Va. Beach native living his movie director dream

By Ben Werner
Virginian-Pilot correspondent
© August 28, 2014

VIRGINIA BEACH

Tyler Nisbet loves seeing life through the lens of a Cannon digital SLR camera, the sort favored by indie filmmakers.

A Virginia Beach native and Kellam High School graduate, Nisbet has loved movies for almost a long as he can remember. Now, a month shy of his 27th birthday, Nisbet is jetting into Virginia Beach from Los Angeles this week to screen his first professionally-shot feature-length film, "Summer Dream."

"It's a really awesome thing to be chasing your dream every day," said Nisbet, who wrote and directed the coming-of-age film about a recent law school graduate, who like Nisbet, weighs a conventional life path against following his dream.

Watching movies was always fun for Nisbet, but he understood early on he loved what he called the art of governing how words on paper are visualized and translated to on-screen productions, or what commonly is thought of as film directing.

For instance, in fifth grade, when classmates were likely playing with action figures or video game consoles, Nisbet received a video camera for Christmas. Five years later, when many kids were surely focused on recruiting parents for driving lessons, Nisbet focused on getting siblings and friends to star in movies he wrote.

He even worked at a movie theater and a video rental store.

Tammy Smith, theater director at Kellam High, remembers Nisbet was quiet but very attentive. She said he always studied the production process and thought of improvements. He worked behind the scenes for Kellam drama productions, directed some, and produced drama department videos.

"He enjoyed doing it and the more he did it, the more he realized this isn't just a hobby," Smith said.

In many ways, Nisbet says he lucked out, growing up as film technology took a quantum leap from video to digital. His first movies were shot using videotape and edited on a VCR in what he described as a laborious method using the stop and fade buttons. By his teens he used digital cameras with professional quality resolution and editing software, similar to what studios use, which is now standard on most computers.

"I was coming up at the end of the '90s," Nisbet said. "A lot of computers started coming with free editing equipment."

Nisbet is also lucky his family is so supportive, Smith said. They've encouraged him every step of the way, including his choice to attend film school at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington and to move to Los Angeles.

His uncle, who was a distributor for Blockbuster Video, supplied Nisbet with loads of titles. He studied DVD bonus features with director interviews, enjoying the extras as much as the films.

"As a teen I was watching everything," Nisbet said. " 'Back to the Future' was always a favorite, so I saw Robert Zemeckis directed it and I looked at what else he did."

Looking ahead, Nisbet will continue shooting movies and working with writers to develop character-driven scripts. Ultimately, he wants to direct more feature-length films.

"I always loved movies," Nisbet said. "It wasn't until I was older that I realized I loved movies more than the average person."

Ben Werner, benwerner@mac.com