Tyler Purcell

I started in the industry at the ripe age of 13 at our local community access TV station. I spent 7 years volunteering for them, starting as a camera operator and eventually directing live news program at 15. Those experiences, led me to expand my portfolio and before long, I was involved in commercial production, shooting on 35mm in my home city of Boston. After graduating from Emerson College with a BA in film media studies, I moved to Los Angeles with friends and started working in the industry. After shooting two features back to back and feeling like I had finally made it, the gaps between gigs, destroyed me financially and I wound up having to take a full time job in engineering, where I found steady income for over a decade. During this time, I became a certified broadcast engineer and found myself building TV stations and several post houses. My desire to re-enter the creative field, gave pause to my heavily career driven engineering path and into a more creative one. I started my own foundation called Celluloid Dreaming and used it to buy some equipment in order to teach people how to shoot on motion picture film. This wound up getting me into a decent job teaching filmmaking at one of the premiere arts high schools in the US, which was an excellent opportunity and one of the most insightful moment of my career. Being a full time creative, got me involved in feature films again, where I edited 4 decent sized releases, two of them with limited theatrical and shot/edited commercials, industrial and educational films, among the occasional music video and documentary. It was a great period of my life, before covid and the world changing forever. To expand our business, after the covid scare, we bought a motion picture film scanner and started offering scanning and restoration services. At the same time, I was able to study with one of the best techs in the United States, which got me up to speed on servicing film cameras using modern techniques. Our acquisition of Abel Cine’s film service division, sealed the deal for us and in 2024, we launched Narrow Gauge Films for both film scanning/restoration AND film camera service. Under the same moniker, we also make short subject films, both documentary and narrative, using a wide swath of filmmaking tools. Our successful YouTube channel “Cinema Repository” offers viewers a look into film cameras of various kinds, both from the using of AND servicing of, from the perspective of a technician and owner/operator. In the coming years, we will be expanding into other markets like creating new parts for film cameras, manufactured with our own machines.