Zach Schlapkohl, Jacob Kiesling, and Ethan Cartwright first met in their Filmmaking 101 class in the long-standing "film house" of Stephen F. Austin State University - a literal house on the edge of campus where they would spend their next few years shooting short films and staying up all night editing before class the next morning. With every semester they spent making films, they grew in confidence as filmmakers and closer as friends. Seeing the sun of their college days beginning to set,...read more
Zach Schlapkohl, Jacob Kiesling, and Ethan Cartwright first met in their Filmmaking 101 class in the long-standing "film house" of Stephen F. Austin State University - a literal house on the edge of campus where they would spend their next few years shooting short films and staying up all night editing before class the next morning. With every semester they spent making films, they grew in confidence as filmmakers and closer as friends. Seeing the sun of their college days beginning to set, it was their senior year that they decided to take the ignorant plunge into the making of a feature film by revitalizing the first short film concept they had ever worked on together - What Doesn't Kill Us. With burning ambition and incredibly supportive East Texas community, they spent the next year and a half on principal photography shooting a day here and there whenever they could, but life after graduation took its toll on their zombie mockumentary and sent the three directors on diverging paths - slowing work on their beloved passion project to a stop.
Two years later in Los Angeles, Zach and Jacob dusted off the old hard drive containing the rough cut of What Doesn't Kill Us, and with fresh and slightly more mature eyes, they watched their film and regained the same excitement they felt back in college. It needed more work, so more work they put into it getting pickup shots and polishing the film before bringing it back to their home state of Texas for its festival debut at Lone Star Film Festival where it received the award for Best Texas Film. Since then, What Doesn't Kill Us has been accepted into eleven more festivals around the world, and the three directors continue to push themselves with new exciting projects on the horizon.
