Freelance Creative is a start-up company operating in Los Angeles California and El Paso, TX. The company aims to bring an innovative approach to pitching and developing stories for the screen, as well as print and online media. Our target market is studios and independent producers looking to appeal to the ever-growing Latino Market in the U.S. and the Spanish speaking market throughout the world.
At the heart of Freelance Creative’s innovative approach is a talented duo of storytellers from the Cuidad Juarez/El Paso Border region. Both Luis Manuel Ruiz Aguilar and Carlos Tejeda were born in Cuidad Juarez, Luis grew up and studied in El Paso; Carlos attended school in Mexico until earning his bachelor’s degree at New Mexico State University’s Creative Media Institute. Luis earned his Bachelor’s at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Each has been learning and practicing the screen trade for over ten years.
The duo is managed by yours truly, Rog North. The three of us have worked together on three short films: Penny, Cycle, and Tempered. Carlos has gone on to produce several short and feature films with PRC. Luis has worked in Los Angeles since 2015, learning the business of distribution and marketing with Latin Entertainment Associates and honing in screenwriting while working alongside Rami Rivera Frankl, the co-chair of the Latino Committee at the Directors Guild of America, as a script reader and personal assistant.
Our approach is centered around a “slate” strategy whereby we pick a genre: crime thriller in this instance, and get together a group of stories that are loosely associated to each other, in this way, building-then nurturing- an ever-expanding audience, rather than building one audience over and over again.
We’ve set out a schedule for having completed screenplays for the following four stories:
Herman (Crime Thriller, Feature Film Concept)
Herman, once a powerful and respected drug dealer comes home from a 19-year prison sentence to find that his daughter Daisy has been missing for over a year. Herman’s street cred isn’t enough to get him help.
Though he has never operated a smartphone or a computer, Herman quickly harnesses modern day technology to aid him in his search for his baby girl, who he’s never met in real life before.
Citlali (Crime Thriller, Feature Film Concept)
Citlali, a member of the Raramuri in Chihuahua, lives in peace with her family out on the mountain range when narcotrafficking suddenly arrives at her doorstep when cartel members begin to use some of her lands to plant poppy fields.
At first, she goes along with them to avoid a bloodbath but all goes out the window when she realizes that her son is involved in the trade. Citlali takes matters into her own hands, employing a literally scorched earth policy which ends tragically.
Doña Linda (Crime Thriller, Feature Film Concept)
Doña Linda is a hard-working, humble housekeeper. Most treat Doña Linda with dignity, except one who ridicules her lower-class status. When Doña Linda’s husband is suddenly abducted and held for ransom, she takes the rich woman’s jewelry and her son as ransom.
Doña Linda has a change-of-heart, deciding that she will not be a part of the vicious cycle. Unfortunately for Doña Linda, aborting the mission’s no longer an option at that point.
Project Reynaldo (Crime Thriller, Feature Film Concept)
Daniello, a sixteen-year-old Mexican pop star visits Los Angeles to record with the world’s top pop producers. Accompanying Daniello is his father Memo Samaniego and their bodyguard Reynaldo. Reynaldo warns Memo, an aging singer who siphons Daniello’s money to feed his vicious drug and alcohol addiction, to seek help before he becomes a liability.
Soon after Daniello’s new album gains crossover success, Memo, Daniello changing the trio’s lives forever… not all of the ways being positive.
In addition to our crime-thriller slate, we’re currently awaiting scores from Blacklist for Welcome Home Gregor, which has now undergone several Stage 32 sessions. Logline: When Gregor Samsa returns home from war with a horrible mutation, his sister Grete and her family must deal with the bloodcurdling fact that Gregor is turning into a giant cockroach. Based on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
In early July we will begin pitching a comedy series called Convention.
Convention is the story of Herb Sanchez, a Congressman and rumored 2024 Presidential Candidate who’s sitting in a hotel room with a transsexual woman contemplating every single life decision that’s brought him to that exact moment.
On the other side of the hotel room door is an investigative news team, which may have just fallen into the biggest story of their young lives, ready to tear him apart for his support of anti-LGBTQ legislation.
Convention pilot is on its fourth draft, with season outline and character bios completed.
