Today we’d like to introduce you to Brandon Duke.
Hi Brandon, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started out wanting to be a musician, but one summer during college, where I was an art major, I took a job where my ears became damaged and I came to the conclusion I had to find something else to do. That’s when I began really getting into movies and changed my major to communication arts after returning to college at Georgia Southern University. Since there was no film major, I studied a combo of broadcasting and theater while minoring in writing.
After graduating college, I immediately moved to Atlanta and started working in television. Occasionally, I would work on short film projects on the side. This is back before Hollywood came to town and I quickly got disillusioned with film work, so I stepped away for a while.
Through the years in Atlanta, I’ve met many artists from all walks of life; musicians, painters, poets, and craftsmen who were exceptionally talented, but were terrible at spreading the word about their own work. I started Karkata Media as a way to help those people get their work out to the public and help showcase the wide variety of talent that lives here in Atlanta.
I also started another company called Novis Opera with my partner, Clayton Romero. We focus more on fictional projects and podcasts. One of these is a multimedia storytelling project, Garfield’s Crossing, that we are currently working on adapting into an audio-drama podcast. I’ve written several short stories for the project as well as acting as the Co-Editor-In-Chief. You can read the stories at garfieldscrossing.com .
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road to where I am today was a rocky one to be sure. I made a lot of bad decisions that kept me from launching my own production company sooner than I should. I managed to smarten up and eventually start down a path where I learned to get out of my own way, save some money, and buy the equipment I needed.
After that, it has just been a process of reaching out to people that I knew and hoping they would trust me enough to tell their stories. I’ve been extremely lucky to find people who are interesting and know how to present themselves well. If you’ve got a really good subject, that will save you a lot of work.
Another part of the recipe is finding solid people who actually want to get something done. There’s a lot of people out there who like to talk about making art more than they actually like to make it. Finding genuine people who are brave enough to actually put something out in the public eye is half the battle.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
With my videography, I’ve tried to showcase stories of talent and perseverance. I’ve highlighted a disabled U.S. Navy veteran named J.K. Hulon who turned a career-ending injury into a business making bad-ass walking canes for other vets like himself.
I’m currently in the process of filming a feature-length documentary on Kodac Harrison, an Atlanta musician and poet who has been recording albums for over 35 years. After a life-threatening injury, he revamped a struggling career and found his true sound and became a pillar of the local music and poetry scene. If you live outside of Atlanta, you might not have ever heard of him, but many musicians and poets from this area know him and respect him.
I also completed a short documentary on a Georgia painter named Russell Carter Jones, who for a time lost most of his eyesight and was legally blind for a time. Even though he had only 25% of his vision in just one eye, he continued to paint and did some extraordinary work with abstract expressionist and impressionist paintings. With my multimedia project, Garfield’s Crossing, we’ve managed to bring together different writers with very different styles to craft a project that is distinctive in its approach to how it tells stories due to its collaborative nature.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
Always be humble enough to learn and choose your collaborators carefully. Attitude is important. If you find talented people who can maintain their humility as they come up and can keep up a great work ethic, those are the people you want to work with, always.
Contact Info:
- Email: karkatamedia@gmail.com
- Website: karkatamedia.com, garfieldscrossing.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/karkatamedia
- Facebook: facebook.com/karkatamedia
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/KarkataMedia
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC01wjFi9HQf5PWPMt69gvWQ
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-268272089
Image Credits
All photos were taken by Brandon Duke (with permission of the subjects).
