Never be afraid to create and share your own work; you never know who’s watching. In Isaiah Howard’s case, it happened to be filmmaker and former NFL player, Matthew Cherry, who saw one of Isaiah’s videos that he created on his phone with a lip-syncing app called musical.ly. Like thousands upon thousands of social media users, Cherry was impressed with the high schooler’s phenomenal, almost magic-like editing and directing skills. Watch below and see why.
Here’s another vid since people seem to like them pic.twitter.com/Rc71sWNajm
— Isaiah Howard (@isaiahxavier10) May 18, 2017
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From the effortless scene changes, to its rhythmic flow, Cherry took to his Twitter page to share Isaiah’s video with his 60,000 followers and “encourage (Isaiah) to get into directing.”
But, it didn’t stop there. Cherry started to push for other people in the film industry to hire Isaiah for large scale commercials and music videos. In a response to fellow director Nick Childs, who asked how he could be of assistance, Cherry said: “If there’s any way you can help him get work that would be (good). Really want to see a production company hire him to direct a similar style video/commercial, instead of just stealing his style and hiring someone else to do it.”
With over 7,000 retweets (one in which came from Rian Johnson, the director of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”), and more than 16,000 likes, Cherry’s one tweet connected Isaiah to several job leads. The groundbreaking director of “Get Out” Jordan Peele has even reached out to Isaiah.
“If y’all don’t know who Jordan Peele, Matthew A. Cherry or Rian Johnson are, y’all better look them up! I am straight beside myself right now,” said Isaiah’s mother Simone in a Facebook post. “There are so many tweets, I couldn’t capture all of them!”
Now that’s how you use the power of your platform. Mr. Cherry, thank you for challenging other filmmakers to hire and develop young aspiring filmmakers like Isaiah.
Remember the name Isaiah Howard; he’s got next.