Mark Carranceja of Noisemaker Media

An Ensemble Cast

Noisemaker Media is not a one-man operation, and when asked about his team, Carranceja expressed eternal gratitude to his staff of close friends who help keep the ship running.

“They are like Voltron. They are the squad. The last two years… Justin Denmark, our key grip, he’s like our MacGyver. Without him, we couldn’t operate.”

Building up a solid crew, capable of keeping Carranceja free of distractions that could potentially derail his creative processes, is essential to his happiness. It lets him relax and focus on creating a moment with the artist.

“Yesterday was so comfortable,” he recalls, “because I had my production manager and assistant director there, the whole crew gripping up everything and I wasn’t worried about anything. I was only worried about creating the moment. It allowed me to look for my shots and be in control of the crowd.”

Carranceja is passionate about his art and wanting to see it evolve. “I love creating. I think that’s the only thing I know how to do best, so I feel like I needed to focus on a specific craft instead of being a jack-of-all-trades like many artists who want to have control of everything.

“I can do music, but I’ll hire somebody to make music, so I can focus on my craft and really refine it and be really great at it. It’s not going to happen overnight, but I feel like its going to happen in ten or fifteen years. It’s not going to happen tomorrow.”

Carranceja continues, “This has become my fulltime job. It’s tough, because it’s still in its infancy stage. I started Noisemaker in 2002, but, really got into the business crux of things around 2008. Now it’s really picking up and I find little time to do anything else because it’s so time consuming. 110 hours a week editing, and then shooting. It’s a grind.”

Between Scenes

As far as winding down, Carranceja’s enjoys playing video games. “I’m a gamer,” he states, “but if I still had my turntables and my keyboards and all that, I’d probably be making beats too.”

Carranceja also owns a large selection of Jazz records. “I have the whole Kudu Records discography,” he said. (Sensing the fact I didn’t recognize the reference, he explains, “The most essential jazz fusion records ever.”)

Carranceja is also partial to rap music, particularly the 1991-1994 era, and is a big De La Soul fan, and we slid into a side conversation about rap records, a topic he admittedly could talk about all day.

When asked which movie directors he enjoyed watching, Carrenceja mentioned the usual suspects; Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scorsese. But then he brought up foreign film giant Federico Fellini as a favorite. “His ideas are grand,” he explained, “but he has a certain sense of cinematic elegance to what he presents.”