Meet Andrew Kadikian | Filmmaker & Editor

We had the good fortune of connecting with Andrew Kadikian and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Andrew, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I’ve always been a creative person, and as such felt it difficult to apply myself to things that I didn’t find creative or inspiring. I knew from a very young age that my eventual career would have to be something creative but my interest in filmmaking specifically didn’t really develop until I started high school. Classics of my generation like Jurassic Park and iconic films from the golden age of the blockbuster era inspired me to learn about the cinematic arts and simply made me want to make movies. In high school, I started to study and practice filmmaking, then from there into film school and into the industry and here I am.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I consider myself to be in the early part of my career as a filmmaker. As any filmmaker will tell you, the road was definitely not easy. This is not an easy industry to find work in, especially in a network as saturated as Los Angeles. However, I am one of those people who wouldn’t know what else to do with their lives if they couldn’t make movies. Luckily, I found myself gravitating early to editing as a niche, so I embraced it. Professionally, I have become an editor for film and also in the digital media space. This has provided me with great opportunities for work, both freelance and in staff positions. The great thing about it is that it allows me to focus much of my free time on developing and directing my own projects. With each one I complete, my directing career gains more traction and it will one day reach the point where I can transition from editing full time to directing full time, As for my art itself, I have somewhat simpler tastes than a lot of my colleagues. I love blockbusters. Not so much the ones of today, mind you. The blockbusters that inspire me are the likes of Jaws, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, and James Bond films of the nineties. Those are the kinds of films that captured my imagination when I was growing up and that’s the kind of nostalgic, escapist movie magic that I want to create. My dream genre is Adventure. If I could make movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark for the rest of my life, I would die a happy man.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Well in a week there are a few things that are necessities when visiting LA. They’d have to visit at least one beach. Going up and down the PCH to see the sights wouldn’t be a bad idea either. There are some other places on the list as well, including Griffith Observatory, Hollywood and Highland, and a few iconic local eateries. Personally, the highlights of my tour of the town for them would be the museums on the miracle mile. The Petersen Automotive Museum, the La Brea Tar Pits, LACMA, and especially the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
Oh man, there are so many. It’s hard to narrow it down. From my parents and other family members who were always supportive and encouraging about my career choice to my friends in high school who tolerated my attitude and allowed me to drag them into my filmmaking obsession both in front of and behind the camera, my colleagues and professors at film school from whom I learned and continue to learn so much, and my frequent collaborators now who hold me up to new heights with each and every project. They all deserve credit for who I am and where I am today. One of the biggest building blocks of my career has to also be the Los Angeles 48-Hour Film Project and its city producers Leanne and Michael Westphal. The 48HFP is a competition that challenges teams who sign up to create a short film from start to finish in just one weekend. You start on Friday night when you draw your genre out of a hat and are assigned your city’s elements (a prop, a character, and a line of dialogue) and you have to turn in a finished short film no more than 48 hours later on Sunday night. It’s not just an LA thing either, this is a worldwide organization with competitions in something like 130 cities around the globe. The best film winner from each city moves on to the traveling film festival, Filmapalooza where it competes against all the other city winners, and a handful of those films then move on to the Cannes film festival. Each city has its own city producers who run their cities to their own standards but I’ve always said that ours here in LA are the best. Leanne and Micheal have created a community of filmmakers that has become a second family to me and that networking has been invaluable to my career. The other thing that had been a boon to my career has been the challenge of the competition itself. It’s a filmmaking gauntlet, a trial by fire that teaches filmmakers invaluable skills that they can carry over into productions for the rest of their careers. It has simply made me a much better filmmaker than if I hadn’t done them. Between 2011 and 2021, I competed in twenty competitions, fourteen as leader of my own team and director of the film we made. Eight of those times, my films made it into the Best of LA awards ceremony and were awarded multiple nominations and wins in various categories. The growth as a filmmaker that I experienced both in the skills I learned navigating the rigors of the competition and the community I found myself a part of among the competitors is something I regard as a huge advantage I was able to levy in my career.

Website: https://www.andrewkadikian.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegreatkadik/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewkadikian/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheGreatKadik

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kadik

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/roguedivision

Image Credits
Ashly Covington Jake Halter Kaela Comontofski