Filmmaker
Robin Schmidt is a multi-hyphenate filmmaker directing, producing, writing, editing, providing his own voiceovers and doing his own visual FX. And yes he’s won awards too. He started life deeply immersed in classical music, first playing the piano at four, singing at five and picking up the violin at six. Five years as a chorister at Westminster Cathedral, and several commercial recordings under his belt Robin then won a Young Artist bursary with the English Performing Arts Ensemble touring the US with a number of productions. However, aged 18 he left music behind and found his way into local radio where he was a DJ for three years before making a huge jump sideways into marketing and branding consultancy, the Fourth Room.
It was here that Robin first had the opportunity to pick up a camera and start shooting, producing short documentary research films using early DV cameras and the first Apples to include firewire ports. Shortly after Robin decided to make the plunge into filmmaking full time and set up Chrome Productions with two friends with the aim of making extreme sports films and filling them with all the cinematic ideas they had in their heads. Over the next 8 years the company grew and grew, earning TV commissions, a hatful of music videos, lots of corporate work and very little of the drama the partners all wanted to make. Robin shot 35 music videos while at Chrome, directed numerous TV shows and taught himself how to edit, shoot, direct, write and create motion graphics to a high standard.
In 2009 he made the difficult decision to leave the company he had created in pursuit of a new challenge. Robin is now a well-known blogger in the DSLR community, has shot four short films, with two more in the pipeline, he has written two feature films, and made a sudden move into comedy with the Super Massive Raver, a multi-platform transmedia project. He is a firm believer that independent filmmakers need to be smarter in understanding the challenges and opportunities posed by the new digital landscape and is now being invited to provide transmedia storytelling to brands with a major project for a luxury resort chain now underway.
In 2010 Robin beat 400 other filmmakers to win the Bahamas 14 Islands Film Challenge and was a finalist in the Fireflies Framepool Challenge in the same year. He doesn’t do festivals but he has lovely hair and would like to win an Oscar one day.
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See Robin's Work on Vimeo