By day, Stephen Wise is an Addy award-winning creative services producer for WEAR in Pensacola, Florida. By night, he’s a film-maker and screenplay writer whose latest effort is winning awards at film festivals and the attention of potential investors.
By day, Stephen Wise is a five-time Addy award-winning creative services producer for WEAR, Sinclair’s ABC affiliate in Pensacola, Fla., writing, producing and editing commercials for the station’s clients.
By night, he’s a filmmaker and screenplay writer whose latest effort is winning awards at film festivals and attracting the attention of potential investors.
Wise, a film graduate of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, has been at WEAR for five years.
“I was actually in the inaugural class of what at the time was the brand new film department that also produced the guys that made The Blair Witch Project,” says Wise. “I went to school with those guys.”
Wise says he wrote and directed a short film “that has gotten really great praise. It has been in 63 film festivals and won 21 awards.”
But he says he was tired of talking about the short film and wanted something else out there “to show that I am not a one trick pony.”
The screenplay is called Paradigm, and it won best screenplay at the Orlando Film Festival in 2019.
Wise says the first draft of Paradigm was written in 2013. “I actually developed the story with a buddy of mine out in Los Angeles. We bounced ideas off of each other and we came up with this idea, this concept for the plot and he helped me develop the characters and a few lines of dialogue here and there.”
In 2019, he did some revisions and sent it off to film festivals and contests.
What is Paradigm about?
“It is a suspense thriller,” says Wise, “with four main characters. Everybody has secrets and it is kind of like a puzzle where all the pieces start dropping into place as the story is going on.”
In addition to client commercials, Wise says he does live sports broadcasts, and is on the drone team where he’s occasionally asked to help shoot drone footage for a news event.
So what do his coworkers think about his screenplay and film work?
“They are very supportive. But I think they get sick of listening to me talk about it so I don’t really bring it up that much at work.”
Click here to watch the entire version of Wise’s short film, Sur’vi.
NOTE: I like highlighting what TV stations do in creating commercials for their clients. If you have some work you want to share, please let me know. Plus, if you’ve got a side gig, a passion, a creative outlet or hobby that you think is interesting, please let me know. Paul@newscheckmedia.com or call me for any reason, 817-578-6324.
Here are two of the Addy award-winning spots from the Pensacola market that Wise says were done in collaboration with coworkers.
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