Chris Shields

Chris Shields was born and raised in East Helena, Montana with a restless imagination and an immediate fascination with movies. To a young boy unfulfilled with the mundanity of smalltown America, movies were an escape — an opening to a whole untapped universe harnessed by the fabled gods of Hollywood. Movies were magic.

Shields spent his early years watching television movies cut up by commercials and VHS tapes and DVDs worn to exhaustion and stained by little kid fingerprints. A trip to the movie theater a town over with his mom, while rare, was always a formative, life-changing experience that only strengthened his hunger to create. He wrote stories to make into movies someday (often with a cast list and all), he drew pictures of characters and movie posters, and collected action figures, mapping out what would happen in his movies and re-creating his favorite scenes from existing work. In school, he drew characters all over his homework and spent his recesses organizing scenes with his friends and coming up with even more stories.

Shields got into music thanks to his musician parents. Saxophone became his life as a more tangible means of expression that seemed more possible for a young man. He excelled in band and even branched off into starting his own bands on the side, picking up singing and the electric bass guitar in the process. Film remained a focus in his life, but as a seemingly unattainable dream, it was just an interest.

In high school, Shields wrote for his school newspaper primarily as a film and music opinion columnist. He worked his way through the ranks until he became the Editor in Chief his senior year. That year (the year of the Covid-19 pandemic), he also had the opportunity to take his first film study class. Suddenly, his dream of telling stories through film seemed possible.

Music took a backseat. He spent every waking moment of his freetime watching as many movies as he could in a day, studying up on the “classics” and seeking out every movie he had ever heard of and wanted to see someday. The whole summer before he left for college was spent teaching himself the art of filmmaking online; researching every element of the filmmaking process he could and writing it down.

In college, he declared a major in journalism at the University of Montana in Missoula, MT thanks to the help of a scholarship and several glowing recommendations from his time on the high school newspaper. Things went well, but he quickly realized his passion for movies would not be fulfilled through this path. A semester in, he added a second major in digital filmmaking and decided to tack on a documentary filmmaking certificate in the process.

He got a job at the college newspaper as a film critic and quickly became known locally as the go-to film enthusiast, which led him to other movie reviewing gigs at other publications. This helped kick start his career in what he actually wanted to be doing: filmmaking.

He started low on the totem pole with small local projects. His initial interest was in film editing, and while that was satisfying, he craved the “on set” experience that would appease his extroverted nature. He tripped and fell into several script supervisor roles, building his resume as a scripty early on, but decided that really didn’t fit his creative interests. He became interested in camerawork through watching cinematographers around him, so he invested in a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6k G2 and taught himself how to use it.

The rest is history.

Over the past several years, Shields has worked on documentaries, narrative short films, a mini series, TV episodes, social media content, music videos, concert films, and advertisements. His focus is mainly in fiction storytelling, but as a journalist, he’s always had a soft spot for documentary work as well (specifically music-related, i.e. concert videography and musician documentaries).

People choose Shields as their cinematographer for his reckless abandon. He places high value on creativity in his shots and often puts himself in precarious or silly situations to make something look interesting. They know he isn’t afraid to get down and dirty and know his instinct to make something look one-of-a-kind.