A LITTLE ABOUT ME
Dear Shawn Ryan Show team,
The first film I ever made, one I'm still working on, started with a road trip and a question. I drove across the country, unannounced, with a camera rolling, to knock on the door of the biological father I had never met. I didn't know how the story would end. I only knew it had to be told, and told honestly. That trip taught me the thing I've built my life on since: story is how we make sense of what happens to us, and how we hand that sense to someone else.
For twenty years I've chased that, behind the camera and in the edit bay. I've shot underwater for PADI, worked for PBS and GoPro, and cut tributes for people whose families needed to see them one more time. The work changed. The job never did: find the true moment inside hours of footage, and shape everything around it so the viewer feels what the person in the chair felt.
Then the ground shifted under my industry. In a season of necessary reinvention, I cracked the AI world open and refused to be left behind by technology. I taught myself to build software and shipped real products. 1600 Penn is a citizen-driven presidential accountability app, built after Gallup ended 88 years of approval tracking. Give it a try; I'd love to know what you think. Fortress Labs scans apps built with AI for exposed credentials before someone else finds them.
I bring the same tools into the edit bay, taking raw conversation to rough cut in hours, not days. I'm not afraid of where this is going. I'm building toward a future where AI amplifies human storytelling instead of replacing it. People ask why a filmmaker builds apps. The answer is the same as everything else. An app is a story about a problem and the person who solves it. So is a memoir. So is a podcast.
That's why your show is the job I've wanted my whole career, even before it had a name. You built it on real stories from real people, told at full length because the truth takes time. That is the hardest kind of editing there is. You can't hide behind music or speed. You have to earn every minute of attention, respect the person telling it, and know exactly when to get out of the way.
I'd be proud to bring my craft to your team. Story and inspiration have always been my focus.
In the picture: Me with my absolute hero, Roger Deakins, ASC.
With respect,
Brandon Paul Watts
watts.brandon@gmail.com · 805.651.8062 · brandonpaulwatts.com
CV & COVER LETTER
