Hunter Hughes

Director and Cinematographer, Evolved Cinema

It all started with LudaDay Weekend. Hunter Hughes was 16, and armed with some basic shooting and video editing skills, he’d been hired to cut together the sizzle reel of Ludacris’s annual five-day event, which includes a celebrity basketball tournament and benefits his foundation. (“I was in all these 21-and-up clubs when I was 16 and I was pretty much in awe,” he remembered.)

From that day forward, he had a process: do a job, make a little money, reinvest it into equipment or education, get a bigger job. By 19, when he was a sophomore in Georgia State’s Honors College, he had enough freelance work coming in that he formed an LLC.

He hadn’t always intended to do that in Atlanta. As a teenager, he’d dreamed of going to the University of Southern California to study film, and he was upset when he didn’t get in. Looking back now, he thinks the universe was doing him a favor.

“I genuinely believe that had I gone to New York or Los Angeles, I would be so much farther behind in my career and never would have had the opportunity I’ve had here to make a name for myself,” he said.

It helped that Georgia instated film tax credits in 2010, soon after Hughes started his program at Georgia State.

“When I was applying to colleges, the film industry hadn’t moved to Atlanta yet,” he said. “Since then, things have blown up here, and I’ve been able to use my native Atlanta roots and my connections here to build a network that’s allowed me to flourish in the Atlanta film industry.”

These days his biggest client is Coca-Cola, where he’s a resident cinematographer, and he’s also shot for TBS, the History Channel, Viacom and a few music festivals. A couple weeks ago, he staffed a production of Love and Hip Hop Atlanta for VH1. After the shoot, the Los Angeles-based producer told Hughes his 16-person crew was the best he’d ever worked with.

“There’s this stigma from out-of-town producers that people in Atlanta aren’t very skilled and there’s still this need to fly in crew from L.A. or New York for productions here,” Hughes said. “But these producers are telling me how if we all lived in L.A., they’d be hiring us all the time.”

Although he’s taking on more commercial work, he makes a point to take on passion projects too. “It seems like the projects where I don’t really end up making any money are the ones where I get the most creative fulfillment,” he said. Last year, he shot the after movie for Imagine Music Festival, and he chose to spend his entire budget on production, hiring a 30-person crew for a 12-camera shoot.

“I did all these skyline aerial shots of the festival hanging out the side of a helicopter, which is why I didn’t have anything left over to pay myself,” he said. “But I was more excited to be doing that.”

Recently he shut down an entire city block downtown, not far from Georgia State, to film an alien invasion scene for a sci fi short.

“When I’m shooting from a helicopter or shutting down a street to have 40 extras running away from aliens, those are the moments where I felt like this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” he said. “This is all the incentive I need to keep pushing myself in this craft.”

—Erin Crews

PANTHERS SHAPING ATLANTA'S FILM INDUSTRY