Joey Arciszdirector of photography

What a client buys is not coverage. It is judgment: knowing what is about to happen, where to put the camera, and what goes wrong before it does.

That judgment started on the water. I rode professionally before I ever picked up a camera, so I learned to read action from the inside.

I started shooting professionally in 2005 and spent years as creative director for iWake, building the iWake.com content library, and in 2012 released Momentum, a forty-six-minute film I produced, directed, and edited for them across Texas, California, and the Philippines.

After the Art Institute of Dallas I co-founded Ultralite Films in 2012. In 2014 my work won Best of Show for Broadcast at the American Advertising Awards, as chief editor of The Unspoken Speech Project: Words Alone. The same show credited me on six wins across four films: two Gold, two Silver, and a Special Judges’ Award.

Tigé Boats hired Geared Like A Machine directly, with no agency in between, to produce the walkthrough films for both of their flagship 2026 models, the Ultre ZX and the Z3. I ran both productions from the estimate and the crew to final delivery, and directed, shot, and edited both. The Z3 film took five 2026 Telly Awards, including Gold for Cinematography and Silvers for Directing and Editing.

My DP work with U.S. Polo Assn. has run six years, through Genius House Media, across fourteen productions in eleven cities. That work is distributed to over 130 licensees worldwide.

The rest runs across national advertising, documentary television, branded film, and narrative. I shot three episodes of Curse of the Chippendales as director of photography, worked as a cinematographer on Destination Dallas, and have led camera departments, produced in the field, and supplied crew and equipment on productions involving Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages, Kubota, Starlink, IBM, and Conn-Selmer. The Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages and Kubota work ran through Grit Productions in 2023. My footage licenses through FilmSupply and Gallery Stock.

Today I run Geared Like A Machine, which puts creative direction, cinematography, crew, gear, logistics, and post under one operating system. GLM owns the package I shoot on and rents it to other productions, which is why I can arrive as crew and equipment at once.

The same experience pushed me into software. Through Production Engine I build tools for working production teams, five of them now on the App Store: CallSheet, GLM Rentals, DP Career Coach, SignalRig, and Video Production Estimator. American Cinematographer and British Cinematographer both covered CallSheet in 2026.

The connecting thread is not cameras and it is not code. It is removing avoidable friction so the work has the conditions it needs to succeed.