Joshua Winters

Born in Royal Oak, MI, Josh Winters AKA "Colonel Pork" had no idea that a simple high school graduation gift would lead to an aspiring career as a filmmaker. After graduating from high school in 2008, Josh began making random crude videos of himself and his friends with an 8.0 megapixel digital camera, to which he was edit using basic software on his computer and upload to his colonelpork channel on YouTube. After moving to Georgia that summer, Joshua started college at Georgia Highlands College, pursuing a career in computer science. While in college, Josh would continue to use his digital camera to document random things. When he got a new camcorder for Christmas that year, Josh created his first dramatic work called "Atonement of the Lonesome." Although clearly an amateur film, Josh would continue to hone his skills in editing. In 2011, Josh decided to change his major to mass communications after transferring to University of West Georgia and being unsatisfied with where he was going with computer science. He started learning more about film and he made his first comedic film with a narrative structure called "Sgt. Porkrind." "Sgt. Porkrind" was meant to be an exploitation spoof in which Josh played two different characters: his Colonel Pork persona with a bitter, hipster attitude and Sgt. Porkrind, a self-aware, over-the-top cornball with a fake mustache, a mullet, and a 44 magnum disguised as a toy gun. As Josh continued with his college studies, he saved up enough to buy a brand new HD Canon Vixia HF M500 and a Rode Videomic, in which he created a sequel to "Sgt. Porkrind" called "Sgt. Porkrind 2: Pig Roast." This was the first video he made involving other people, including people to act in the video, people to help with camera operation, and boom mic assistance. It followed the misadventures of Sgt. Porkrind after performing his tasks in the first video, and ran at over 20 minutes. The production values were higher, and Josh was using a higher end editing software at this point. As the fall semester approached, Josh would go on to direct and edit video game skits for his college's video game television show, 1UP UWG. He and producer/director Chad Brock would collaborate on a number of skits revolving around the show's hosts: one involving Tekken and another involving Borderlands. Josh would also make his first French silent film for a French class, and actually have his work included in the college's publication, The Eclectic. As he began to take his video making more seriously, Josh also created a separate YouTube channel to upload his more prestigious work called SuperColonelPork. 2013 is when Josh's career really got jump-started. Josh met a fellow classmate as well as fellow aspiring filmmaker Aaron Heidman and began collaborating with him for several class projects, including a final project in which they had to make a portrait of a person or a place. The project was titled "Perpetual Limbo," and it was a psychological drama involving the consequences of drug overdose. Shot with a Canon t3i and edited using Adobe software, Josh was beginning to find his footing as a filmmaker thanks to help from Aaron and his film professor: documentary filmmaker Deon Kay. Josh spent the summer of 2013 interning, making connections, and creating more short films, including "Nasty Habit," a comedic film that serves as a double entendre, and "Don Libellula", a short in which Josh talks to a dragonfly with a mobster accent. For his final semester, Josh created an abstract film called "Saturar," in which he was persuaded by Deon Kay to enter into film festivals. Josh is also working on a collaborative comedy with Kay called "Champion Claim Josh," which pays homage to Jared Hess' offbeat "Winner Take Steve."