Employee Spotlight–Brad Ellis

What he remembers most about that hallowed evening was not his costume, the trick-or-treating, or the candy; it was what happened after he returned from his neighborhood plunder and turned on the TV. That was the moment he first watched John Carpenter’s Halloween. And it absolutely fried little Brad Ellis’ brain. “I was about seven or eight years old,” he says, shaking his head, “and that movie just took hold of me.”

The now-classic horror flick set Brad on a path to become a producer/director of film and video. He started by turning his parents’ suburban home into a virtual haunted house movie set each Halloween. “We would construct mazes and have different rooms and scenes, with props, special lighting effects, fog machines and sound effects.” Then, when he was in 11th grade, his parents bought him an 8mm camcorder. “That changed everything,” he declares. “My friends and I, after school, would shoot comedy sketches and they would air on the school’s closed-circuit TV channel.” They even created their own homage to Halloween, and screened it for their classmates. “It was really cool, because we were putting our work out there, getting feedback, making a connection with an audience,” Brad recalls. “And like anything in life, you take that experience and grow with it.”

After graduation, Brad and his high school buddies were determined to keep growing their talents. They would take time off from their jobs to regroup once every year or two to create a new movie from an original screenplay. Brad leveraged his job at a local cineplex to host public screenings. “I had access, we had the projector, we had the big screen, we had the auditorium,” he says. “We would just invite hundreds of people to come watch whatever our premiere was at the time.” They developed a loyal, local following, including the Memphis daily newspaper’s movie critic and Hollywood movie director Craig Brewer, a Memphis resident.

By 2005, one of their movies, Act One, was good enough to earn a one-week run at a local theater and was then held-over for an additional week. “People actually paying money to see one of our films was amazing,” Brad says. “I would sneak into screenings, even though I’d seen the film hundreds of times, just to guage the audience reactions.” In 2010, the team won their first distribution deal with Daylight Fades, a modern-day vampire film with a six-figure budget.
They’ve made about a dozen films overall, many of which are available on various streaming services.

Brad managed to parlay his filmmaking passion into a fulltime video producing career, working at two production companies before eventually landing at Running Pony as a writer/producer/director. He says, “One of the things I love about this job is when I get to interview somebody. I really try to get to know that person. I’m interested in what they have to say. I just like connecting with people, and this job lets me do that.”

When he’s not working, Brad enjoys spending time with his wife, Ashley. They got married on New Year’s Eve, 2019, just a couple of months before the COVID-19 pandemic began. “If anything’s gonna test your first year of marriage, it’s going to be being stuck in one place with the same person all day long, every day,” Brad laughs. Ashley managed to put up with Brad’s love of pugs (he has two) and his love for pop culture trivia. (“If you give me a movie title,” he says, “I can tell you what year it came out.”) She has even agreed (so far) to let him continue hosting the annual Halloween party he began as a child, now known as the “Rocktober” parties. So, like Michael Myers, the seemingly un-killable villain in his favorite flick, Brad’s love of Halloween, movies and filmmaking lives on. “I just need to do what I was born to do,” he explains. “I’ve always been a storyteller.”