I run Aumen Film Co. I direct most of the work and have a hand in every campaign that leaves here. This page is the honest version of how that came to be, and why it’s still set up this way on purpose.
I started editing video when I was fourteen years old, on cracked copies of software I pulled off Limewire. (Don’t tell my mom.) I didn’t know what I was doing. But I had a family computer, too much time on my hands, and a realization that I could change how people feel by putting pieces of video next to each other.
I went to college for psychology and left to tour with a band. Songwriting, it turned out, was just editing in a different medium — arranging small pieces to make someone feel something larger. I’d later start Aumen Film Co with those instincts intact. (I would also, somewhat improbably, go on to make a campaign of ads for that same college.)
Aumen Film Co has existed in some form since 2010. It has changed shape several times. What has held steady is the part I care about most: the work is intentional, the relationships are long, and the people I do this with — clients, crew, collaborators — are ones I genuinely want to spend time with.
Aumen Film Co is not a big shop. That is a deliberate choice. When you hire us, you get me — on the strategy, on the creative direction, on the set, and in the edit bay when it matters. I bring a network of trusted collaborators for production and post, people I’ve worked with for years and would happily hand the keys to on any given shoot. But the taste, the process, the thinking, the relationship — that’s me, and it will be me for the foreseeable future.
Most of what clients tell me they value about working here has less to do with the gear and the awards and more to do with how the work actually feels to make. That part is founder-led by design. If Aumen ever grows into something different, it will still be answerable to that standard.
Most of our work happens in ongoing partnerships, not one-off projects.
After ten years of running Aumen out of spare rooms, basements, and over-priced downtown studios, I realized I wanted my own space to work out of. So I built one. A local Amish crew raised the shell. I finished everything inside it. It’s about two thousand square feet now, sitting on my property in central Pennsylvania. Not so much somewhere clients fly in to visit, but the place where a lot of the work actually happens between shoots. Pre-production. Edits. Camera tests and crew cook-outs.
It’s where most of the thinking happens before cameras ever roll. Where ideas get tested, broken, and rebuilt before they cost anyone time on set.
The work that goes out with the Aumen name on it is made by more people than me. Designers, gaffers, cinematographers, editors, colorists, grips, hair and makeup teams — most I’ve worked with for years, all of whom I’d hand a scene to without watching over their shoulder. Most know the Aumen clients as well as I do. The photograph below is most of the core group, taken at wrap on a recent shoot.
The most talented artists and filmmakers I have ever worked with and will ever work with. If you need deep narrative storytelling and moving cinematic-level imagery and tone and aesthetic, Aumen Film Co. is your squad.
A short conversation is the easiest way to figure out if there's something worth building together.