focus on and work towards everyday. About a month later, a classmate I graduated with asked if I could fill in for him as sound recordist on a high school student’s first-time short film. Since I had nothing better to do, I agreed to do some free work and help out on a stranger’s project for seven days. That ended up being an incredible week. The high school student was a kid named Devan Fujinaka, a bright individual who put together a really smart screenplay called Hitman. His passion and enthusiasm pushed the crew to inject their own creativity and do their best. Over time, I helped give the cast and crew rides, captured a few shots for some of the scenes, and gave a little bit of advice from experiences I’ve picked up during my journey. When the film was complete, he generously added my name in the credits as one of the film’s producers. The film went on to get selected in multiple film festivals, including The American Pavilion’s Emerging Filmmakers Showcase at Cannes Film Festival! We’re traveling to France next month to screen the film, and we couldn’t be more excited!
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
For me, the process of working on a project– in my case, a short film or a wedding video– is exciting and rewarding in it’s own right, but I have always found an incomparable feeling of accomplishment when I have just finished uploading or delivering the project. The feeling of wiping my hands clean of a project I was at one point completely occupied with, mixed with the closure of hearing how it’s received and how it affected the client or viewer, is the most rewarding aspect for me right now. It prompts other rewarding aspects, like finding out a project inspired someone to make their own project!
It’s such a great feeling of release that, even if I was burnt out and discouraged while working on the project, I will then feel motivated to move on to the next one..
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
In college I was taught to practically kiss up to my superiors if I wanted to move up in my industry. I’ve learned that what I should have been taught is simply to be a good worker– I can’t rely on my superiors to pull me up in my career, and I also shouldn’t fear that they have the power to sabotage my career. I learned this the hard way, being so paranoid about upsetting my superiors that I ended up actually doing worse at my job. We also live in a time where a career in the film industry– and many other industries– can be approached from a hundred different angles, and we don’t need to rely on making one specific person happy to go up a step on the ladder.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://retrosightstudios.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/retrosightstudios/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/retrosightstudios
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/kurthoffilms
Image Credits
Christine Hoffmann Cherry Lowrie Jonathan Shima