telling personal, heart-centered stories
I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait.
There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure.
You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper,
unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.
-Spike Jonze
For the full “Who We Are” Campaign series (directed, filmed, and edited by Max), please visit: https://prismunited.org/who-we-are/see-us/
Portrait of an artist. This was a purely personal project—no client, no specifications. Just a short film showing the work of Christopher Beiting
I filmed this in January 2019 while on location in Israel working as a camera assistant / director’s right hand man on a project about Jesus’s life.
This video I created in 2020 was sponsored by Rainbow Mobile, a LGBTQ organization based in Mobile, Alabama.
Case STudy:
The Who we are campaign
When Prism United’s fundraisers were canceled two years in a row due to the coronavirus, they asked me to create a docu-series of 12 cinematic short films to tell the stories of LGBTQ youth in the area: evergreen content demonstrating their need for support and community. The result has been the highest-profile visibility campaign for LGBTQ youth in the history of southwest Alabama.
The “Who We Are” docu-series campaign was not just about interviewing youth with positive experiences of Prism: it was about exposing audiences to the life experience of these youth through immersive, cinematic filmmaking. The professional quality of the films also lend more legitimacy to the Prism brand, helping their fundraising efforts and giving them a strong way to share their mission.
“After a year and a half of scrambling to realign our programming and our budget projections to the realities of the pandemic, it was hard for the Prism team to feel energized about the future. We’re a young nonprofit. Young nonprofits need a lot of momentum to get off the ground. It’s a race to prove your legitimacy to the broader community. If you can’t do that, you won’t last. And the pandemic completely undermined our momentum. The video campaign turned that around. It was a multi-faceted triumph for us. It re-energized the community about our work to see a local organization putting out such high-quality videos. Several people expressed that what they were seeing in our campaign videos was like ‘Something you only see come out of bigger cities.’ It’s a nod to how emotionally compelling and professional those videos turned out. Since the campaign’s conclusion, we’ve seen a substantial increase in our fundraising. We’re looking at 2022 with the wind at our backs because of the work Max did.
What makes the enormous success of the project even more confounding to me is that we gave Max such a short amount of time to complete it. Totally unrealistic. We handed Max a pipe dream and he pulled it off. There wasn’t an expedited deadline he didn’t meet.” Corey Harvard, Co-Founder & Executive Director, Prism United
Read the full case study on LinkedIn here.
Introduction to the campaign
