Director/Animator - "The Old Gods"
Noah Van Buhren is an Animator and Filmmaker from the stormy shores of Vancouver, Canada. He has had a lifelong obsession with creating monster movies. His first short film ‘The Jovian Project’ screened at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in 2017. Since then, he has worked as a Creature FX Artist on the Star Wars: Young Jedi Animated series, as well as on many independent horror movies.
Noah is an escapee from Hollywood, where he worked on films you've all seen but which he isn't supposed to talk about. Noah also made a number of films he'd be happy to talk about but which you've never seen -- including a feature-length Georgia noir that no one involved is permitted to show you. He is no longer an active Private Investigator and fervently denies creating an underground filmmaking cult that worships Pixelvision. Noah works in a cigar shop in San Francisco.
Although he's been acting professionally in Los Angeles for the last decade Jude considers his main role to be Jesus (from 5th grade), which he's reprised 4 times in the theatre. Most recently, Jude has been creating comedic characters that poke fun at Los Angeles and himself. He'll be the guru in the coming revolution.
Ward Crockett is a Digital Cinema MFA candidate at DePaul University.
Chance White was born in Nashville, TN, the fifth son of music industry legend Bergen White. The son of a musician and an artist, White gravitated towards film at an early age, inspired by films like Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and later the work of Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. As a child White directed his own action films with action figures and drew his own comic books, spending hours dreaming of telling his own stories. White moved to Atlanta in 1997 to study Computer Animation and has resided there since as a Director, Cinematographer, Editor and Animator.
Whitney Ellis, was raised in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. At a very young age she discovered her affinity for the visual arts when she picked up her father’s Pentax SLR camera and took a picture. In 2011, she graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a BA in Film Studies and a BFA in Film & Video Production. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York where she works as a full-time TV producer and runs her own production company. She plans to make her first feature film in 2018.
Born in Boston, Elias moved to New York to study filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts. Ayla is his second feature film as a director and is the followup to his directorial debut, Gut, which screened in thirty international film festivals and earned seven awards. Other previous work includes “Dark,” which he wrote and produced and “Phobia,” which he produced. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
Barbara Steele, born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, England, originally studied to be a painter, but ultimately became one of the most iconic and beloved horror actresses of all time. Her first film role was in the British comedy, Bachelor of Hearts. Her breakout role was in Black Sunday, which was Mario Bava’s directorial debut.
Nick Zweig is an animator who recently graduated from RIT, where he made his thesis film screening at HPLFF, Eon. Nick loves telling oddball stories and creating strange characters, and bringing them to life through animation. Though primarily a 2D animator, he has skills in 3D and stop motion animation, primarily character animation.
Poet, performing artist, critic, and literary historian, Donald Sidney-Fryer is the last in the great line of California Romantics that reaches from Ambrose Bierce to George Sterling, from Sterling to his protégé Clark Ashton Smith, and from Smith to his disciple Sidney-Fryer.