Joseph R. McClellan
- Producer
- Production Manager
Joseph R. McClellan, is a Film Director, Screenwriter, Producer, and Entrepreneur. He lived in Huntington Beach for a brief period before him and his family made the move to the small town Canon City, Colorado in 1996. Since a very young age he was always creative constantly drawing and painting. As a kid he worked helping his dad with his drywall contracting business, doing lemonade stands, and little odd jobs, until he was able to join the workforce. He started working at Taco Bell at age 15. In school he always excelled in art, writing, and computer design classes. He learned how to use photoshop, Corel draw, and dreamweaver. During that time he was running a concert booking company for punk, hardcore punk, and metal shows in the early days of myspace. Being in a band himself he was using myspace to book and promote their shows. He designed flyers and utilized guerrilla marketing tactics with a street team of friends by handing out hand bills and posting the flyers all over his small town. Naive to the reality of these types of businesses his parents got him into an MLM at 18 while working as a kitchen manager at his parent's restaurant. That restaurant hit hard times during the recession and went under in 2009. The MLM gave him great mindset and sales training but inevitably realized that industry wasn't for him. He tried to start a clothing company and designed apparel that didn't end up getting off the ground. He then worked a sales/lead generation job in Denver before moving up to Fort Collins, Colorado. While line cooking he worked in another more established clothing company doing event marketing in the early days of Facebook. Through the love he had for hip hop plus the networking he did in the apparel company he became a record producer and inevitably started his own record label to promote and self distribute his own music. Realizing the importance of content marketing he purchased a mirror-less Sony camera. He shot, directed, produced, and edited his own content for his record label. Creating these graphics, photos, and music videos gave him the understanding of the true power of content marketing. After doing free stuff for friends and producing content for his label people started to contact him shoot their music videos. It was there he found a new passion for film production. It was at that point his production company was born. After shooting various, music videos, commercials, events, and interviews he felt it was time to level up. Looking to find a mentor he took to Instagram and sent DMs with the mission to shadow someone more well established. Cinematographer Justin Jones responded and allowed him to come on set to shadow him. That experience changed the trajectory of his career. He leveraged that experience and the networking he did into his directing debut in LA on a sizzle for a documentary. He began to work on larger scale productions in the LA film industry gaining valuable experience. He began to find clients with larger budgets to direct content with larger crews. He took on the role of producer and production manager because he felt that to be a great director he needed to learned the production side of the film business. Learning the process of how productions got off the ground he realized if he wanted to have full creative control of what he created, and that he needed to write and direct his own stuff. That process lead him to developing his own shows and movies.