Check Out Nicholas Geisler’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nicholas Geisler

Hi Nicholas, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
In my final year of college, I decided to shoot a psychological horror feature. I wasn’t a film student — we didn’t even have a film program — but I got access to some cameras and lights through the photography center and had a few theater kids willing to act on the weekends. I’d never shot something that long and had to teach myself Adobe Premier to edit it, but the movie ended up in a festival and I got the bug for filmmaking and never lost it. After college, I spent a few years in the Bay Area making sketches, writing How-To articles, working on documentaries, and filming ad spots (with a brief sojourn as the creative director of a baseball bat manufacturing start up) before moving to LA to pursue the career full-time.

My first gig was a KFC commercial, laying linoleum. I worked for Nick Jr and gory horror movies in the art department before snagging a full-time videography/editing job for a YouTube channel about motherhood and parenting (which I clearly knew a lot about). It was my version of “film school,” producing and publishing 3 videos a week, and while I was there a producer read one of my scripts and hired me as a writers’ assistant for a new Netflix show. Down the line, that job led to my first produced scripts, entry into the WGA, and a staff writer job on the Disney Channel.

In the midst of all that writing, I started a production company with Bennett Cordon, who was a fellow assistant on that first Netflix show. Originally, it was just an LLC to allow us to shoot one short film, “When You Became Us,” that I wrote and directed. But the success of the first short led us to produce 6 more, along with music videos and a few ads. I’m still editing, too, often running post-production pipelines for our work to see everything through. The last short was our biggest yet, with two fight scenes, a 10-year time span in the film, and heavy VFX, and we’re now trying to finance our first feature.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Not even close! I came out to LA without any connections or work, and not a lot of money in my pocket. The first year I was here, I had a PA job running errands for the art department, and my car broke down. Had a kindly mechanic not taken pity on me and fixed it for free, I would have had to quit the job and, likely, the entire industry, before I even got started.

Last year, the Writer’s Strike hit only 3 months into getting my first ever staff writer job. To say the year was a challenge would be a massive understatement — but I also believed in the cause and my fellow writers, and we got through it together. I even started my own picket line, as a WGA captain, to help keep up morale and solidarity: https://www.writtenby.com/recollections-from-a-rebel-outpost

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a writer and director who tries to merge comedy with thought-provoking and often difficult scenarios. I’ve been lucky to work on everything from children’s television, where I wrote on the longest-running live action show in Disney Channel history (and contributed to, I believe, some incredibly funny and thoughtful episodes, for both kids and adults), to historical dramas questioning the efficacy of political violence in 19th Century Russia, for which I was sent to St. Petersburg for research.

Personally, I am most proud of a script I co-wrote about bipolar disorder with schizophrenic tendencies, a disease that runs in my family. Somehow, I think we made it very funny, while still honoring our often painful lived experiences. It has not been produced yet, but I’m hopeful it will be something that can help many families grappling with similar experiences.

Between that script and Salt Cellar Films, I think what sets me apart is my ability to blend humor with relatable drama, and the deep quiver of hard skills I’ve acquired to put those stories on screen. I pride myself on being one of the few full-time writers who can also create a hologram in After Effects, edit a fight scene, light a set, and operate an Alexa 35. It makes me a better collaborator, director and, ultimately, storyteller.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
Probably that I help found a baseball bat company in another lifetime! Birdman Bats was the brainchild of my then-roommate Gary Malec, and I believed in him and in the product, and off we went. The bats are now MLB certified, and being swung in the major leagues as we speak. Also, that I used to have shoulder-length hair… both of which you can see in our kickstarter video: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1284341045/birdman-bats

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nickgeisler.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livefromsomewhere/
• Other: https://vimeo.com/983349472