Today we’d like to introduce you to Chase Stanley.
Chase, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
After graduating high school, I knew I wanted to get into film somehow. I didn’t have any connections, nearly good enough grades to get into a college in California or the means to even get over there. I did what any rational person does and joined the Coast Guard with the hopes of getting over to California purely by luck.
I spent my first year in the Coast Guard just writing scripts, I didn’t know how to format them or anything it was literally just word vomit on a Microsoft Word document. When I moved to my second station in Virginia, I met another person who wanted to be a director. We got to talking and I was able to get a gig on his next short film where I met all of my future working partners, Evan Henderson and Nicholas Nathaniel.
Once finished in Virginia, I used up all my luck and finally got over to California. I used the money I had been saving up for a while on my first short film, ‘The Bartender’. I decided to fly back to Houston and shoot it here simply because I felt it was only right, also, it had been a bit since I had Whataburger…
After editing ‘The Bartender’ for six months, I finally finished it and released it on YouTube. I turned around from that one and started working on the next one almost immediately. I rushed into it because I had that itch to get back on set and shoot something. I went up to my best friend who was in the Coast Guard stationed with me, Nicolas Cleveland (who had also composed ‘The Bartender’) and we started spitballing ideas.
I put into motion two shorts, ‘Solace Cove’ (the one we came up with together) and ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ (one had been obsessing over since I had seen ‘Baby Driver’). Being in pre-production for both of these at the same time nearly killed me. I had two completely different crews on both, one was in LA and the other was in San Francisco where I was living, all while still working during the week at the Coast Guard.
We finally got through both of the shoots when I had been brewing on an idea with Nic. We couldn’t get this idea out of our heads but it was a crazy expensive short film idea. We finished the script and started sending it around to some producers that I knew just to see what they thought of the script. Turns out, one of them had went ahead and pitched it for us.
I left the Coast Guard shortly after, with preparations to go over to Romania to shoot the film in April, not expecting Corona to stop me in Houston. Once I got stuck here, some friends from high school reached out and asked if I would shoot a music video for them. So, now I’m doing music videos in Houston until things start to run again.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Anything but, my second short, ‘Solace Cove’ was incredibly difficult. I could sit here and talk for hours about how difficult that film was and everything we had to work through for it. Some examples are, I had to change the director of photography (the guy who shoots the film) 13 days before we started filming out of creative differences. This then caused us to last minute have someone come up to San Francisco from LA and updating him on my entire vision that I had been working with the other guy for three months for.
Also, we were shooting the whole film guerrilla-style, meaning we didn’t get permission to shoot in most of the locations (if you’ve seen the film it’s all the outside stuff). So, when we were halfway through the shooting day, a park ranger came over and kicked us out of the location, which sent us scrambling all over the place trying to find a location that looked similar enough so we wouldn’t have to re-shoot the whole thing. It’s kind of incredible that movie makes even the slightest amount of sense.
That’s just part of ‘Solace Cove’, I didn’t even get into the nightmare that was editing. Speaking of which, the reason ‘The Bartender’ took me six months to edit is because I gave up about a quarter of the way through, going insane because nothing of what I envisioned was how it was on the screen.
There’s a point somewhere in the creative process of each movie where I just sit down and look at everything going on around me… and I lose my mind just a little bit. Nothing ever goes the way you think it will. Something, if not everything, will go wrong.
Please tell us about Mixed Bag Productions.
Mixed Bag Productions is the production company I started with Evan James Henderson (the main actor in my movies and also co-writer on the upcoming ‘Ascend’) and Nicolas Cleveland (Writer on both ‘Solace Cove’ and the aforementioned ‘Ascend’.)
We really do everything that has to do with film. We direct, edit, shoot and just do our best to get the image you have in your head a reality.
Overall, I’m so very proud of our turnaround. The last music video we worked on was conceived on Saturday, shot on Monday and Tuesday, then finished on Friday. I’d also go as far to say that our turn around and quality is what’s going to be what’s setting us apart from others.
Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
Luck is most of the recipe in how I’ve gotten to where I am currently. That being said when life gives you luck, that’s only half of it. I’ve made sure not to take the luck for granted and just sit on it. You have to piggyback off of it and work as hard as possible. God knows if you’ll get that opportunity again.
Pricing:
- Music Videos: 200 a day for the shooting, 500 a week for editing.
Contact Info:
- Website: ascendmovie.com
- Email: chasestanleyfilms@gmail.com
- Instagram: @therealcstanz
- Facebook: @chasestanleyfilms
- Twitter: @therealcstanz
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmJhatOW8Zx8WefghFOBilQ
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