Jeff Bollow is an award-winning director/producer, best-selling author, screenwriter, actor, film festival organizer and public speaker. He has recently launched FAST Screenplay, is writing his third book, and is developing a new TV series and building a feature film studio.

A Los Angeles native, Jeff has been involved professionally in the film industry since the age of 12, starting first as an actor. He has appeared in television and feature films such as Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, Lost Valley, Pink Lightning, “Columbo”, “Ann Jillian Show”, “Gabriel's Fire”, “The Trials of Rosie O'Neill”, “Sisters”, “Inside Out”, “Nightmare on Drug Street”, “Young Hercules” (ADR), and “Shortland Street”, as well as dozens of short films, including "As Dreams Are Made On", "Spot", "Bound By Spirit", "Summer Lessons", and more. He has appeared in television commercials for companies such as Pop Tarts, Doritos, Plymouth, Havoline, Visa, Movenpick, and others, and has done voiceovers for TV and radio ads, trailers and promos. He was a professional DJ at 103.1 FM KSRF at age 17, and has performed theatre at the Lex and Theatre Theater, among others. He also has an extensive history of improvisational comedy in three countries, with groups such as Theatresports (LA & NZ), the iMPS, Malignant Humor, Silage and On the Spot.

In his late teens, he developed a passion for film production and the creative side of the industry. Jeff has held nearly every film production job, including sound, boom, camera, DP, electric, grip, production, casting, editing, and marketing, on scores of music videos, corporate videos, short films, feature films and TV productions for companies such as Universal Studios, Castle Rock, Concorde/New Horizons (for famed producer Roger Corman), Propaganda Films, DNA, Twin Towers, and the Oxygen Network. His first production job was on Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen's debut music video clip "Brother for Sale".

In 1995, he turned his attention to his own projects, and wrote, directed and produced a series of short films, including “The Duel” (winner of the IFC New Filmmaker Award) and “After These Messages”, as well as producing an award-winning short film (”The Feed”) for Noble Films. Around this time, he was also writing in-house corporate videos for Universal Studios, and producing and directing the inflight video “LA Unlimited”.

Since migrating to New Zealand in 1996, and Australia in 2000, Jeff started Embryo Films, wrote and co-produced an ill-fated independent Australian feature film (6,000 Miles from Hollywood), and launched Screenplay.com.au, a feature film script development company, through which he has presented over 80 FAST Screenwriting Workshop weekends to over 1,200 participants in nine cities across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore, at such venues as Fox Studios Australia, UNSW, OPENChannel, QPIX, Bond University, ACT Writer's Centre, South Australia Writers Centre, and the Digital Media Hub for the MDA in Singapore. In addition to screenwriting, Jeff has taught acting at The Actor's Pulse in Sydney since 1999.

More recently, Jeff was the producer/director of Making Fantastic Short Films, an educational DVD that won Australia's ATOM Award for "Best Instructional / Training Resource of 2007" (as well as being nominated for two additional ATOM Awards). He is also the author of the bestselling books Writing FAST: How to Write Anything with Lightning Speed and the official Apple-certified Apple Training Series: iLife 08 for Peachpit Press, for which he wrote the chapters on iMovie 08, Apple's consumer video editing software.

During an extended stay in New Zealand throughout most of 2006 and 2007, Jeff directed three episodes of the youth magazine show Pacific Beat Street for Drum Productions and TV3, and co-founded New Zealand’s Big Mountain Short Film Festival which he co-organised, directed, programmed and hosted during its first two years.

Jeff was invited in 2007 to the jury of the prestigious Kuala Lumpur International Film Festival. Jeff has been profiled in Filmink Magazine and Asia's FiRST magazine, and has appeared in numerous newspaper and magazine articles over the years.

Jeff is the principal of Embryo Films / Borderless, an independent production company with several feature film and television projects in development. When he's not writing or directing, Jeff frequently travels around Australia and internationally to speak on the subjects of writing and filmmaking, and particularly making movies outside Hollywood.

In 2008, Jeff directed his first full-length play, Five Women Wearing the Same Dress by Alan Ball, author of American Beauty and Six Feet Under. Five Women was the inaugural production of PGT, the Pulse Group Theatre in Sydney Australia.

At the same time, he was hired to rewrite into English a Chinese action film screenplay (KNIFE) for LeBrocquy / Fraser in Singapore, and his work was directly responsible for attracting $1.5million of the film's budget.

Jeff returned to Kuala Lumpur to speak at the 2008 Kuala Lumpur International Film Festival to present his Making Movies Outside Hollywood seminar.

In late 2009, Jeff began building FAST Screenplay, the world's first and most comprehensive step-by-step professional screenplay development system — a mammoth year-long full-immersion process for generating production-ready screenplays. After pouring over three and a half years into it, FAST Screenplay is now running.

Through FAST, Jeff aims to generate enough market-ready screenplays to finally achieve his goal of building an independent film studio within 5 years, with writers around the world.

Alongside this effort, Jeff is also writing his third book, Phenomenal: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, developing a sci/tech/travel TV/web series called The Phenomenal Experience, and developing a new feature film, to be announced shortly.

You can follow the twists and turns of Jeff's ongoing progress and adventures on Jeff's Twitter page.

Jeff can be contacted directly via email.
Simply write to his name (first and last) at Yahoo.com.

Links to Jeff's various projects and ventures on the net:

About Jeff: IMDb .:|:. Wikipedia .:|:. Peachpit Press .:|:. Actors Pulse
Production Companies: Embryo Films .:|:. Borderless .:|:. ShootDownUnder
On Writing: FAST Screenplay .:|:. Writing FAST (book) .:|:. Screenplay.com.au
Film Projects: ONE (fomerly 4C) .:|:. 6,000 Miles (rip) .:|:. Screenplay Factory (FF, on hold)
Educational: Making Fantastic Short Films .:|:. The Actor's Pulse
Film Festival: Big Mountain Short Film Festival