Today we’d like to introduce you to Tyler Hickman.
Hi Tyler, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My name is Tyler Hickman, and I’m a filmmaker. After three Regional Emmys, forty international festivals, and dozens of short films, it’s still strange to say that out loud sometimes. I’m the guy who picked up his parents’ camcorder at eight years old and never put it down.
Being the oldest of three siblings taught me early: nobody hands you permission to tell stories. You bushwhack that path yourself.
That camcorder didn’t make me think “filmmaker” (kids don’t think in job titles). I just wanted to make stuff like what I saw at the movies. My first films in the theater were Roger Rabbit and Batman (1989). Extract from that what you will about my filmmaking sensibilities.
At twenty-one, I got handed the keys to a feature horror film in Belize. The producers had done Lionsgate titles, and they trusted me with “Blood Island”, a bloodthirsty pirate story shot in the Caribbean. We filmed over two months in 2007 while I was still a student at Cape Fear Community College. Somehow, my professors approved of me doing this. Then suddenly, in Central America, I’m responsible for a crew and budget, directing a masked pirate ghost in hundred-degree heat while mosquitoes eat everyone alive. We even got to film at ancient Mayan ruins for that one!
That same year at Cape Fear, I made my first two shorts: Slipping Away (which won Outstanding Student Film at Scene First Film Festival in Wilmington) and The Big Come Down (which earned Best Cinematography at One Take Film Festival in 2008). 2007 gave me my first feature and my first award-winning short film. I walked onto that Belizean island a student and walked off a feature film director.
UNC School of the Arts gave me permission to fail spectacularly in a safe environment, though I was already working professionally. I’d been in LA for a while working on films, TV, music videos, etc. It was a grind that almost made me forget why I got into film in the first place. So I went back to school at UNCSA.
LZ Lost was my first UNCSA short, and it eventually screened at Riverrun International Film Festival in 2016. At this point, I had a few laurels under my belt, and I was finding my voice (or at least getting louder about what I’d always known).
Since 2006, I’ve directed over fifteen short films. Why so many? Because shorts are where you experiment. Where you try that risky cut or unconventional structure. If it fails, you’ve lost a weekend, not two years. Aftermath got into Blackbird Film Festival in 2015. Vessel played Vienna’s Bio-Fiction Science Art Film Festival. 4th Paradox traveled to Cairo, London, Miami. Each laurel was like a passport stamp, and it’s the best received film I’ve done (so far…)
The Rogues: Dawn of the Black Sun is my love letter to Indiana Jones and Uncharted. I wrote, directed, and edited it. It’s as a $2,000 concept trailer shot over one weekend. The goal was to prove we could create this world on a budget. It starred Tyler Cole as anthropologist Dr. Owen Grant opposite Reid Doyle who played smuggler Royce Bridger. That trailer alone has hit six festivals and won awards, including Best Action Sequence at Austin Action Film Festival in 2022. The Austin audience knows action cinema, and they thought we brought something fresh. Still hard to believe we got that award, that is a TOUGH slate of films to go against!
We’re currently shopping the full feature to investors, producers, and distributors with my manager Bill Pettit of Pettit Pictures and Tyler Cole. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. And we have a LOT of incredible plans for it.
I’ve got three Midsouth Regional Emmys, all while I was working at WXII 12 News as a Creative Producer. The first in 2020 for Exile The Hacker in Interactive Media. Then two in 2023 for Our Home—Editor-Spot Announcement and Image Promotion. That double win was surreal. Awards are keys that open doors, but you still have to walk through them and deliver.
My roots run across the Southeast. From Wilmington crews to Triangle filmmakers, Asheville creatives to Atlanta production teams, we’re a team. We share resources, crew each other’s projects, show up at 4 a.m. for sunrise shoots because we said we would. That Red House podcast I did with Tyler Nail in November 2021? That’s community. Two guys in a house talking about why you don’t need Hollywood anymore. That conversation meant more than any trade magazine interview because it was real.
Speaking of community, I can’t think of a stronger supporter in the filmmaking community than my late friend Brennan Scott. Brennan was like a brother to me. We met in film school in 2007 and became “soul mates of filmmaking” as he put it. He was a director, writer, cinematographer, composer (and a hell of a lot more) who brought a horror/thriller aesthetic that balanced my action/adventure lean. He always asked “why should I care?” about every scene. On tough shoots, he kept us laughing so hard we cried. In edit bays, he was the fresh pair of eyes that saw what I couldn’t. When he passed away on April 8, 2021, I didn’t think it was real. It’s only been through that community and my friends like Charley Coleman and Nate Loftin that I’ve been able to process that loss and move forward.
Nate Loftin has been my constant since I met him working at Blockbuster in 2003. We were both film nerds working at the best movie rental place around, and became friends. Eventually, I convinced him to work with me on some film projects culminating in his debut performance in the short film “Complication” in 2008. I’ve cast him in every project I do. He brings a physicality and dedication that I have rarely seen anywhere else. He’ll do a scene until it’s absolutely right, contributing to dialogue and action in ways that elevate everything. He was the perfect Nathan Drake in our “Uncharted” fan films, already a fan before we cast him. Working with Nate and Brennan together felt like family. When Brennan passed, Nate and I held that memory tight and kept building on what the three of us started.
Tyler Cole is another indispensable collaborator, an incredible creative force. We met through the magic of YouTube where I saw his own “Uncharted” fan film and quickly realized we shared the same obsessive passion for heightened stakes and tension. Where Brennan brought horror sensibilities, Tyler brings an actor’s instincts and a director’s eye. He can break down a script, find emotional truths, and deliver performances that ground even the wildest concepts. We’ve worked on a bunch of smaller projects together and now we’re co-directing “Ghost Echelon”, our feature-length spy-thriller shooting across North Carolina and Georgia. Tyler challenges my assumptions and pushes me to make every scene count with the framing, blocking, performances and honesty. Finding a creative partner who both shares your vision and sharpens it is rare. I got lucky finding him.
We’ve been working on “Ghost Echelon” for a while, stealing weekends and burning vacation days. It’s the biggest thing I’ve attempted, teaching me I still have so much to learn.
Fifteen years in, here’s what I know:
Finish things: Most people don’t. They talk about scripts they’ll write, films they’ll direct. They don’t finish.
Learn to edit: I edit everything I direct. It’s final draft writing frame by frame. It makes or breaks a film.
The gear doesn’t matter: I won my first Emmy using nothing but a Go-Pro. Story is story. Light is light. Performance is performance.
Community is everything: I show up. I help on your project. You help on mine. It’s not a competition, and to think like that hurts everyone trying to get things made.
Ghost Echelon is in production. The Rogues waits for its moment. I’ve got more scripts than I can count ready to go into production and I’m producing more, helping other filmmakers get their visions on screen.
And I’m still that eight-year-old kid with a camcorder. Every time I yell “action,” I’m trying to capture something true. Something that makes someone feel what I felt when I first saw Indiana Jones escape that boulder.
That’s the journey. From camcorder to cinema cameras. From kid with hubris to three time Emmy winner. It’s all the same job: point the camera at something that matters and don’t look away.
The story’s not over. We’re just setting up the next scene. Or, as Brennan said “we’re not reinventing the wheel, we’re putting new tread on the tire”.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Has it been a smooth road? Hell no. And anybody who tells you filmmaking is smooth is either lying or they’ve got a trust fund.
The struggle starts with money. Always has. I directed my first feature at twenty-one in Belize, but I wasn’t some prodigy backed by money. I was a kid with a camera and more hubris than sense. We scraped together Blood Island on a shoestring. That was my real film school.
The real gut punch was Brennan. Nate and I had to carry that forward without him, and some days I still want to reach for my phone to text him about an idea for a film or a funny memory I wanna joke with him about. That loss doesn’t show up on a festival resume, but it’s the heaviest weight I’ve carried.
Distribution is another beast. We made The Rogues trailer over a weekend, and that thing’s won awards. But shopping the feature? That’s years of meetings, of refining pitches, of patience.
The Southeast film scene is my home. But let’s be honest: we’re not LA. We don’t have studio lots on every corner. We fight for resources, for recognition, for the simple right to be taken seriously.
Tyler Cole and I are co-directing Ghost Echelon now, and he’s pushed me to be better in every scene. Finding collaborators like him, like Nate, like Brennan… that’s not luck, that’s survival. Because filmmaking at this level is a team sport, and if you don’t have your people, you don’t have anything.
So no, it hasn’t been smooth. It’s been a grind. But ask any filmmaker worth their salt and they’ll tell you: the smooth roads lead to boring films. The struggle is what makes the work matter.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m a filmmaker who lives in that space where adrenaline meets something human. Action and adventure are my playground, but the heart is the part I obsess over. I’ve made a lot of films in a lot of places, from the Belizean jungle when I was barely old enough to rent a car to the late-night shoots all over the southeast that still remind me why I do this. The real fuel is the stuff I make with the people who matter to me.
If people know my work, they usually know The Rogues or the Uncharted fan films. We built that Rogues trailer in a single weekend with a couple grand and a whole lot of stubborn belief. Just that trailer alone has traveled farther than I ever expected, and I know the feature will, too. And the film community down here knows me as the guy who shows up, no matter the hour, no matter the highway that gets me there.
But the truth is, my work is defined by the people I make it with. Brennan Scott was my creative brother for a decade. He pushed every story to ask something real. Nate Loftin has been beside me since our first student project, the kind of collaborator who becomes family without you even noticing. And Tyler Cole is the spark I needed at exactly the right moment, the voice that keeps me honest as we build Ghost Echelon together. A lot of filmmakers assemble teams. I grew mine, and they grew me.
What I’m most proud of is that I’m still in the fight. I’ve got kids now. I’ve got bills like everyone else. Life has thrown real losses at me, and I’m still here making things that matter to me. When Brennan died, we didn’t quit. When people doubted The Rogues, we proved the story had legs. I can’t do anything else, filmmaking is in my soul.
That doesn’t make me special. It just means I won’t stop.
How do you define success?
Getting my films out there to the people, finding my audience, inspiring others to make whatever they feel in their hearts to make. And to make a living doing it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2728517/?ref_=pro_nmovr_ov_visitcons
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TylerHickman
