Meet Nate Doane of October Films in Gilbert

Today we’d like to introduce you to Nate Doane.

Nate, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
When I was really young – maybe 5 or 6 years old – I remember my grandpa showing me a whole bunch of Sci-Fi movies. The main ones that stuck with me were The Abyss and Alien. There was something about the atmosphere in those movies that just really stuck with me. They built a whole world out of just an amalgamation of fake things – sets, props, costumes, etc. – and really made it feel real and lived in. I think from about that moment, I realized I wanted to have something to do with filmmaking, I just didn’t quite know what. So, at around 8 years old, I grabbed my family’s VHS camera and started re-enacting episodes of Cops and Jackass with my friends.

Fast forward a few years and I’m a bit older. Around 12 or 13, I was fully in love with the Star Wars prequels (I know) and I had just seen James Cameron’s Avatar. With all of the crazy effects in those films, I made the decision to learn how to edit movies and do crazy visual effects. I never really learned how to do the crazy visual effects, but I was able to con my friends into making really weird action films with me so I could practice layering and adding in muzzle flares and CGI blood, among other things. After a few years of that, I realized that I wasn’t very good at it and more or less gave up on the action genre as a whole.

At 16 years old, I took a Broadcasting/TV elective in high school, where I made a group of friends who all wanted to make films on a more legitimate level than I ever had even considered, and they were pretty good at it too. That group and I stuck together throughout high school, and we made a lot of pretty funny skits and tried to figure out how to get our videos to feel more like movies instead of just like a bunch of kids messing around in front of a camera. The high school years was a lot of hammering out our technique and style in order to stop embarrassing ourselves and start making “real movies”.

Around this time, we started trying to overshadow everyone in the class, and we were pretty successful at it for a bunch of teenage narcissist know-it-alls. We created a couple of characters for our school news so that instead of just having random kids up there, now we had ridiculous caricatures of news anchors on the screen, all with ridiculous names. Cody Silk, Trevor Leather, Christie Satin, etc. It got to the point where people were recognizing those news anchors in classes and in the hallways as if they were legitimate celebrities. High school was weird.

During this time, I wanted to explore darker subjects outside of school and I began writing a lot of scripts that were pretty high-concept. At the time, I thought they were genius, but looking back on it now – not so much. So, I took that group of school-friends and we stole a bunch of equipment from our school after hours, and we set out to make a “real movie”.

Over the course of about 3 weeks of filming a 30-page script and after begging for resources and having to bribe our other friends into acting in it, the film completely fell apart. It was a pretty rough time for all of us. There was a lot of hard work put into it, but that doesn’t really help since we just simply didn’t know what we were doing. None of us were happy with what we were making, and none of us thought we could even make movies again, so we just completely gave up and went back to what we were good at – making really dumb videos for class.

My first real film job came a year later at 17. My Broadcasting teacher recommended me and a friend for a documentary about the Gilbert Education Foundation. It wasn’t very interesting at all, so I’ll spare you the details, but it was the first paid job in film that I’d ever had. For the project, they had to purchase lights, audio equipment, and a camera, since our school didn’t have one that would be good enough. When the end of the project came, they asked us how we wanted to be compensated. We asked them to give us all of the equipment that they had bought for the project since we figured they wouldn’t use it anyway. And that’s how I got the equipment, and a little bit of the motivation to make another film a year later.

Fast forward again to 18 years old. Nothing’s going very well at 18, and I’m in a pretty dark place, and just dropped out of high school. Partially because I was an edgy teenager, and partially because I had gone through a pretty nasty breakup recently. All of this together meant that I had a lot of pent up emotions inside of me, and it fueled me to make the decision to try one last time to make a “real movie”. This was the last chance I was giving myself because all I had ever wanted in life was to be able to make good movies and I didn’t really know if I wanted to be here if I couldn’t make movies. So, one last chance.

I call up that group from high school to see if they’d be interested. They are. I have a friend who I’m very close with who’s an actor. He’s in, and he knows two other actors who are in. Everything is gonna go perfectly. We’ve got two days to shoot a 7-page script. Everything will be fine.

The day comes for the last-chance movie and everything goes wrong at every step of the way. An actor doesn’t show, and nobody can reach him. The sound guy is 2 hours late. We can’t get a hold of anyone. It’s going to rain and we didn’t expect that. The few people who had already shown up started helping me find solutions. Long story short – we got it done. It’s not very good. But we got it done. That film went on to play at a few festivals and even screened at Filmbar.

Finally, getting that film done gave me a lot of confidence. I started applying to work on other people’s films in order to learn more about filmmaking on-set and get hands-on experience. I started spending hours at the library reading books about filmmaking. I started watching indie films that I’d never heard of and started to understand more about what I like in movies. I really dove headfirst into it.

Now, I’ve worked on a lot of films as a Director of Photography as well as an editor, grip, gaffer, PA, and many other roles. I’ve also just finished my second film, which is an epic 21-minute feminist western film that had a legitimate budget and a lot of great people behind it. It should be playing at festivals in the near future, and as someone who hates their own work, believe me when I say that it’s worth the watch.

I’m able to sustain myself full-time working on films, TV shows, and commercials, and I can’t be happier. It’s been an incredibly long road, with a lot of sleepless nights and emotional turmoil, but I wouldn’t give it up for anything. That journey made me who I am.

Has it been a smooth road?
It’s been incredibly rough. While it’s not something that’s commonly talked about, I try to be very up front with the emotional and mental struggles that I’ve had, especially in terms of my filmmaking career. I struggle a lot with depressive tendencies and anxiety, and I think a lot of film people do. It’s emotionally draining work sometimes. I’ve had nights, where I’ve gone to bed at 1 am after a 12-hour shoot day, only to wake up at 4 am and have a 10-hour shoot day. I’ve had whole films fall apart in the middle of shooting them.

It’s important to know when to walk away, and important to know when to make some time for yourself. Filmmaking gives me a really good outlet for a lot of the negative energy in my life, including depression and anxiety, and it allows me to explore a lot of themes and learn about myself.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the October Films story. Tell us more about the business.
As a company, October Films specializes in helping make films and commercials come to life. We have connections to the absolute best cast and crew in Arizona, and even some in LA and Utah. We use these connections to create everything from short films to feature films to TV and internet commercials. We’ve been paid to come out to New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and California to work on some incredible projects and bring our expertise to their set.

One of the things my commercial clients tell me is that I have a really good knack for understanding their vision and making it come to life. I think there’s something really special about being able to take someone’s vision and execute it perfectly. So while I will always add my input and make sure that I’m vocal if I think something isn’t going to work out, I make sure that my clients get exactly what they want. We’ve also been told we’re extremely transparent, as I really don’t like keeping things from people who are paying me.

All in all, I’ve worked with a lot of professionals, and there’s a lot of things about the commercial industry that I feel like is a bit shady. With the clients that I work with, they know that my #1 priority is giving them a great experience from start to finish through both communication and execution. I make sure everything is planned out and ready to go, that way they can just relax and let us do our thing.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I think the Arizona film industry has a lot of great things coming to it soon. I think everyone’s expecting the industry here to change externally, as in people will come from LA and shoot here, then leave. I don’t think so. I think we need to work on changing it internally, and making it easier for the people who are already here to shoot here. People who I work with that leave to LA, rarely WANT to leave to LA, they feel like they have to. But there are many directors in Arizona making films right now, and using their own money, and creating jobs for other people. If we want the film industry to boom here, then we need to implement a film office that is going to support those people. I’m willing to spend a lot of money on shooting a film here. In fact, our last film did cost a lot of money and had a fully paid cast and crew. I love Arizona. It’s beautiful and there’s so much talent here. But if we’re going to keep wishing that LA or Atlanta is going to come here to hand us jobs, then I don’t see the industry getting to a point that we all desperately want it to. If those places see us making great films with the help of our state film office, then they’ll come and give us their business. We have to show them that we can handle it first, and the talent is overwhelmingly already here.

Contact Info:

• Phone: 480-635-2503
• Email: NateDoane@Gmail.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doanerofphotography/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InAWorldOfHurtFilm/

Image Credit:
Kayla Windsor, Bria Gastelum, Nero Manalo

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