The History Of Final Hour Films
by Mark Crawford
It all started at college…
It’s funny how the most amazing partnerships form in life. Thinking back to how Final Hour Films began, I can positively say it started when I met Patrick Behan the second day of college at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He came from Texas. I came from the town of Louisville, just a few miles from Boulder. When we found out we both came to college to learn how to make films (and that we also had a strange, deep admiration for cult movies like Evil Dead and Army of Darkness), we instantly became friends.
After barely making the cut for our first production class, 8 mm, Patrick and I began delving into the experimental film education upon which CU’s film studies program was based. While trying to wrap our brains around Brakhage’s Window Water Baby and scratching on film emulsion to make our early masterpieces, we quickly realized we were not the only students confused about experimental film in the class.
* I should note that we all have a deep respect for the CU film studies program and the experimental film medium. After all, if it wasn’t for being in CU’s experimental and creative environment, we would have never had the inspiration and freedom to create the early work I will mention later in this piece.
Enter the Talented Mr. Schultz
We immediately realized this guy had some serious filmmaking talent when he showed his second practice film. Projector starts up and instead of upside down shots of trees and warbled droning music, we see a beautifully shot, properly exposed test roll of an experiment using an 8mm Minolta film camera on a homemade jib system. After pulling off this feat, we got to know Matt not only through his filmmaking abilities, but also through his humor and percussion talents (as an aside, Patrick, Shawna, Pat Lewis, Matt Schultz, and I all have a musical background in percussion).
From the day Patrick and I met Matt, we couldn’t stop collaborating on film ideas and we couldn’t keep these ideas from becoming realized. During that introductory course, we skipped class on April 20th and started filming our first short documentary, 420, after hearing of the infamous pot-smoking event on Farrand Field every year.
The name stuck
During our second year of college, Shawna quickly joined the team when we realized she was just as quirky and passionate about film as we were.
So where did our first musical, The Final Hour, come from? I feel like this is one of those moments in our history that we’d call the perfect creative storm. We received a short, 3-5 minute practice assignment in our digital post-production course. Check. We had all dabbled in some song writing in high school, and were looking for an opportunity to explore the talent even more. Check. And finally, one of the most consistent sources of humor was pointing out the cliques and stereotypes within our University. With all the pieces in place, the musical came from the heart and flowed out of us naturally. We completed the first polished draft of the musical in about a week and a half. To this day, The Final Hour has played in the most film festivals and has received the most merit out of any of our college videos.
Click Here to Watch The Final Hour
Later College Endeavors
After the success of The Final Hour, we created two more musicals, The Daily Grind and Body of Work, as well as other smaller musical works like intro to The Big Freakin’ Deal film festival. The Daily Grind was a true test of our “last minute” filmmaking abilities because it was created for Apple’s 2nd annual 24- hour Insomnia Film Festival. That’s right; we wrote, filmed, and edited the 3 minute musical in 24-hours.
Click Here to Watch The Daily Grind
While creating these early films, we collaborated with Patrick Lewis, a photography and music student at CU. Over the years, Pat’s quirky sense of humor has inspired much of comedic enterprises. He’s also helped us create some amazing time lapses, and he demonstrated his musical talents in our latest short, Passing Time.
We have always had a passion for documentaries, and when our academy award nominated teacher Jerry Aronson got a hold of us, that passion became even more apparent. For our thesis film, we decided to go out with a bang. Matt, Shawna, and I thought back to our high school drumline days and remembered the amount of hard work and passion we put into the unique activity. At the time I was also the section leader for the CU drumline, and knew a lot of the participants in the Blue Knights drumline.
It had always been a dream of mine to be a member of the Blue Knights drumline, but school and filmmaking always prevented me from fully committing to the team. On the Line was my chance at vicariously living through the performers while creating the documentary. This was one of our most daunting projects – driving to practices in Denver, over 80 hours of footage to sort through (thanks Patrick!), and a long bus trip to Dayton, Ohio (it broke down 3 times). Fortunately, our hard work paid off, as it has been one of the pieces that launched our careers into their next respective phases.
Click Here to Watch On The Line
Our First Big Gig
While we were all still in college, we received our first big paying opportunity: our chance to create Mesa State College’s promotional videos for their website. It was the biggest shoot yet – a six-person crew armed with a jib, dolly, and a remote control video helicopter. In a way we were thrown straight into the deep end. However, our creative vision was fulfilled and we pulled off a set of videos with which we, and Mesa State College, were very satisfied.
Click Here to Watch our Mesa State Promo
I should introduce one more person to the team at this moment in time. Larissa Rhodes, who at this point in her college career had just began to pursue a film studies degree, as well as a Spanish business degree. Larissa helped on the post-production end, transcribing the interviews. Over the next years, she quickly picked up the production and producing skills needed to really drive Final Hour Films to where it is today.
The Next Three Years
Thinking back to all of this, it has been a wild ride. Here’s a company that started with a group of friends in college who were all passionate about creating great videos and now here we are. We still have the motivation to create great pieces of work no matter which kind of project is thrown in front of us. We’ve filmed all over the country and parts of the world. We’ve won multiple awards. Best of all – and this is what I’m most proud of – we’ve done this all by connecting all of our clients through word of mouth.
After the success of the Mesa State videos, we’ve picked up clients at a surprisingly rapid pace. Over the past 3 years, we’ve collaborated on the online video marketing direction for the nationally syndicated children’s book company, Books Are Fun. We’ve continued fueling our passion for creating documentaries with social impact with our latest endeavor, The Unreasonable Institute. More recently, we’ve collaborated with tech guru and entrepreneur Jim Deters on the web video content for his new award-winning restaurant ChoLon Asian Bistro and his company Ascendant Technology.
We have built our company around collaboration; both in our relationship to our clients and with the people who help make the videos. We deeply respect the long-term relationships with the people for whom we work, and we love a mutual creative attitude when tackling each project. We’ve also stayed a small company, but our ability to reach out to the most talented filmmakers allow us to join creative forces and expand our business beyond the state of Colorado.
The Future of Final Hour Films
Thinking back to the last years of college, I remember sitting down with my friends and talking about the scary and exciting topic every soon-to-be graduated college student asks themselves: “What do we do now?” We didn’t quite know the answer to that question, but we did know that someday when someone asked us what we did for a living we wanted to safely say, “We’re doing what we love to do, and having a blast doing it.” Three years later, I can safely say we are living out that initial dream.
