Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael, Bennett, Celestra Warker, Hayes, Productions
Hi Michael, Bennett, Celestra, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
We’ve known each other for a long time now. Back in high school, our friends all got really into film. I (Michael) was an actor, doing all of the school plays, and Bennett had a camera for photography and videography. We were both just starting out, but we loved movies and made a couple shorts around then. Then we went off to school to pursue our interests. I got a theatre degree to study acting more and Bennett got a film degree. Every time we were back home in Virginia, we’d make shorts together, and we’d find ways to collaborate throughout college, even though we were on opposite sides of the country. When we graduated, we moved in together and decided to give our partnership an official name: Celestra Productions. The name came from a script my dad had started writing when he was a kid called Celestra, inspired by Star Wars. The name reminds me of pure creation and the fact that everyone has a story inside of them that they want to tell. Once we had the name, we started making our own films and helping others with their projects. We collaborate with as many people as we can, and we’ve currently finished five short films and are nearly finished with a sixth in addition to our collaborations with other artists on music videos, a documentary, and some corporate work as well.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Juggling personal work with making a living for ourselves in a highly competitive creative field is a huge struggle, and it’s a struggle that I’m sure is familiar to any other creatives reading this. It’s always a balancing act, and we are always looking for ways to smartly allocate our relatively limited budgets in the best ways possible. We always make it our goal to make things look much more expensive than they were, and we’re always trying to tell interesting, high concept stories that are entertaining and provocative. If money were no object, we’d make much more than we do, and we’d like to make a feature as well some day. Hopefully the money will come in time.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Within our partnership, I think we’re best known for telling high concept stories that are usually reserved for Blockbusters on an extremely tight budget. We’ve told stories about a man whose eyes come alive and leave his body, a sci-fi detective, a plane crash of dating show contestants, and we’re working on finishing an anthology short that spans two hundred years and is told through four different genres. We come at these projects from two different points of view. I (Michael) write the scripts for our projects, and I come from a background more focused on acting, writing, and the minutia of storytelling. Meanwhile, Bennett can see past the page to think of interesting production elements to incorporate into the story to help enhance the cinematic quality of the film and incorporate interesting visual elements. In that way, we help fill in each other’s gaps in the workload as well throughout pre-production, so it doesn’t become as overwhelming. We’re proud of everything we make, and we use every project as a chance to grow into better storytellers.
We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Luck is really where preparation meets opportunity. Our goal is to be so amazingly prepared that when opportunity comes, we’re ready. We’re always learning and growing. In the mean time, we make our own opportunities not only for ourselves, but for our friends and collaborators. We have been lucky, however, to find jobs external to our personal, creative work that not only feed our creative skills, but they also allow the flexibility to pursue our interests whole-heartedly.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.celestraproductions.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/celestra_productions/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/celestra_films
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@celestraproductions9799
Image Credits
Personal Photo: Matthew Block
All Film Images: Bennett Hayes
