When the Emmys were handed out in Los Angeles last month, two of the technical awards were won by people from Louisiana who graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette the same year, but, oddly, had never crossed paths there.
Chris Welcker holds his Emmy award.
Chris Welcker won for Outstanding Sound Mixing for a limited or anthology series or movie for his work on Amazon’s New Orleans-shot “Daisy Jones & the Six,” and Natalie Kingston was awarded an Emmy for her cinematography on “Black Bird” on Apple TV+. Both are proud graduates of ULL, class of 2004.
It was the first such award for either of the two artists, and a testament to how much can be accomplished with a lot of ambition and good old-fashioned hard work.
Neither had the luxury of going to film school, and neither were from areas remotely connected to the film industry.
Kingston was born and raised in New Iberia, and Welcker was and still is a New Orleanian. Both, with no connections and still honing their skills after college, learned by starting small and getting their feet in the door in order to soak up every bit of expertise from the experts around them.
An artsy kid
Kingston knew early on that she loved creating. As a small child, she was always doing something artsy.
“I would do stage plays or productions, or fashion shoots with my Barbies dolls,” she said. “At the age of 12, I was given a VHS camcorder … I didn’t know what a cinematographer was, but I knew what a director was, so maybe at that age I thought that’s where I was headed.
“What I did know for sure was that I wanted to be behind the camera, telling fascinating stories.”
That’s easier said than done when you don’t live in a film mecca. In 2004, there wasn’t much of a film industry yet in New Orleans, either. So, Kingston took a job in retail.
She was moving up the ladder and transferred to Dallas, but she realized it wasn’t her calling and that somehow she needed to get back to what she loved.
Natalie Kingston, cinematographer, on stage at the Emmy Awards.
Taking a job at a cable access TV station in Opelousas, she was charged with getting locally sourced programs on the air.
The station gave her a show and creative freedom. She learned to write, direct, edit, and shoot. She also learned to operate a camera by shooting live, local sports.
With this knowledge under her belt, she began shooting local commercials.
A low-budget beginning
Her first movie was in East Texas, a low-budget drama, where she was an assistant camera operator.
She worked for free, but she was taking it all in — pulling focus, slating — anything that helped her climb the ladder in the world of cinematography.
From there she moved on to short films. In 2011, she took a 3-month lighting seminar in Rockford, Maine.
“I learned all of the facets of lighting, and the lightbulbs went off, no pun intended,” Kingston said. “I was a changed person after that.”
More films and shooting a music video for Billie Eilish cemented her status in the world of cinematography. She was recommended by a series of producers to shoot all six episodes of “Black Bird” with Taron Egerton, Greg Kinnear and Paul Walter Hauser (who won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for his performance in that film).
Kingston moved to Hollywood in 2020 with her director husband, and is very proud of the fact that she is the first woman in any fiction category ever to win the award for cinematography.
A word from grandma
For native New Orleanian Chris Welcker, as a musician, he tinkered with the idea of majoring in jazz studies at college but figured a music/media degree would be more conducive to getting a job after graduation.
But how, and where?
His grandmother began sending Welcker clippings from The Times-Picayune about a tax incentive program to bring the film industry to New Orleans. Those articles encouraged him to come back home and look for work.
Welcker was waiting tables to pay the bills when a colleague mentioned that a film shooting locally was looking for a DJ immediately, because the actor hired for the part had quit and walked off the job.
Welcker showed up with his turntable for the on-camera work in a raunchy comedy called “College.” But he was meeting people on set — in particular, a boom operator and a sound mixer.
Over time, small opportunities cropped up, until a sound mixer from Baton Rouge hired him and took him under his wing, and he really learned the ropes.
When big films like “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” came to New Orleans to shoot, experienced sound mixers were flown in from Los Angeles and elsewhere. Suddenly Welcker was learning from the masters.
A generous mentor
But a mentor from Whidbey Island, Washington, who was perpetually “retiring” had the most impact on Welcker’s life.
The sound engineer worked with Welcker on “Twelve Years A Slave” and brought him on board for “Jurassic World.”
And when he really retired and moved to Hawaii, he called Chris to tell him he was sending him all of his sound equipment so he could start his own career.
“This man was so generous to me,“ Welcker said. “I was part of the second unit on these films, but he made sure I got a credit as a sound mixer, and that’s important.”
Sound mixing on Jordan Peele’s 2016 “Keanu” led to numerous other films, among them “Bill & Ted Face the Music”, “Deep Water” and last year’s “65” with Adam Driver.
Chris Welcker won an Emmy for his work on Amazon’s New Orleans-shot ‘Daisy Jones & the Six.’
A scene from ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’
Welcker was hired to sound mix the last three episodes of “Daisy Jones & the Six” when they moved the production to New Orleans. The producers submitted episode 10 for a nomination, and the rest is history.
As Welcker said… “What are the chances two kids who went to college in Cajun country and graduated the same year both end up winning first-time Emmys on the same night in Los Angeles?”