Our Team
Scott Hays
Writer, Producer, and Director
Scott Hays has taken on various roles throughout his lifetime and garnered invaluable knowledge in numerous fields. He has been at times, a writer, an editor, a college professor, a media consultant, a radio/cable TV host, and an executive producer. Consistently looking forward, always ready for the next opportunity, and willing to take chances, Scott continues to produce ideas and bring them successfully to life. At the moment, he is co-producer of the public affairs show “Inside OC” with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Rick Reiff, which broadcasts 7x per week on the various PBS SoCal channels, 7x per week on Cox Channel 3-TV from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and on KDOC-TV in the southern California market.
His passion projects are those that help bring awareness to communities that often go unnoticed. Along these lines, combining his love of music and video production, Scott wrote, produce, and directed numerous projects for non-profits, including a benefit CD and short-documentary on homelessness, a music-documentary for an organization that builds homes for women and children transitioning out of abusive homes, and a docu-style video celebrating the 25th anniversary of Friendship Shelter in Laguna Beach, Calif.
Prior to all this, Scott worked as a media consultant for several publishing companies, where he helped launch general consumer and trade newspapers, magazines, and websites; and for a digital company that catered to the Chief Marketing Officers for some of the largest advertising brands in the country. Over the course of his 20-year career, Scott has also launched websites, managed marketing strategies and advertising campaigns, and published roughly a dozen, mostly non-fiction books for major publishing companies.
From video-taping weddings, Dan McKechnie entered the video & film industry by starting a small production company in his garage, From this humble beginning, Dan started video taping weddings. For many years after, Dan served as a video production consultant for the Irvine Unified School District creating educational programming, and teaching high school students and teachers video production techniques. Within 10 years, Dan evolved into a 12,000-square foot editing facility in Anaheim, California, equipped with three state-of-the-art edit suites, connected by a multi-format edit deck machine room, a sound studio, movie theatre presentation room and nationwide clientele. As technology advanced, Dan became one of the first editors in Orange County to join the desktop computer world with the revolutionary Avid system. With cinematography and editing as his first true loves, he liquidated his interest in the facility and formed a video/film production group, where he joined with the Southbay Studios family in Long Beach, applying his skills to TV shows and specials, commercials, infomercials, and Internet programming which all followed even after Southbay became Thunder Studios. Dan has become an 8K Red cinematographer, which now in addition to Avid includes editing in format 5K Final Cut.
Dan McKechnie
Cinematographer, Editor
