We were lucky to catch up with Drew Lewis Guerra recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Drew, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
When I was younger I used to think that I was going to be a drummer in a rock band. I started playing drums at the age of eight, took a few years of lessons and even started my first band around the fifth grade called Payday. We wrote our own songs and we rocked. When high school came along, I joined a new band. We practiced twice a week, and played as many shows as we could, determined to get signed by a record label before we graduated. When that inevitably didn’t happen, I was left wondering what I was going to do next. All my friends were going off to different colleges, but I hadn’t really left myself with a backup plan, or at least I didn’t think I had.
Since the age of twelve, I’ve had some kind of camera in my hand. I started out filming everything I could from family vacations, music videos, to short films with my friends. I was lucky enough to attend a high school with an in-depth Video Tech program that allowed me to get my hands on professional editing software at the age of sixteen. By the time I graduated, I had written, directed and edited a half dozen short films, but I never looked at filmmaking as a viable career path. So when my friends went off to college, I was left to attend a community college and study the first thing I could think of – Accounting. I realized pretty quickly that a life in finance wasn’t for me, and after a year, I had failed out of community college and I was back to square one. At this point it was my mom that suggested that I go to film school. It had been, after all, the one constant in my life up until this point. Immediately, that idea clicked with me and I knew that it was exactly what I was meant to do. I went to visit the school in the Spring of 2008 and a few weeks later I was enrolled and starting my first classes in Orlando, Florida.
I excelled in film school. Being around like-minded people, getting saturated in all aspects of the craft and having a chance to learn and experiment with professional film equipment was everything I needed to throw fuel on the fire that was my passion for storytelling and filmmaking. I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Film Studies from Full Sail University in 2010 and then I sold my drum set and used the money to buy a professional video camera and start my production company, Black Canvas Productions in early 2011. Since then, I’ve relocated to Los Angeles, and the company has been growing organically year after year.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Since graduating film school and starting my career I’ve juggled two primary focuses within the industry, and those are to write and direct my own film projects, and to grow my company by furthering my clientele and working on bigger projects with more notoriety. Throughout the years, I’ve learned that those two things aren’t mutually exclusive, and in fact they lend themselves to a sort of symbiotic relationship. Ultimately, it’s my goal to write and direct feature films and television, but I learned quickly that without the means to support myself and fund those projects, I would be dead in the water. So I lean into the times that I’m working on client work for long periods knowing that these will not only pay the bills, but also afford me the time and resources to focus on my passion projects.
For instance, in 2020 my company was hired to design and animate all of the motion graphics for a docuseries for Discovery+ called The Book of Queer. The season included five hours of programming, over five-hundred unique graphics and ultimately took around seven months to complete. The series ended up earning six Daytime Emmy Nominations, including one for Main Titles and Graphic Design. The awards ceremony itself is in December, and as much as I’d like to add an Emmy to my award collection, just being nominated is a huge honor and accomplishment in itself.
The project was a marathon, and after wrapping that in Spring of 2021, I dove right into pre-production on my next short film project called The Traveler, a story taking place 17,000 years in the past and following an ancient hunter-gatherer in search of purpose in a world he struggles to understand. We premiered the film in March of this year and it went on to win six awards including the Audience award at The Mammoth Film Festival, as well as twenty-one official selections and twenty-three nominations at film festivals across the world. The film will be released free to the public in January of 2024, and hopefully continue to connect with new audiences that watch it.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The first would be resilience. Call it work ethic, or the ability to adapt when faced with adversity, I feel like this singular skill has always been my secret weapon. Early on, I’ve understood that as hard as I try, I’ll never be the most talented, or creative person with the best ideas, but I can be one of the hardest-working. This industry is one of the most competitive in the world, and the fact is you’re going to deal with failure constantly. The sooner you can come to peace with that, and learn to power through those times, the sooner I believe you will find real success. Anyone that knows me well, understands that if I’m idle for too long, I tend to go stir-crazy. This has definitely put a strain on a number of my relationships because on any given weekend, I’d usually rather be working on something creative than to go to make an appearance at a social function. In recent years, I’ve valued more of a work-life balance, and have found the importance of the time spent building memories and nurturing relationships with the quality people in my life. That said, I really feel the strongest sense of purpose when I’m creating something, especially with others.
Be multifaceted. There’s a very fine line between being a jack of all trades and being a master of none, but through my own experience, I’ve learned it really benefits you to be great at as many things that interest you as possible. This can translate to skills within your industry and overflow into your personal life with things like your hobbies, your health and your spirituality. I knew pretty early on that I wanted to be a Director, but lucky for me, I was also very interested in other aspects of production, editing, design, and screenwriting. Nowadays, my most marketable skill to others is probably editing, motion design and visual effects, and these skills have kept me busy and steadily employed during the long gaps between opportunities I have to direct. There are so many jobs within the film and entertainment industry, so I would encourage anyone starting out to explore as many aspects that interest them as possible, so that they can sharpen those skills and add value to any number of people and projects along their journey.
Have fun. If I could go back and give advice to the younger version of myself as he was struggling to make ends meet as a business owner, and when he felt defeated and like he was never going to make it within the film industry, I would just encourage him to remember to have fun and enjoy every step of the journey. Life is short, and ultimately if we’re able to find joy in even the chaotic and difficult times, then it’s almost like a cheat code in getting through them. As artists, we sign up to face challenges, and the sooner we can be at peace with that and find happiness in the process, the better off we’ll be as humans, and the more that will spill over into our work and hopefully the lives of the people around us.
Okay, so before we go we always love to ask if you are looking for folks to partner or collaborate with?
I am constantly looking for talented people to collaborate with. This can be in the form of a musical artist that trusts me to bring a certain visual aesthetic and tone to their song or album, a cinematographer that brings a special point of view to a particular project I’m directing, or a motion graphics artist or graphic designer that is able to breathe a fresh sense of life to a concept that I never could have thought of myself. I even look at my clients as collaborators. Even if they’re hiring me and my company for a particular skill set we bring to the table, we’re working in tandem together to create and deliver the best end product possible. One that connects to their audience and communicates their message in the most effective way. So if I’m working with a brand to create a direct-to-consumer advertisement for social media, it’s important that we work together and that their message and their expectations for the project are fully understood by myself and my team, so that we can take those ideas, expand upon them, and deliver a final product that exceeds their expectations. It’s all about collaboration for me. I would encourage anyone interested in collaborating with me or my company at any level, to reach out to me through our website or find me on social media.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.blackcanvas.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/directordlg
- Other: www.artofthegrindpodcast.com/
Image Credits
2nd image: Photography by Caleb Auston
