Michael A. Martinez

Born into a military family, Michael A. Martinez partly grew up in Germany and Italy, developing a love of genre cinema (mainly war and science fiction films) from watching the local television and tapes his father collected from his world travels. After a few years in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Martinez's family settled in Fairbanks, Alaska where he and his friends started putting together short films for their high school classes, and then later outside of class just to keep themselves busy during the summer. Martinez attended the University of Alaska where his father worked, often taking advantage of his access to the university's rocket launch facilities, and got his first television gig shooting rocket launches and retrieval. He went on to film school at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he met fellow filmmaker and paranormal enthusiast Nick Groff. The two of them co-directed many student films culminating in the feature Malevolence (2004) which had a brief festival run in 2004. Martinez returned to Alaska and worked in local television for the next few years wearing many hats; marketing, copy-writing, editing, directing, shooting, producing, and compositing visual effects due to difficulty finding other people locally to fill those positions. In 2008 he moved to Los Angeles and worked freelance in camera and visual effects for several years before becoming American Honda Motor Company's in-house video director from 2013-2018. In 2018, he relocated to Atlanta, GA to work full-time in visual effects and editing on studio films and TV but still works on smaller projects in his spare time.