Geoff Browne

Over the past 20 years, as a filmmaker, I have 'lived' and collected a wealth of rare experiences. For my award-winning doc. Call it Karma, I lived alone in a remote village in Tibet with monks and nomads, and without translators or assistants. I charged my camera with a gas generator. In 2008 I went to Nigeria to research a screenplay I was writing. I lived in an orphanage, became friends with the staff, and for years worked with them to ensure the authenticity of my script was intact. The draft has been picked up by two Oscar-nominated writers. As a DP, I shot for Nat Geo's, Drugs Inc. and spent weeks with the LAPD, DEA, doing raids and arrests, and secretly meeting drug dealers and cartel members. I also shot for 2x Oscar-winning doc. Director Malcolm Clarke spending weeks in the downtown Eastside of Vancouver, interviewing drug addicts, prostitutes a documentary about serial killer Robert Picton. I've shot and directed in other locations around the globe including taking a small Russian freighter across the Atlantic ocean from Argentina to South Africa. Other locations include Bulgaria, Nigeria, India, Nepal, the Arctic, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many more. All these experiences of ' shooting in the trenches' mean as a fiction filmmaker I can draw from the 'truth,' rather than recycling from second-hand sources. I had a great experience directing a feature film in Bulgaria. The shoot was an epic 12 days and jammed packed with practical effects and exteriors. On that shoot, I learned a lot about choosing my battles re. shots and sets up, moving on and leading a crew, and making the day... This helped a lot when I was again put to the test and hired by TikTok/ByteDance to direct promo spots over 3 days in four countries. India, China, Japan, and Taiwan. We cast online, then landed in each country, taken to the location to block ... and the next day began. In some cases without permits and shooting on the fly. I have recently been accepted into the Sundance Collab Director Core Workshop. A 9-week intensive course that focuses on blocking, working with actors, breaking down scenes, discovering subtext, and how to show theme through images and actions over dialogue. Other directing workshops have been with former AFI 'directing' professors Peter Markham and with producer, instructor Joan Scheckel. I also took years of acting classes with legendary coach Aaron Speiser.