Daily Inspiration: Meet Blake Miller

Today we’d like to introduce you to Blake Miller.

Hi Blake, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Hey there guys — sure thing. Filmmaking was always something I wanted to do since I was a kid, but growing up in Kansas City, it felt like a pipe dream. We’re just starting to have a bit of an industry here, but back in the mid-2000s people really weren’t making films. So as a kid and then as a teenager, I played competitive baseball, got into journalism for a bit, tried my hand at broadcasting, I photographed bands in high school – but making movies was always in the back of my head, an itch I couldn’t scratch.

By the time I hit my junior year of high school, I decided to give it a shot and made my first short film. That film wasn’t anything special (and looking back now I see all those mistakes I made) but my life took a seismic shift during that time. Personally and professionally, I really came into my own and discovered who I was, and ever since then I knew this is what I wanted to do.

I seriously started in the summer of 2014, and for the last seven years I’ve made just under 20 shorts, approximately 100 corporate videos, collaborated with brands big and small, graduated with a B.A. in Cinema from San Francisco State University, and had the chance to work/become friends with a lot of wonderful artists. It’s been a journey built on one thing: practice, practice, practice.

But most importantly, through all this practice, I found my voice: which is to tell Kansas City stories. I just made my first feature film, “The City of Dried Fountains,” and the movie is all about that.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I wouldn’t say it’s been smooth. I’ve been incredibly lucky for the privilege I was born into: the fact I come from a middle-class background, have supportive parents, was raised in a community with a solid education system, that I could afford to go to college and get a degree. The older I get the more privileged I realize I am, and it’s my duty to pay that forward and help out others who aren’t as lucky as me.

All that being said, it’s still tough. I’ve always had the most supportive people around me but there is that feeling of “filmmaker, huh?…” and I don’t blame them. I also didn’t come from a background of artists — I didn’t even know anyone that practiced art until I was 17, 18 years old. When I went to San Francisco that was a whole other thing. I’m a suburban Missouri boy who was 18 and barely knew anything other than Kansas City, and here I am going farther out of state than anyone else I knew to practice something I BARELY had done.

Then of course, there’s the struggle of beginning a craft. Barely anyone talks about that. Your first five shorts, you don’t know what you’re doing, the next five you have a basic understanding but you still don’t have it down so you’re frustrated all the time. Add on top of that, your peers are in the same boat, so you’re all together trying to figure it out and it’s tough. It’s challenging.

But all that being said, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m a film writer/director specializing in telling Kansas City stories. I’m currently putting together a production company with my producing partner Kate Napoli and am developing feature projects to put out under the company’s name.

Like I said earlier, one of those projects is “The City of Dried Fountains,” a documentary about Kansas City, love and loss coming out of 2020. We conducted dozens of interviews of great Kansas Citians (people like Hartzell Gray, Pete Grigsby, Pierce Turcotte and more) to form a unified, intertwining movie about grief. Right now we’re just hitting picture lock and are looking to crowdfund our finishing funds for post through Seed&Spark.

A lot of news is dropping soon, so check it out by following @TCODF on Instagram or my own page @_blakeamiller.

How do you think about happiness?
Funny enough, I thought the answer to this was always set in stone but the older I get, the definition is more elastic.

Happiness used to be film, film, film and nothing but that. As I get older, film still makes me happy, but what truly gives me happiness is extremely personal, and it’s more centered around the people I hold closest. My inner circle, my faith, my family: it’s those three areas that get me through life day to day.

Contact Info:

• Email: blake.miller19@yahoo.com
• Website: www.ablakeamillerfilm.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_blakeamiller/?hl=en / https://www.instagram.com/tcodf/