Our Story

To the Moon Productions was founded after Director / Producer, Angela Snow, quit her job in Los Angeles and drove up the California coast with the blind determination to leave the country, make a little money and continue filmmaking. Coincidently, after returning from a shoot in Lebanon, Cinematographer, Josh Gibson, emailed Angela with a preview to his new documentary. Needing a technically savvy partner with equipment, Angela proposed the idea of To the Moon Productions. Josh replied, "Hell yes, do you need me to move to LA?"

Before this time Josh and Angela were not close and had only known of each other while attending Columbia College in Chicago. Angela knew Josh as the talented cinematographer who bought a van and drove across the US after graduation.

Three days after the initial emails, Josh created the To the Moon Productions website and a month later two jobs were booked. On To the Moon’s one-year anniversary in December 2007, Josh and Angela had completed four videos, spent a month in Greece, a month in Vermont and two weeks in Peru. To the Moon Productions will return to Peru for the next 2-3 years to continue on the company’s first feature documentary.

It is through travel that we learn, through films that we share and through collaboration that we effect.

ANGELA SNOW, DIRECTOR/PRODUCER (based in LA)

Based in Los Angeles (escaping as much as possible), I stay busy in freelance Production on award shows, reality TV, and independent films in the Assistant Director department. I have worked/interned in Vermont, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Washington D.C., Denver, and Los Angeles.

I graduated in three years from Columbia College Chicago with a BA in Film/Video Directing. While at Columbia, I directed my own short films and was involved in the production of over twenty others. I also was as a Teacher’s Assistant for a Directing Class.

Originally from Vermont, I went to high school in St. Louis, where after graduating I immediately took off to backpack through France and Spain. I have lived and attended school in Barcelona, have traveled elsewhere, and cannot wait to explore more of the world, always along side my camera. I love, as a filmmaker, to have the power to take something, some other world, living in my head and show it to others, and just maybe somewhere along the line make a difference. In addition to the narrative work living in my head, I want to show others the reality that lives around us in other cultures, personal stories and places not seen by everyday eyes.

Director,

•  New Recipe, 24p short
  Official Selection: Humboldt Park Film Festival & winner of best Actress
• Some Assembly Required, 16mm film
  Official Selection: St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase & DC short Film Festival
  Winner: Ourstage.comDecember short film Artist Access

Production work: (extensive TV & Film work)

• 2009 Prism Awards - Supervising Producer
• Deadliest Catch, Original Productions / Discovery Channel
• Inauguration of Barack Obama, Neighborhood Inaugural Ball
• 2008 Democratic National Convention
• Feature Film Assistant Director & 2nd Assistant Director:
    - “What Do I Do Now?” & “Second Coming of Mary”
• 80th & 81st Academy Awards
• Interloper Films, (Documentaries such as DIG!)
• Florentine Films, Ken Burn’s Documentaries
      -The War, Unforgivable Blackness, & Horatio’s Drive

Background

• Columbia College Chicago, B.A. Film/ Video Directing
• Attended Pampeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain
• Conversational Spanish

JOSH GIBSON, CINEMATOGRAPHER
http://www.joshsgibson.com

In my hometown of Peoria, Illinois, I studied theatre and television production at Illinois Central College. After three years of working for a steel factory, I left my job to take a position at a local NBC affiliated television station. A year later, I moved to Chicago to study film. In the Spring of 2006, I graduated with a BA in Cinematography from Columbia College Chicago.

I have a variety of local, national and international clients that keep me traveling. When I am not on the road, I keep busy with my own projects. Currently, I am the Director of Photography for Comanche, a new webseries shooting in Chicago. In it's first season, Comanche made the cover of Chicago's RedEye and has been featured on WGN News.

Documentaries:

• Beta: a short documentary (footage aired on NBC, CBS, and featured in Best Friends Magazine and Chicagoland Tails Magazine)
• Chicago Public Housing (Ronit Bezalel)
• House of Suh
• Message from the East: The story of Muhammed Iqbal
• Tree House Animal Foundation
  

Clients:
JWT, Karyns, The Second City, Towers Productions, Dreaming Tree Films, Walking Shadows Productions, Starcom MediaVest, Get Fave!, Ki + Edit Design, Think or Swim, Creative Media Consultants, Inc

Additional Collaborators

Ian Issitt, Cinematographer (Chicago based)
http://newboundmedia.com/

Ian Issitt has lived in Chicago for the past 8 years and has come to call it home. But the urge to travel, see new places, and meet new cultures has been rising to the surface more and more. Whether it is traveling the US in a wildly painted bus headed west on 40 picking people up along the way, sleeping outside with more stars than I have ever seen in a remote town in Southern Sudan, or driving my Vespa through three states in one day, travel and adventure have come to the forefront of my endeavors. Originally from Tennessee I moved to Chicago to attend college where I graduated with a BA in Cinematography from Columbia College Chicago. Two years ago I started my own production company, New Bound Media, LLC, and have continued working as a cinematographer and creative director on many projects throughout the Midwest. I have made a very strong client base, and hope to continue meeting new people, traveling to new locations, and documenting it a along the way.

Bryan Yokomi, Editor (La based)
http://www.bryanyokomi.com/

I’m currently living in L.A. pursuing Directing and Editing. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Orlando, FL.   I attended the Florida State University Graduate Film school where I learned the Craft of storytelling and film production.

Cinema is our generation’s form of storytelling.  It has become one of our primary sources of information, This gives cinema a very powerful responsibility.
When an audience sits down in a dark theater to watch a film they give their full undivided attention.  For that time you have them in the palm of your hand.  You have this amazing opportunity to truly communicate with them.

I’m currently directing a  documentary about the people who fled the Japanese Internment during WWII.  It is a collection of memoirs about three women’s  experience in Colorado, far from the barb wire fences of the camps.

Editor:

• “The Colorado Experience: Poverty & Freedom”, Documentary
• Seminole Productions, Seminole Sports Magazine
• Sunshine Network Television Show

Assistant Editor:

• Locksmith Content, commercial production house
• Craig Murray Productions, Assembly of trailers for Disney, Warner Bros,  ABC.
• Laid to Rest, HD Feature

Background

Florida State University
M.F.A Motion Picture, TV & Recording Arts
B.S. in Communications/Media Productions

Ersellia Ferron, Producer/COORDINATOR (Paris) / Cinematographer (LA BASED)

Ersellia Ferron was born in Aix-en-Provence, France, in 1974.  She came to New York City with her parents in 1978. In 1992, she entered New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she received a Tobias Award for Excellence in Photography, and from which she graduated in 1996.  Upon graduation, Ferron moved to France where she attended “L’Ecole des Beaux Arts” (The School of Fine Arts) in Aix en Provence and received her diploma in 1999.  During that time, she participated to various creative activities throughout Europe and in Thailand, such as visual arts shows, touring multimedia presentations, festivals and conferences, and was a resident artist at ZKM in Karslruhe, Germany.  Her first documentary “Efem” is a celebration of femininity as viewed through the considerations of seven young women from various cultural backgrounds (China, West and North Africa, India, Latin America, England and France). Completed in 2005, it has since been presented at various festivals in Europe.

Upon her return to the United States in the fall of 2004, Ferron joined the faculty at the University of Maine in Bangor, as a graduate assistant to Guggenheim Museum’s New Media Curator Jon Ippolito. She is currently resides in Los Angeles and is editing and finishing her second documentary film “Malika’s Burqa”.

Field Producer:

• Gantz Brothers
• HBO, Taxi Cab Confessions, CBS, Real Life, MTV, 24/7

Director/Producer/Cinematographer

• Efem (Documentary screened at Festivals Worldwide)
• Malika’s Burq(Documentary in Post-Production) 

Background

• NYU TISCH School of the Arts
    (Tobias Award for Excellence in Photography)
• L’ecole Des Beaux Arts (The School of Fine Arts)
    (Aix en Provence, France)
• Bilingual in French and English

Eric Smith, Cinematographer / assistant camera (LA BASED)
I.A.T.S.E. Local 600