It's time for a career reboot. I moved to California to go to film school and never looked back. (I did make the curious choice of moving to San Francisco instead of LA, but no regrets there.) Over the past ten years I embarked on a serious effort to break into filmmaking and managed to amass a fair number of credits.
I've enjoyed working as a producer, director and production designer. My previous career as a graphic designer served me well on numerous animation and title assignments. I've been fortunate to attend many film festivals as a presenter, judge and officially selected filmmaker. My experience was enough to share as a teacher, mentor and consultant.
And yet...
After all of that effort and relative success, I've hit a plateau. It’s not for lack of passion, commitment or ability. But making motion pictures is the most complicated and expensive way to tell stories. And I’ve grown impatient with all the preparation required to get a movie made. Or to put it another way, I have plenty of time left—but no time to waste.
It’s not enough to have a good idea or a good story for a movie, you need stars to sell them and stars require a financial ecosystem far grander than this indie filmmaker in San Francisco can summon. (Having stars is no guarantee of success anyway. Just look all of the great casts in films you’ve never heard of.)
If the past ten years have taught me anything, it’s that telling stories is much more important to me than the medium that I work in. So rather than compromise my creativity, I’m going to redirect it. Say goodbye to Apolog Films, my production company dedicated to ”truth and spectacle, with uplift.” Say hello to JoeSikoryak.com.
I’m going back to my roots, as a cartoonist who dabbled in animation, matured in graphic design and graduated to filmmaking. I’ve learned a lot over the course of my career, and now I’ll apply that experience to tell a larger story than I could ever manage before—in a graphic novel.
It’s fortunate that I can write as well as draw, because now I have all the tools I need to express myself (and no one else to blame for slow progress, either). Frankly, I haven’t had this much fun in years, and I look forward to sharing this new project as it develops. I hope you’ll check in to see my progress.
Thanks to all of my friends and colleagues in filmmaking. We've had a wonderful adventure together, and I couldn’t have gotten here without you. ’Til we meet again…
