Conversations with Shawndell Futrell Jr

Today we’d like to introduce you to Shawndell Futrell Jr.

Hi Shawndell, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was born in Atlanta, GA, on August 9th, 2004. My whole family is from New York, but my parents had already been in Atlanta for almost four years before I was born.

I grew up on everything. I always had a love for film and what went into actually producing something so mind-blowing to my young mind. Video games had that same effect on me as well, but above anything else, I absolutely adored Cartoon Network growing up. The Ted Turner legacy (RIP) has honestly had a major impact on me as a kid, from everything I was seeing on Adult Swim on a school night when I should have been in bed asleep, to my mom always randomly taking me to the CNN Center downtown so I could visit the Cartoon Network store and cash out in there every trip.

These were just the makings of what I’d become years later—the foundation, really.

My mother has always been, and still is, my biggest supporter. Anything I was into or thought was cool, she would never hesitate to buy me every DVD, toy, book, game, or anything else that brought me genuine joy.

I grew up on YouTube as well, and one thing I’d always watch as a child was stop-motion animation. The overall concept of making a piece of clay or a LEGO minifigure move around in your own action-packed movie was insane to me at the time, mainly because it felt like a dream come true. When you’re a kid and you’re making your toys fight each other and do all kinds of wild stunts, in your mind, it looks exactly like how a stop-motion-animated fight scene would look.

By the time I was 10, I was making my own stop motions. I had the Stop Motion Studio app downloaded on my iPhone 4 at the time, and I would use iMovie or the Final Cut Pro app to edit everything. This was the start of me creating videos.

I would make stop-motion series based around things I loved as a kid, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Attack on Titan, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, just to name a few. I was addicted to making videos, and I still am to this day.

But I was really shy about it back then. At the time, nobody even knew that I made videos except for family members. I knew I still had a long way to go before I could show any work off, so that was just kind of the mindset until COVID.

While my friends would hang out after school every day, I’d be going straight home to finish a video. My old YouTube channel was growing so quickly that I had 1,000 subscribers before I even knew what to do with all that attention. My videos would range anywhere from 500 views to 500K views.

I remember Christmas 2016, I was giving my mom a PowerPoint presentation on why I needed her to invest in a MacBook for me with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription because I genuinely needed her to understand that I could no longer grow doing everything on my iPhone. She saw the dedication, persistence, and vision. Adobe Creative Cloud was like a whole new world to me that I was determined to conquer.

By the time I was in high school, I had slowed down with the stop motion but would still keep at it from time to time. I would also silently work on my graphic design skills and ghost-design merch, flyers, and logos.

By 2020, the whole world was on lockdown, and times were looking very uncertain. The pandemic is one of the best things that has ever happened to me because it forced me to reset and realize what I really wanted to do instead of what others expected from me.

As we were closing out the year, I remember vividly being in my old room with the LED lights on purple, watching a ton of videos back-to-back late at night on YouTube. AWGE DVD, Ice Cream Skate Team DVDs, Pinkflamingousa, and CKY DVD are just a few mentions of what I was playing that night.

I remember watching these videos and admiring the editing style choices and thinking to myself, If I picked up a camera, I could be making stuff like this too.

I was already editing videos for years at that point and felt that teaching myself the film aspect of things would make me a dangerous force creatively.

I got my first Sony Hi8 Handycam because I knew immediately that I wanted to shoot with MiniDV tapes so I could achieve the nostalgic look I was going for.

This was the birth of Archive Tapes.

I made the channel, designed some logos, and really started to build my world in this new field I entered. I always wanted to be authentic. I never wanted to come out of the gate being “too perfect” or overly put together with the work.

When I got my first VHS, I was just shooting a bunch of my friends and what we would do on a normal day in Atlanta as teenagers. This was also the introduction to my peers finding out that I had a genuine skill and love for what I was doing.

I remember just coming around everyone with my camera and they’d be like, “Since when did you start shooting videos?”

I was just documenting life and putting everything together with a nice red bow, kind of like what I’m still doing now, except a bit more advanced.

I knew I wanted to put together my own DVD compilation series. So I started putting together the Archive Tapes, which would be my own DVD series.

The very first installment of this series took over four years to create because it had four years’ worth of footage fit into 14 minutes.

When it came down to the overall style and approach to my DVDs, I knew I wanted them to be something that people could relax and unwind to with others. I wanted my DVDs to have the same feeling that Adult Swim would give me late at night as a kid. I wanted them to bring people together and flip that creative switch in everybody’s brain, because the world tries to take away our childlike love for things and our creativity so that we can become hollow.

I mix everything I love into the DVDs, from capturing the fashion world to creating my own low-poly CGI character models and cutscenes with Blender.

Archive Tapes is for the youth, and sooner than later, I’m going to be forming my crew for Archive Tapes Film Studios.

It was the strangest thing having someone tell me that I was the reason they, too, picked up a camera. You never truly know who is really paying attention to what you are creating.

The frequent confirmations that God continues to show me are enough for me to keep going on my path.

Nowadays, I just stay consistent and continue to grow Archive Tapes organically. Atlanta is full of so many genuinely talented people, and I love documenting the rawness of the city that I’m from.

I will continue to push the raw and uncut because it’s honestly what the world needs. In a world full of smoke and mirrors, it is important for me to organically push real talent and creatives who really bleed what they do.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. One of the biggest struggles has been trying to stay committed to my vision while having people around me who don’t always understand it. I’ve had people question why I dropped out of college, why I chose to pursue something as unpredictable as the arts, or why I don’t take the more traditional route. Another struggle has been doing so much on my own. Building Archive Tapes, learning new software, shooting, editing, designing, directing, networking, and trying to figure out how to turn my creativity into something sustainable has all been a learning process. There isn’t really a blueprint for what I’m trying to build, so a lot of the time I’ve had to figure things out as I go.

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?
Archive Tapes is an independent production and multimedia platform masterminded by myself. I shoot videos, take photos, edit, and design for others, while collaborating with artists to create refreshing work to share with the world. I have my hands in a few creative directing positions with some artists in Atlanta, which I love because I have full creative control most of the time.

The goal is to create content that’s true to my authentic eye while the rest of the world continues to follow each other in circles artistically. Archive Tapes mixes the new with the old and allows others to see things the way I do. It gives people a different perspective.

I think what I am most proud of is that I continue to keep my integrity in this corrupt and compromised world we all live in. There have been many instances where the people closest to me have wanted me to go against what I believe in and become this opportunistic and greedy person that I just am not.

People around me have a really hard time digesting how I work and how I move through this life, especially when things seem to flow for me the way they do. People don’t understand how I can wake up every day to a new opportunity or even randomly connect with someone who may have seemed like they were so far above us just because they are rich and famous.

I love showing people that we are all pretty much “normal” people and that the status thing means nothing at all. I go into everything in life being 100% myself, and some people can appreciate that a lot and genuinely see me for who I am.

The ones who get bothered by it are supposed to be bothered, honestly, so I am not too focused on that demographic of folks.

I honestly think the main thing that sets me apart from the herd is that nobody is me, nor do they have my brain. I was always the oddball growing up, and I feel like that has been paying off more and more the older I get.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I am a believer in the term, “no risk, no reward.” I took a risk by dropping out of college after my first semester, even though I had known for a while that college wasn’t going to be for me.

I was attending Atlanta Metropolitan State College briefly because I wanted to earn my film certificate through the Georgia Film Academy. My reasoning for dropping out was because I was 18 at the time, in a class full of 30+ year olds, with maybe two other people my age, who had never even touched a single editing software in their lives. Unfortunately, this made my time there very dull and slow-paced compared to the level I was already at at 18.

I was hoping I would have been more hands-on and learning about things I had no idea about—not how to make a basic cut, transition, or type on Premiere Pro.

I loved my professor, too, because he used to work for Ted Turner and had done work on the live-action Ben 10 movie from 2007. I was a huge Ben 10 fan growing up as well.

I felt like I was wasting my money learning a bunch of things I had been teaching myself since I was 12 years old. So, after I turned in my final project, I dropped out for good and decided to really go all in with Archive Tapes.

I get a mixed reaction to that story often because some people get it and some don’t. Some people don’t understand why I would drop out or why I would “throw away” that opportunity. Those people don’t understand that I was better off taking my own path into my own hands instead of trying to follow a path that was never really for me in the first place.

It motivated me to go hard every day with the arts until it just became second nature to me.

Pricing:

• $350 run n gun Music Videos (shot + edited)
• $500 Brand/Buisness work
• $800 CGI work
• $150 Graphic work

Contact Info:

• Website: https://archivetapes.figweb.site/?__a100skip=1
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/archivetapes/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100095228191028
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@archivetapes/featured