Filmmaker, Cinematographer, storyteller: DJ Merrill
DJ Merrill is a junior transfer student at San Diego State University majoring in theatre, film and media with an emphasis on film. He grew up in Chico, California, a small northern California city. Merrill is a filmmaker, cinematographer, and storyteller who found his passion for filmmaking while attending high school in Chico. After signing up for a video production class in high school as something fun to do with his friends, his passion grew quickly after completing his first music video.
The moment Merrill realized that filmmaking was something he was interested in is when he showed the music video to his class and saw emotion on the faces of his classmates.
“I fell in love with that, making things that make people emotional in any way, let it be anger, sadness, fear,” he said.
Following his final project of the class he was invited to join the advanced video production group at his school where he was able to create videos for competition and commercials for local companies.
When I asked Merrill what exactly he does, because it seemed like he did a little bit of everything, he said, “short films, dramas and emotional pieces, montages, weddings which I want to start off my career doing, and narrative shorts so yeah a little bit of everything.”
He uses Adobe creative Cloud to create and edit all of his pieces. To shoot all of his films he uses a Lumix-Gh5.
Merrill has worked on some pretty impressive pieces in the past couple years, including when he and some friends teamed up to do a music video for two artists in northern California that created a song after the Camp Fire. The Camp Fire was one of the deadliest fires in California that destroyed the entire town of Paradise and took 86 lives. After they released the music video, Adobe teamed up with the group to create a documentary spreading awareness for the people that were affected by the Camp Fire.
Merrill was the director of the production and stated that, “it was the biggest and most impactful piece I've ever done”.
One of Merrill’s most known pieces which he wrote and directed was a commercial called Directing Change on mental health matters. The commercial helped bring awareness to mental health within the youth and won 3rd place in the state film competition. After witnessing how much of an impact a video like this can have on others, Merrill decided that he wanted to learn more about the art and emotion of cinema.
Merrill’s biggest project, a commercial promoting free haircuts to Camp Fire survivors, was shown on NBC LA. Along with these influential productions, Merrill has also done many fun shorts and films with his friends in the form of montages and special moments spent with his friends. Merrill has a series on his instagram where he shares these montages, which he calls channels. All of Merrill’s work can be found on his website. Merrills latest piece is a 3 minute short called “Cutoff” that was filmed on campus with his two roommates.
Merrill said his dream is to direct a movie, but states, “On the business aspect, I want to be a director or a creative team director.”
He also said he is,“most looking forward to meeting more people that enjoy the same things as me and just have a really solid team to make shorts and narratives.”
He is currently working on a short about the importance of appreciating what you have that will be posted to his Instagram and his website where all of his work is documented. Merrill’s work is nothing short of exceptional, his ability to create a range of different types of film from shorts, montages, commercials and documentaries is something that is very rare. He said he began making videos because he wanted people to feel emotions, whether that be happiness or sadness, while watching his work. I can confidently say that he has accomplished this in every single one of his pieces.
Jenna Harter — October 30th, 2021
