We recently connected with Tyler Purcell and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Tyler, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
The key is to always be looking ahead and keep goals realistic. So many people have completely unascertainable goals. Understand what you’re capable of doing. Find simple goals to start with, that push not only your career forward, but are also rewarding to yourself. Small rewards here and there, really help get the momentum moving. Building that momentum, allows to build bigger, more loftier goals, which then helps build even more momentum. The key is to keep the momentum constant, don’t floor the gas pedal and don’t let off. Just steadily increase speed and stay focused on the goal.
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?
It’s not easy to describe what I do in a few paragraphs. I’ve taught scuba diving, I’ve developed my own paintball marker brand, I’ve been a broadcast engineer and even raced motorcycles. During all of that time however, I’ve always been a filmmaker. To this day, I will never quite understand why I’m so passionate about filmmaking. Perhaps it was my childhood, growing up in the theater stage crew of my middle and high school. Watching movies and collecting them. Being obsessed with how film/TV production worked, from a very young age. As my curiosity bloomed, my parents were there to give me the nutrients required for further growth. This very symbiotic relationship, lasted me until I was 24 years of age, when I finally left the garden to pursue a filmmaking career in Los Angeles.
During the last 22 years living in Los Angeles, the one thing that never faltered was my love of film. The is something tangible about the format, something unique about the look. As I saw my digital life disappear thanks to drive failures, card failures and even cloud services folding, I realized more and more that film must stick around. I had to do my part in order to make a small dent in saving the most important physical medium we have left.
The journey started with Celluloid Dreaming in 2015, a non-profit educational foundation, which was designed to provide equipment and resources to young filmmakers looking to shoot on film. This led to a teaching arrangement made with a local high school (LACHSA) and college (CSUN), to not only give lectures, but also be a weekly addition to the staff (LACHSA). It was an outstanding experience and it led to the brand growing, brining students in from all over the country. Over the follow years, Celluloid Dreaming launched the Cinema Repository YouTube channel, designed to help spread in-depth technical information about shooting on film. The educational series “The Workbench” was launched during the height of covid and we shot 60 episodes in two months.
After a year of working with Andree Martin, one of the top camera techs in the country, I split off and started my own repair business called; Narrow Gauge Films. This would encompass film scanning, lab work, service AND filmmaking under one roof. Today we are focused on those aspects, plus film restoration, which has grown our business tremendously over the last few years.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Communication – Being a good communicator is very important. Taking public speaking classes. Learning how to write and master the language, all very important aspects. You need to be strong in a public setting as well. Don’t back away from conversations, embrace them. Write as if your life depends on it, even if what comes out is shit. Phone calls, email, texts, private messages on social media, all of it should be treated like another opportunity.
Storytelling – Understanding the beats of a story, what works and what doesn’t, is very critical to this profession. Being a filmmaker is all about story, the technical aspects are easy to understand. Your story tho, that’s the heart and soul of your project. Finding that story may take time, building it to be the right thing, may take a decade. But in the end, storytelling as a skill is one of the most important. Reading books about storytelling helps build the structure, but outside of that, you really need to discover what stories you’re telling, on your own. The key is to learn how to recognize what’s good and bad because once you have that skill, then you can adapt it to help other people. This opens doors in so many areas like post production, where being an editor is basically being a storyteller. Without these skills, which I must profess are very challenging to build, it can be very hard to work in Hollywood.
Curiosity – This is a critical skill development aspect, which so many people forget about. It’s fine to be forced to learn a new skill in college or for a job, but having genuine curiosity, really helps build a well rounded skillset. It’s absolutely what’s allowed me to expand my skillset. Nobody is born with the skills I’ve amassed over the years, but because I’ve been so curious, it’s allowed me to build those skills, without anyone really forcing me to do so. I find the time, I tinker and eventually, I learn the skill because I’m curious about it. The more curious you are, the more you’ll find yourself in situations normal people may walk away from. That’s what your really want, because that exploring, is where you gain the knowledge they may not have. With that knowledge, you can define who you are and it’s that definition, which helps you grow in a very saturated industry.
Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?
There is only really one person who could ever fill this role; Peter Starr. I met Peter randomly through my job as a computer technician when I first landed in Los Angeles. He would bring his computer in and eventually, I’d just go visit him on the west side. We became friends very fast because he was an avid motorcyclist and professional filmmaker. I wanted to get into motorcycling and man, he was the best person to help me. Not only did we hang out all the time, but I edited several of his films and he helped find me sponsors for my racing career. He taught me so many things about filmmaking because let’s face it, he was the pro. He would sit down and we would watch my shows together. He’d then give me good criticism, which was critical. He’d then show the cuts to his other filmmaker friends and like a little community, we’d all discuss what needed to be done to make it great. This helped me discover my voice even more and how to make stuff that truly is watchable. Peter’s last project with me, was a film series I was producing about the Denver and Rio Grande Western. He had agreed to do the VoiceOver, even though he was sick at the time. That was the last thing we ever worked on and he passed away at the age of 81 in 2023. Peter really helped fine tune my storytelling skills and without him, I truly don’t know where I would be today.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.narrowgaugefilms.com
- Instagram: @tye1138
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tye1138/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-purcell-1302337/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/cinemarepository
Image Credits
Hayden Morrison
