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"making my dreams real one image at a time"

about akley

Akley Olton is an award-winning filmmaker, visual artist, and creative consultant specializing in creative direction for high-end film, audiovisual, and multimedia content productions. Mr. Olton has been studying visual arts ever since high school and filmmaking at UWI in Barbados and the International School of Film and Television [EICTV] in Cuba, following up with workshops and internships in several other countries, absorbing skills and knowledge in every aspect of filmmaking – scriptwriting, directing, editing, producing. It shows in the excellence of his work, which has won accolades and awards regionally and internationally. He has sharpened his advanced visual aesthetic and technical expertise into a streamlined creative consultancy that helps companies and individuals translate advanced concepts into beautiful forms that resonate with the audience on a higher level. A core theme behind Akley’s visual style is resistance, and testimony to the transformative power and impact that art has on society. He follows a self-taught formula that infuses the creative process, with the discipline and flexibility to allow clients to participate in the production process. With over 10+ years of industry experience, his work has spanned nearly all film, audio-visual, and multimedia mediums including content for cinema, web, broadcast television, smartphones, virtual reality (VR), electronic billboards, and print. 

 

The excellence of Olton’s work is remarkable on its own, and much more so given his youth and that he and his company Island Rebel Media are based in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). His first short film, Black Doll, was screened at 12 film festivals from the Caribbean to Europe. He was co-writer and cinematographer for Hero, about Trinidadian icon Ulric Cross. His documentary, Madulu,The Seaman about the whaling town of Barrouallie and its legendary whale hunter George “Tall 12” Frederick, premiered at the 2023 Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, one of the most prestigious documentary film festivals in the world and the largest in North America. In 2021, he won the Creative Activism Award from the anti-war arts foundation Cultures of Resistance Network, and in 2022 he was 1 of the 100 who received the prestigious Prince Claus Award. Olton’s many regional and international accolades are as much for the aesthetic merit of his work as the consistent integrity of his vision, which focuses on themes of environmental preservation, indigenous rights, racial justice, and the revaluation of history; and his commitment to the people and land of SVG. In his past and ongoing projects, Olton has shown himself to be committed to telling the stories of his homeland SVG, and to nurturing his compatriots to do the same. SVG has remained consistently his source of inspiration and he has managed to make a (precarious) living making and teaching movies.

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