George B. Kelly

George B. Kelly inherited his love of filmmaking from his father (holder of 17 patents on the Technicolor 3-strip camera) and grandfather (owner of Kelly Studios in Erie, Pennsylvania). He also formed a lifelong love of drama and narrative starting with a Children's Theatre group at age 7 and continuing with high school and community theater. After dabbling in Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California in Berkeley, he finally majored in Dramatic Art. He transferred to the College of Fine Arts at the University of California in Los Angeles, where he studied Theater, Motion Pictures & Television before going on to study Graduate Film Production at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Although George had always worked professionally in Theater and Film while in school, he finally left academia after his first year in New York, and started working seasonally lighting Independent Feature Films, Off-Broadway plays, and Spring and Fall Fashion shows. Returning to California, he continued his Film and Theater career in Los Angeles and San Francisco, gradually working his way up the ranks to be a Director of Photography, 1st Assistant Director, 2nd Unit Director, and Producer. As analog shifted to digital, George got himself certified in both digital cinematography from Sony and 3D character animation from Alias/Wavefront. In the 21st Century, George headed a specialized video production department at Google Inc., where he has the dubious honor of having produced Google's single most popular YouTube video ever until surpassed finally in 2012, after gaining tens of millions of views. As Senior Producer at several large Agency/Studio in Silicon Valley, he has worked with many of the start-ups and most of the global giants of the tech sector. He founded several companies himself, including Reel Live Crew, a complete below-the-line production service company for independent features in Hollywood, Visionik, LLC, a French real-estate venture, and his own production company, CineSpecial Productions, specializing in fun and exciting interpretations of complex and subtle material, not to mention Kelly Studios Films, the stock footage archive of his father's and grandfather's films, some of which can be seen on the ARTS channel. What George enjoys most is mentoring and developing talented artists, directors, managers and producers.