Chet Hamilton

My Story

Chet grew up as an only child in Leander, Texas--a suburb just outside of Austin.  He attended Rouse High School and 

Rouse High School

University of Texas at Austin | B.S. in Radio, Television, and Film

In middle school, we were assigned a project on the assassination of JFK and for the first time, they offered up the option to create a video about it instead of a trifold. I always hated making trifolds but loved movies. This was right when the iPhone first came out, meaning that for the first time, I could shoot everything without knowing anything about how cameras worked as well as could edit everything on the same phone! 

I went on to do a parody of "The Office" with my high school principal acting as Michael Scott, which was a hit on campus due to everyone loving the office at the time. Then I made a student council campaign video that caused a landslide in the 12th grade voting booths and the school offered me and a couple other creative students to have a class inside of the broadcast program. Separate from normal broadcast content, all we had to do was create funny/cool videos to be shown during normal school news announcements. Then I went onto college, where I wouldn't make anything good, nor much of anything really, again until Junior year. Too busy having to take astronomy, thanks UT! 

It was only when the world shut down during my last spring break of college in March of 2020 that I realized the key to becoming a good filmmaker: make film! And a lot of it! Retrospectively fortunate, I was stuck in LA with my now co-director, Dru Miers, and we made a comedic web series on an iPhone, however much higher quality than the one I had in middle school. Yet, we were using it with the exact same ease of use, allowing us to focus on the only things that truly mattered: writing and acting. As we were just uploading these to Dru's finsta, his burner insta account with like 130 followers, we focused on making as much good stuff as possible without the pressure of a class project. Weird thing about constant, low stakes practice every day, you get a lot better! Take note UT! As the (total 13) episodes got better and better as we went, that's when the lesson became dogma, and my previous hopes of divine inspiration became a naive joke to me. Finally, I saw filmmaking as a sport where focused practice, elbow grease, and good taste is all it takes. But while I do believe that, having a partner you work really well with is invaluable. 

The following year and a half, we made a couple projects less amazing than we predicted. It was then that we realized the absolute necessity of great actors. We started filming Lone Stars in January of 2022 and had our first screening in July of 2023. We rented cameras on weekends and mostly shot multi-cam due to having all the dialogue be improvisational, while Dru and I guided the scene to line up with the plot we had written, taking cues from Curb your Enthusiasm. Writing the dialogue is the hardest part of convincing writing in my opinion, so if you're not Charlie Kaufman, please consider improv. Now in May of 2024, we have won some awards from film festivals and are looking into distribution.