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 arc started on the water. At fifteen CWB named me to its national wakeboard team. A year later, its professional roster. I competed at the world championships, where I finished top five in the world in my division, and rode the Pro Wakeboard Tour with Nautique and CWB listed as my sponsors. Then I turned the camera around on a sport I already knew from the inside, and never turned it back.

I have been shooting since 2005. The first thing I made that proved the turn was Momentum, a full-length wakeboarding film I produced, directed, and edited across Texas, California, and the Philippines and released in 2012 as a forty-six-minute DVD. One stretch of it was a week living on a houseboat at Lake Shasta.

After the Art Institute of Dallas I co-founded Ultralite Films in 2012 with Bud Force and Erich Schlegel. 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.

Tige Boats hired Geared Like A Machine directly to produce the walkthrough films for both of their flagship 2026 models, the Ultre ZX and the Z3. I directed, shot, and edited both. The Z3 film took five 2026 Telly Awards. Gold for Cinematography, plus Silvers for Directing and Editing. No agency in between.

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, on every continent except Antarctica.

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 across 2023. In 2017 I filmed and edited Alex Graydon’s part for X Games Real Wake. We won the fan vote. 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, three of them now on the App Store: CallSheet, GLM Rentals, and DP Career Coach. 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.