My name is Brendan Coyle. I am a 29 year-old writer/director living in Los Angeles, CA who is currently pursuing his MFA in Fiction Directing at UCLA's School of Theater, Film, & Television. I bring with me a decade of experience in show business, utilizing my creative spark and technical aptitude to bridge the gap between art and technology in Hollywood. Having grown up moving from Massachusetts to Maine to Arkansas to New York and finally to California, I grew up facing America's many contradictions head-on.
After a high school career balancing musical theater with a competitive FRC robotics team, I began my undergraduate studies on the snowy slopes of Cornell University. While I originally enrolled as a Computer Science Engineer, I would be called towards my true passion: filmmaking. I embarked on scrappy independent projects in-between my classes, recruiting friends wherever I could to bring the work to life.
A summer internship working for a boutique production company in Beverly Hills landed me my first opportunity in Hollywood, allowing me to swiftly return after graduation to pursue a career in film. Six years of post-production experience later, I was accepted into UCLA's Fiction Directing MFA program, marking the next chapter of my life making pictures.
Beyond my work in the film world, I have also been trained in the discipline of User Experience Design. In studying the psychological link between program and user, we are able to iteratively redesign interfaces and tools to be as intuitive and rewarding to use as possible. I believe that the barrier between UX design and directing a film frame is remarkably thin. The Designer and Director both influence the audience by guiding their eyes across the screen like a ghost: omnipresent but barely noticeable.
Below, you can find one of my high fidelity wireframes for a program called GameShelf that helps video game players catalog, review, discuss, and troubleshoot playing games in their library, or "Shelf".
Here, we can see a site map and Figma prototype for a weather app that I developed to be used for outdoor athletes, runners in particular. The app, RunnerShine, prioritized the information that would be most useful to those about to head out on their daily run.
