From Skateboarding to
Santa Barbara International
Film Festival
Filmmaker Pat Hall’s Directorial Dreams
Were Seeded in SBIFF’s 10-10-10 Program
By Leslie Dinaberg | February 8, 2024
Read the rest of our SBIFF 2024 cover story here.
When Above & Within has its world premiere screening at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) on Valentine’s Day, as part of the Santa Barbara Narrative Shorts program, it will be the fulfillment of a longtime dream not just for director Pat Hall, but for the supporters who mentored him when he was a teenage participant in SBIFF’s 10-10-10 Student Filmmaker Mentorship Program, as well as at Santa Barbara High’s MAD (Multimedia Arts and Design) Academy.
His interest in filmmaking started with skateboarding, Hall told me. He picked up a board at around age 4, and a camera when he was around age 10 or 11. A storyteller from the beginning, Hall said, “My mom always noticed that I would fixate on the skaters’ struggles or if they were succeeding and doing the trick, rather than just doing tricks, and she introduced me to kind of like a visual imagination from a young age.”
Diane Hall also encouraged her son to take filmmaking classes at Santa Barbara City College when he was just starting high school, and he ended up working on a documentary about natural winemaking in Santa Barbara when he was just 14. It was that film that he submitted to get into the 10-10-10 program, which offers students in-depth mentorship and skills development opportunities. He won an award that first year and continued to participate in the program and win awards until he graduated high school.
“Honestly, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival is the thing that kind of shaped me as a filmmaker and really kind of opened up those doors. They offer so many incredible resources to high schoolers: mentors, and amazing, like, editors that won Academy Awards. Arthur Schmidt [who recently passed away and won Oscars for Forrest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?] was an amazing mentor. … He was a resource that was available for the kids to talk to and directors that would come and help walk through your scenes. And it was just the coolest thing ever,” said Hall, who is now 25.
“I think that’s when I really fell in love with filmmaking and was like, ‘I think I could do this for life; this seems like a fun thing to dedicate my time toward.’ ”
He spent a year at the Dodge College of Film at Chapman University, but the summer after his freshman year, he got enough professional work (for well-known companies like Foot Locker and Adidas) that he didn’t go back. “About six months into freelancing, I got signed to Stept Studios, which is an amazing production company in Los Angeles, and I got my first full-time gig as their lead editor when I was 19.”
Though his commercial pieces are the stuff that many young filmmakers dream of (Josh Allen and the Buffalo Bills for Nike and Patrick Mahomes for Oakley, for example) Hall also has a passion for telling his own stories. “I really want to have a really big narrative directing career as well,” he said. “I want to be able to do both commercials and features. And so, about a year ago, maybe two years ago, I was like, ‘I want to do this. I’m gonna do a short film.’ ”
Like many shorts, Above & Within serves a multi-pronged purpose, as a standalone piece of storytelling, as the potential starting point for a feature-length film, and as a calling card for its filmmaker to show off what he can do.
“I love things that challenge the viewer and really kind of pose and create a lot of questions and are brilliant artistic representations of films. And I’m also kind of into, there’s some Western aspects,” said Hall. “It’s kind of like a neo-Western thriller, with a little bit of sci-fi in it — so it’s a kind of a genre-bending film.”
See Above & Within along with the rest of the Santa Barbara Narrative Shorts — And Now I Lay Me Down, directed by Rani DeMuth; Forget Me Again, directed by Noah Freeman Hecht; Next Train Out, directed by Darby Naughton; and Someone Lied on the Roommate Form, directed by Najee Werners — all of which are world premieres, on Wednesday, February 14, at 5:40 p.m. at the Metro 4. They will also screen again on Thursday, February 15, at 8:40 p.m. at the Metro 4.
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