Casey Warren
"I guess it all starts with my grandfather, who was also into photography. My family’s garage was just full of these wonderful old vintage photographs of his. When you held these images to the light, they’re not just an old piece of celluloid, they contain a whole story captured in a single moment. In a way, I grew up having many generations of my family’s adventures preserved on 35mm slides."
"My dad’s garage was my playground. Not only was it full of old photographs and photographic equipment, but there were all of these amazingly detailed plans of airplane components, radio controlled airplanes, NASA rocket models and miniature trains. Although dad was a CAD designer working in the aeronautical industry, he was also into archery and bike riding. My parents had so many hobbies, it was too hard to count them all."
"My mom also loved to write poetry, so life’s experiences were everything to my parents. They never really cared much for money and went more for experiences over possessions. For my brother and I, our lives were also all about wonderful experiences."
"As kids, we were always trying to create little imaginary worlds within the world we lived in. That’s pretty much what I still do today as a filmmaker - to create worlds that exist in my imagination. And then, find someway of making them real so others can experience those worlds too. Much of what I do these days as a director, I can trace back to my love of photography and comic books."
"My love of comic books has had a profound influence on how I approach my filmmaking. When you ask someone to read a comic book and remember all of the visuals, what they actually see is a kind of movie playing out in their head. As a kid, I was gobbling up all of these comic books that would eventually become movies in my mind."
"Filmmaking is the reverse process for me. Now I take the idea for a movie and then convert it into a storyboard. Just like a comic book, that allows people to go out and film what you first imagined. It’s ultimately, all about the story that these visuals tell."
"Later when I got into video games, I found it was the narratives that went along with the games that I loved the best. The one game I loved the most, was Final Fantasy 7, because of the story!"
"The idea that people actually had jobs where they invent imaginary worlds like games and films, really appealed to me. As a kid, all I wanted to do was my own VFX movies based on my own imaginary worlds."
"My passion for storytelling and filmmaking is a mix of my mom’s love of writing and my dad’s love of photography. My dad was also clearly influenced by his dad’s love of photography, because, when the Vietnam War broke out he immediately enlisted as a war photographer."
"Growing up with photography as part of your life from an early age, teaches you a lot about composition, exposure and lighting. Because I already had these skills in photography as well as a wild imagination, when it came to learning video, I found it a relatively easy transition. Once you have the composition and exposure worked out, then it all comes down to how that movement in those images connects with people."
"When I got my first video camera, I started doing all sorts of experimental films and music videos. It was the first time I could create my own stories and tell those narratives through real people."
"However, it wasn’t until I met Danielle Krieger that filmmaking and photography became a serious option. It all started one summer in high school, when we started our business Mindcastle, shooting school portraits. Things started to snowball from there and by the next year, we were aiming to make $20,000 out of shooting senior portraits or graduation photos for our friends in school."
"When it came time to go to college, we had a number of offers from various art schools. But in the end, we decided not to go to art school, just so that we had some more options. Both Danielle and I went onto Washington University, where we studied communications and acting together. Communications was the perfect choice for us in the end because we learned a lot about marketing and branding. It’s important to think about who your audience is prior to creating your film and also how that film will fit as a part of a client’s branding package as a whole."
"It was during our third year at university that things really started to happen for us. Here we were trying to juggle a business and study at the same time, which was becoming a real problem. Then we got the call from ESPN to do our first big commercial job. We were in our junior year when we had to decide between being flown to New York to be paid to shoot the NFL draft or take our finals!"
"The NFL draft was definitely more a documentary approach. Then one of our bigger ESPN projects involved filming commercial content for the Sunday NFL Countdown. That’s when we really felt we were in our element. We started directing and creating the sort of story elements behind the project, as apposed to just making it look good."
"When we started getting involved with both the story and the look, we found that more and more directing jobs started to open up for us. After that, I just fell in love with directing. Directing for me, is crafting the vision for what is being told and being completely responsible for the end result. I found that my cinematography blends well with directing, because it’s also a form of telling that same story."
"In the beginning, a lot of the stuff we were doing was smaller crew and the cinematographer on those projects immediately becomes the director. That’s where we have been successful, when they want someone who can come in and take the creative vision tell a great story. Not having just a visual idea for the project, but also having a story telling aspect to it as well."
"From that time on, things just got bigger and bigger. Then I got this great opportunity to shoot a film in India as well as several shoots with Major League Baseball. We both decided that I should probably focus more on my career as a Director & DP than finishing my communications degree."
"Since those days working for ESPN in our junior year, we have gone onto to work with Canon, ESPN, NFL Network, ELLE Magazine, Microsoft & Arri among other great companies. We are very excited that we won a Young Director Award at Cannes Lions this year for our film, “The Journey.” It’s nice to be recognized among so many great new and up and coming artists."