Hello,

My name is Alden Elias. I am majoring in Multimedia and have a passion for film making. My good friend Tom Deirikx and I, who I happened to meet in my Visual Literacy class, started a small production company together by the name of Shiner Films (Shinerfilms.com). Tom was nice enough to recommend me to Smuggler Entertainment where I worked as a PA on a commercial directed by Henry-Alex Ruben. This was an amazing experience for my first job working on set, we traveled all over Oregon and got to see some cool tourist sites like the Silver falls and the house where the movie The Goonies was shot. My specific job as a PA was Driving the camera truck and helping the DP’s with whatever they needed. I also did things like pick up extra memory cards, drop off hard drives to be shipped back to LA, and make sure traffic didn’t interfere with the shoot.

A couple months later I worked as a PA for Maker Studios on a shoot in Portland which was directed by Tony Swansey. This shoot was called Pepsi Road Trip, which the Youtube channel Nacho Punch did for Pepsi. On this shoot my job was to get signatures from interviewees so Maker could use the footage without having to blur out faces and so they wouldn’t get sued by the person being interviewed if they decided to use that footage.

Being a PA has helped me decide what I really want to do in the film industry, and it has helped me and Tom work better as a team when shooting videos for our own customers. My goal is to become the Director of Photography for my own company and film all over the world.