Today we’d like to introduce you to Victor Fink.
Hi Victor, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts north of Boston called Melrose. My start in a film like many was recording little sketches with my friends in my backyard on a digital blue camcorder and also making elaborate stop motion animation films with legos and models. Had rudimentary editing software that allowed laying in music, adding sound effects, and creating special effects. Started in third grade. Would team up with a friend on a Friday evening and work on the animation until late at night. Used fishing line to make it look like things were flying.
In high school, I continued to make videos with friends but didn’t think I’d pursue a career in film or video. I was always interested in how things worked and putting things together so I initially planned on studying engineering in college. My dad was an engineer and I thought I’d go down a similar career path. Towards the end of high school, I realized it wasn’t for me and I revisited my idea of pursuing film.
In 2010 I made my move to Baltimore and started my first year at Johns Hopkins University studying film.
This was a big change. Studying film history I got exposed to a whole new world of films and also a different way of looking at them.
I also started doing a lot more photography and filming outside of school. I purchased my first DSLR camera, a Canon 60D I paid for from working a summer job maintaining parks, trails, and baseball fields in my hometown, and started taking it everywhere with me. This was at about the start of the “DSLR revolution” which completely changed how low-budget filmmakers worked.
Large sensor cinema cameras had previously been unaffordable for independent filmmakers and students but with the advent of the Canon 5d Mark II, Canon 7D, etc. suddenly people had access to large sensor stills cameras that could shoot video, and render beautiful, cinematic images with shallow depth of field.
I was obsessed with the camera and start using it all the time, on student projects as well as outside of school.
One of the strong suits of the Johns Hopkins film program is that they have courses in 16mm film production. Freshman year I had the opportunity to shoot on Kodak black and white Tri-x film, learning the fundamentals of exposure and coming to appreciate the tangible aspect of the medium.
The program was also very small which meant we had lots of access to professors and could use equipment pretty much whenever we wanted.
My sophomore at Hopkins was when I met Josh Land, who I’d later team up with to form my business, MindInMotion. We both wanted to make films, and we didn’t see any reason why we should wait until after graduation to start. The following summer, Josh made his first feature film, The Summer Before, which was a coming-of-age comedy about two friends and their job at a summer camp the summer before college. I was home in Massachusetts for the summer and I took the trip down to Baltimore to help work on it for the final weekend of production.
Through college, Josh and I worked on numerous other film projects and became close friends. We also began taking on paid work outside of school, camera operating, working on sets, and filming and editing videos for companies. This is where we started building up a collection of clients and started doing work for a number of Hopkins departments.
Other college highlights for me included spending a semester abroad studying film in Prague at FAMU where I met and worked with students from other schools across the U.S. and spent the semester putting together a short film which we shot on 16mm film and for which I was the director of photography.
After college, Josh and I solidified our company, MindInMotion, built a reel and website, started taking on more client work, and started working on our next film, Lotus Eyes, which we wrote, produced, and edited together. Josh directed, and I was director of photography.
Lotus Eyes was a truly independent effort. While Josh had made one feature before, this was my first time being involved in a feature from beginning to end, and it was taxing, although rewarding process that involved months of pre-production, three weeks of filming, and 6 months of post-production Our ambitions definitely exceeded our budget on Lotus Eyes –
The film was set in the declining U.S. where food and resources had become scarce and infrastructure had started to collapse. Because we didn’t have the budget to build sets we looked for existing abandoned and derelict locations and found a number of post-apocalyptic-looking locations in Maryland Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
The filming days were long but our young but passionate crew and our community rallied behind us to help make it happen.
We met many friends on the cast and crew side with who we would continue to work for years to come and began to build our filmmaking community in Baltimore.
Lotus Eyes introduced us to our friends at Studio Unknown, a post-production sound company in Catonsville that creates sound effects and mixes for films and television. We would later share an office space with them, and they would later introduce us to Matt Rigieri and Nick Kovacic at Digital Cave, a film and commercial production company based in Hampden. We would later move offices to their space.
Over the years we continued making films. In 2016 we produced I Like Me, a comedy parodying the self-help movement and written around the two actors Anna Fagan and Sue Schaffel.
In 2018, Josh and I produced and co-directed Ape Canyon and Bad Witch. Ape Canyon is a drama set in the Pacific Northwest centered around a brother and sister who go on an ill-fated Bigfoot hunting expedition. This was our most ambitious project yet, although still very much an independent production, that involved flying our cast and crew out to Washington state for a chunk of the production and filming the rest here in Maryland. Bad Witch was our first venture into the horror genre, where we teamed up with screenwriter and longtime film friend Jimmy Hennigan to create a wacky film about male witches and what happens when casting spells backfire.
We’re currently working with screenwriters on several other scripts.
Our existence as a company has been divided – we make films and companies also hire us to create videos for them.
Some of our recent hired work has included creating videos for Hopkins, University of Maryland, the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research, and directing commercials for the Maryland State Department of Education.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
On the corporate/commercial production front: Building up a group of recurring clients for our business has taken time. I think people want to work with people they know they can trust. So most of our new clients have come from referrals from other clients who have been happy with the work we’ve done and the experience of working with us. Saying it’s all about who you know is a cliche but that’s definitely the truth. In film and video, people are generally hired based on who they’ve worked with before and who their immediate contacts know and recommend. Being able to do some work for Johns Hopkins and their various affiliated organizations as undergrads helped us a lot. A large chunk of our work since graduating in 2014 has been Hopkins referrals. Also knowing and working with other companies in Baltimore has helped us with finding work. The film and video community in Baltimore is very welcoming and supportive, which has made it a pleasure to operate a business here.
On the independent film production front: producing independent films is always difficult because you’re trying to do more with fewer resources and money, always trying to stretch every dollar as far as possible. We’ve been very fortunate to work with some amazing collaborators over the years, whether they be producers, crew, screenwriters, actors, etc. Baltimore has a real depth of talent.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
MindInMotion is a creative production & post company based in Hampden.
We produce films and commercials and work with a diverse clientele from filmmakers to nonprofits and businesses.
What sets us apart from others is our experience creating feature films and our scrappy independent filmmaker spirit that lends itself to making the most out of budgets, creative problem solving and creating compelling, cinematic visuals that tell an impactful story.
We’re proud of our films and our portfolio of commercial work, including spots for the Maryland State Department of education we recently directed.
What makes you happy?
I enjoy working. Diving into a project I really care about and the process of working with collaborators who elevate a project through their talents, skills, insights, and unique perspectives.
Contact Info:
- Email: victor@mindinmotion.tv
- Website: https://mindinmotion.tv/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mindinmotionpro/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mindinmotionpro
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/MindInMotionPro
- Other: https://vimeo.com/mindinmotionpro
