Caleb Sobolewski — Portfolio

Direction and Production

Video

“I am a person. You are not.” – Severance Visual Match

For this project, I directed and produced a frame-accurate recreation of a scene from Apple TV+’s Severance. We ran it like a real film set: call sheets, dailies, costume construction, and casting across both the general student body and NMU’s School of Theatre and Dance. The goal was a serious study of cinematic craft through reproduction, to understand the full breadth of effort that goes into high-level production. I handled all editing and visual effects in post. Getting the lighting, blocking, and performance to match the original required deep pre-production and sharp attention to detail at every stage.

Emily’s 21st – Documentary

A short “backyard documentary” about my friend Emily’s 21st birthday. This project sits in the modes of celebration and the bittersweet. I interviewed my friend and also captured footage of her birthday night celebration, then layered additional sound elements in post to create tension and depth between image and audio. The film explores the weight of a milestone that rarely feels the way you expect it to.

This piece was nominated into NMU’s yearly student film festival.

Atomos Ninja Inferno – Tutorial

The original assignment asked for a 3–5 minute equipment tutorial. I went well beyond that and produced a full in-depth walkthrough of the Atomos Ninja Inferno, a professional external monitor and recorder used on film sets. As a kid I wanted to be a technology YouTuber, so I treated this like the real thing: scripted, well-paced, with on-camera demonstrations, and real test footage showing what the gear can do. It now serves as the official tutorial resource for NMU students who want to check out and use this piece of equipment.

Please Do Not Touch – Directing Dialogue

From my introductory cinema course, this short was built around a script handed to every student in the class. The challenge was to construct a complete story and visual world around the same given lines, making directorial decisions that could set your interpretation apart from everyone else’s. I filmed two other students in the course as my actors. It was one of my first real experiences turning a constraint into a creative framework and taught me that the story can be so much more than what’s in the script itself.

Design, Project Management, Creative Direction

Graphic Based Projects

Keweenaw Youth Arts Association

For this group project, we developed a full campaign for a fictional nonprofit focused on connecting young artists in rural Upper Peninsula communities with real creative opportunities and career pathways. As a team we built out the branding and a working marketing strategy document, including tone words that guided every content decision. My role was social media content: I designed several posts and produced a short video framed as an episode of a fictional educational access series. Motion graphics were planned for the video but cut due to a collaboration constraint late in the project.

Enchanted Pen Conference

The Enchanted Pen is a fictional fantasy writers’ conference set in Hocking Hills, Ohio. Every decision was chosen with deep attention to detail. I researched real authors in the genre, dug into what readers and writers actually want from a conference experience, and used that to inform content decisions from the ground up. As programming lead, I developed the full conference schedule in both short and long-form versions, then carried that visual system into social media assets and attendee badges. The social content had to feel like a real event people would want to attend, not a student project, so the pre-planning drove everything.

Students’ Art Gallery

The Students’ Art Gallery at Northern Michigan University is a fully student-run gallery on campus. I was part of the team for four years, starting as Social Media Manager and finishing as Art Director before passing the role off this spring. Every exhibition came with a new visual identity and my job was to adapt that identity across a wide range of formats, both print and digital. Schedules, posters, social posts, signage, mockups. The work was genuinely multi-medium and the volume was high. Staying consistent while also letting each show feel distinct was the ongoing challenge across all of it.

Creative Direction, Post Production

Photography

Argonics, Inc.

During my multimedia marketing internship at Argonics, I shot across a wide range of contexts and styles. That meant professional headshots, controlled studio product photography, and on-site work at real job locations. The on-site shoots had two distinct goals: environmental storytelling that captured the culture and scale of the work, and in-field stock photography of products in actual use. Switching between those modes in the same day required both technical flexibility and a clear eye for what each shot needed to communicate.

NMU Marketing and Communications

As a photographer for NMU’s Marketing and Communications department, the guiding principle was quality content from the student perspective. I handled the full workflow on every shoot: pre-production planning, coordinating across teams, solving problems on site, and editing the final selects. Photos were distributed across campus, online platforms, and print materials. After each shoot, I organized and uploaded everything into a shared online database with detailed tagging so teams across campus could find and use assets easily.