The Road to Redemption

Jesus Mavis was a career criminal. He says he can’t remember living any other kind of life. After relocating to Utah from Phoenix, he ended up in prison again and decided he’d had enough of his old life.
I met Jesus at the D.I. where he talked about his past, showed me his tattoos and described the hell he'd been through - and had put others through.
But his eyes lit up as he talked about the future: his school classes, his part-time job as a mechanic, his new friends from his church, his elderly neighbors - he pulls weeds for them, they secretly leave home baked meals on his doorstep.
Jesus is up for parole this summer. This time, he says, he’s up for life.

Behind the Scenes: Enter the Sacred

Artistic vs. Technical: Enter the Scared

Dancing on Red Rocks

7 am on a beautiful, cold Saturday morning in March - a film shoot for a music video. We arrive at the Snow Canyon overlook, with actual snow on the ground. A rare moment when the canyon's name fits. The dance troupe from Dixie State arrives, led by Li Lei, a Chinese physicist-turned-dance-instructor who runs them through their routines faithfully, over and over, so we can get all the shots we want. In between takes, as we set up new dolly tracks and camera angles, the dancers do their best to keep warm, even sneaking a quick nap on the sun-warmed rocks. The shadows lengthen and we continue shooting - from soft sand dunes to petrified sand dunes to Cougar Cliffs, not stopping until the last ray of sun slips behind the red horizon.