Local Filmmaker Plans Project in Fresno Area

Award-winning, Clovis High alumni Brock Heasley is planning on filming a featured film in Fresno. (Photo contributed)

Local award-winning filmmaker, Brock Heasley, partnered with VidAngel Studios and Stellar Lense Productions, announced plans to make a feature film in the Fresno area. Specific dates will be determined once financing is finalized.  

In 2017, Heasley’s debut short film, The Shift, earned him an Outstanding Filmmaker of the Year Award from the Hollywood Dreamz International Film Festival. Now he has the opportunity to turn The Shift into a full-length feature film.  

Community involvement and investment opportunities are available. For more information or to watch the short film that shows what the feature film will be like, visit https://studios.vidangel.com/theshift.

The Shift is an inspiring story about an ordinary man who receives sympathy and a promise of fame and fortune from the Devil. The storyline combines science fiction with faith and is a tale of choices that brings hope.

The film will be made here throughout the Fresno and Clovis area, and mostly in the Downtown Fresno area,” said Heasley. “We’ve already been talking with some of the owners of the properties in the Downtown area, and they’re looking forward to the spotlight we can bring. Too soon to know for sure, but Clovis is my side of town, and I’m sure we will be shooting there.

Stellar Lense is handling the production work on the film, and we’ll be hiring almost exclusively local talent for cast and crew.

“There’s a LOT of talented filmmakers here in Fresno. I was lucky enough to have most of them work on the short film with me and am hoping to get them back for the feature. Additionally, we’ll be looking to fill several supporting and minor roles with actors in the area. And we’re going to need extras–lots and lots of extras. We’re hoping anyone and everyone will come out for that.”

How the title of the film came about is indicative of the two genres.

“The Shift is both a science fiction film and a faith-based film, so the idea, appropriately, came from two different places, says Heasley. “The science fiction of it all came from a drive to work one morning when the DJ I usually listened to had disappeared from the air with no explanation, as though he had never been there at all. I had a moment where I thought I might be crazy, that I had just imagined this DJ, or that I was suddenly in some sort of alternate dimension where he had never existed.

“The faith-based part came when thinking about stories in which a man meets the Devil. I had never seen a character in fiction battle the Devil in the way I would, as a Christian. I wondered what that might be like, and combining that idea with this idea of “shifting” people around alternate realities to sow discord and confusion was how The Shift was born.”

Heasley’s second short film, The Two Hundred Fifth, is about a young college girl with a dark past who repeats her entire life over and over. The film will be making its world premiere at the prestigious Fantasia International Film Festival this summer.

Heasley graduated from Clovis High School in 1995 and from California State University Fresno in 2004. The Heasley family might be remembered when they were featured on the television show Rescue 911 in 1990. They were portrayed in the dramatic rescue of the father after he was shot 13 times during an armed robbery at his store.

Besides making films, Heasley is a writer, illustrator, graphic designer, and director. Early in his career, he was the Fresno Bee’s Teen Movie Reviewer, and then served a two-year mission as a Spanish-speaking missionary for the Church of Jesus Chris of Latter-day Saints in Arizona.

During his 15-year career as a Graphic Designer and Art Director, he launched the online comic, The SuperFogeys, published by Th3rd World Studios. He co-created the online comic, Monsterplex, which went on to win the D.C. Comics Zuda competition.

Heasley’s writing has appeared in the Independent Journal Review and at ForEveryMom.com. He is the author of the recently released Young Adult novel, Paper Bag Mask. In its first week of release, the book hit #1 on Amazon’s New Release Teen & Young Adult Fiction chart. He has worked on both studio releases and smaller independent films, including as an Associate Producer on the soon-to-be-released Blumhouse film, The Gallows: Act II

Brock lives in Fresno with his wife, Erin, and their three daughters. Their middle daughter was born with developmental delays. Both Brock and Erin work within the Fresno community to advocate for families and children with special needs.