Today we’d like to introduce you to Vanessa M. H. Powers.
Vanessa M. H., we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I like to joke that I’ve been making movies as long as I could hold a camera and a Barbie at the same time. While I say this with humor, it is also the truth. My family and I are BIG movie fans. We used to do movies and homemade pizza on Friday nights, and it wasn’t just watching movies and it wasn’t just kids movies – my family would talk about the merit of the story, about the characters, about the filmmaking. I watched movies that were challenging to me, not just Disney stuff that reinforced my status quo.
Then when I was around 8 years old, Matilda came out, and I got a ‘making of’ book about the movie. They explained various jobs like the art department, and I was very intriuged; it had never occured to me that people MADE movies before, though that sounds obvious now. Then when I was 14 I met an independent filmmaker who’s film I had watched at a special event, and he was a really nice guy, but he was just a guy. He wasn’t Brad Pitt or Stephen Spielberg, and he had made a movie that I had watched and enjoyed. It was kind of mind-blowing to realized that you could just MAKE a movie. You didn’t have to BE someone first.
That started my high school friend group making movies with great frequency, and great seriousness. We had shotlists, schedules, on set arguments about performance versus visuals, the whole works. When I went to college the first time, it was for theater, and then I spent a few years working at coffee shops and doing theater and film on the side. Then I decided I really wanted my day job and my side hustle to speak to each other, so I went back to school for filmmaking, with a focus in edting, as that seemed like a marketable skill. Luckily, it was. Now I work as an editor, and I do theater and film, and I don’t feel such a whiplash between paid work and passion projects.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has certainly not been a smooth road. When I graudated from High School, I almost went to school to be a lawyer(?) because I didn’t thinkg pursuing the arts felt like a ‘safe’ enough career path. Luckily, my amazing parents encouraged me to stay the course doing something I loved, because money wasn’t a guarentee no matter what I studied, but I could choose a path that was going to make me happy.
That said, college did not make me happy – I went from being a very big fish in a very small pond in my hometown to the opposite. I felt invisible in college. At first I was studying theater with an emphasis on acting, and that didn’t turn out to be fulfilling, even as I started to experience some success at it. Fortuantely, I was in a major where I got to explore the other aspects of theater, costuming, lighting, writing, and directing, and found that I was much more excited by behind the scenes work.
When I got done focusing so entirely on theater, I had really let me film work slide. So many technological innovations had been made in those 4 years that I had to relearn a lot of film, which I did independently through YouTube University and self-teaching. That had some dramatic ups and downs, with projects never getting finished or getting fully filmed but never making it out of post-production. That was ultimately why I decided to go back to film school, even though I made some successful films eventually – I knew there were gaps in my knowledge.
Coming out of film school, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Films are expensive, and require a really wonderful team of people to make. Scraping together funds, finding a group of people that works well together in pressure cooker situations were (and continue to be) their own challenges. Finding ways to connect your work to audiences (festivals, screenings, distribution, online platforms, etc) is a challenge. It’s all really hard, but really worthwhile to do, and it does get marginally easier each time – you learn more, you meet more people, and bring those lessons and people forward onto the next project.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I think the intersection between my theater and film education lands me squarely in the speciality of character-driven story-telling. People like to ask me my favorite genre to work in, and I never have an asnwer, because really, as long as I get to work with actors to tell a story I care about, it doesn’t matter the genre. I communicate exceptionally well with actors and work with them to get really powerful performances. To me, that is the most enjoyable part of the process, and since I am my own editor, I get to tailor my post-production around preserving the best performance moments as well.
Recently, I feel something I’ve become known for too, is the way I employ color in my films. Before I fell in love with film and theater, I loved to draw and paint. I still do, but less so as a busy adult, unfortunately. I think my love for the visual arts shows up in how I use color – from preproduction with my art director, to production with my Lighting team, to post production – I am usually my own colorist, though I have collaborated with a few talented folks as well. Color is a guiding principal for how we tell a story, as important to the final product as costumes, actors, cinematic angles, etc. It is something people have started to call out and compliment, which has lead to us focusing on it more, which has lead to more feedback.
That’s why connecting to your audience is so important. You always know what you put into a project, but you don’t always know what someone is getting out of it. Once you do, you can fine tune and workshop and improve.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
The easiest way to support me is to keep up with what I’m doing, watch my work online, and attend screenings and performances when they happen. My website is www.oxfordcommafilms.com, my instagram is @oxfordcommav, and my website has links to my other socials as well. If there’s a fundraiser, donate. If there’s a new short film release, share it with people. If there is a festival locally, attend it. All I want is to know my work is reaching people and speaking to them.
If you’re interested in working together or collaboration, that’s a great thing to do through my website too. I have a CV and collections of laurels from festivals I’ve been a part of if you need to see what I’ve done and how successful I’ve been. There’s a contact page where you can reach out to hire me, pitch projects, and ask questions. I’m working on getting a mailing list off the ground as well, so that will be another way to keep up with what I’m up to and connect.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.oxfordcommafilms.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OxfordCommaFilms
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/OxfordCommaFilms
