The LaunchPad is super excited to welcome Ant Gentile, an award-winning content creator, cutting-edge film maker and SU alumnus for an inside look at the future of digital storytelling and how to build a life and career in the creative and digital world. The Fireside Chat will be Wednesday, December 9 at 7 p.m. EST, co-hosted live from NY and LA via this Zoom link: https://bit.ly/digital-fireside It is open to all.
Ant Gentile is a founding partner and creative director of Hidden Content, a full-service creative production studio. With a slate of content that includes award-winning feature films, branded content, podcasts, and virtual reality experiences, Hidden provides innovative ways to discover and tell unique stories. Hidden has developed and produced work for clients such as Nike, Google, The North Face, United Airlines, and Samsung. In early 2020, Hidden produced the “The Spirit on Conviction” web series for Wild Turkey, which won the Webby Award for Best Documentary (Branded).
Since March, Hidden was on the forefront of remote productions, developing proprietary, camera “drop kits” for shooting premium, contactless content. This attracted notable clients including Sprite, Conde Nast, Zagat, and Netflix, for which they shot over 70 people around the world in just 6 days.
Hidden Content films have won accolades at the Sundance Film Festival, American Film Institute (AFI), Fantasia, Toronto International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival and Festival de Cannes. Several have been selected as New York Times Critics’ Picks. They are available for viewing on major streaming services.
The company also specializes in virtual reality, augmented reality and 360 cinema and video. Hidden produced an interactive VR narrative entitled Broken Night, starring Emily Mortimer. The film was accepted to Tribeca Film Festival and Cannes NEXT. Hidden also produced a VR horror narrative entitled The Caretaker, which was also accepted to Tribeca and Cannes.
He is a graduate of the Martin J. Whitman School of Management where he studied marketing and entrepreneurship. As a serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped his ventures, he is very interested in sharing his journey and insights with young creatives, digital content creators and filmmakers. He is an energizing and inspiring storyteller with great insights, and his engaging style and knack for networking and relationship building offers a model for anyone trying to break into this hyper-competitive space.
Gentile will be interviewed by Peter Hartsock ’19, co-founder and creative director of 410 Pictures, an award-winning midnight movie genre house focused on producing original and boundary breaking content. 410 Pictures is based in Los Angeles and has won awards in national and international film festivals for its unique narrative which explores distinct cinematic worlds. It produces short films for festival distribution, but currently has multiple feature film projects in various stages of development. 410 Pictures was founded by Hartsock and Daniel Simoni ’19 when they were attending Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and members of the Syracuse LaunchPad. Through a shared love of all things macabre and genre, they created a production house to tell unique stories and now work bi-coastally.
The Fireside Chat will feature remarks and insights by Gentile with a thoughtful conversation facilitated with Hartsock and an open AMA (ask me anything) session for aspiring creatives to chat with Gentile and pitch their own ventures and projects.