Cofounder
Director of Production: Videotape
Author: Runaway Empire, Sharon Tate, and Waiting for Love at Airports
In his pantry, you will find a large bag of Tootsie Rolls.
Andrew Yorke displayed a natural talent for the arts as a young child, writing his first play at the age of five. Approaching his early teens, he had learned several instruments and written several short stories, short movie scripts, and a comic strip. By the time he was twelve years old, Yorke began studying film with bi-weekly trips to libraries and video stores. With the end of his high school career, he had taken his interest to the next level, generating a small library of his own experimental shorts. College provided opportunities to conduct research in cinema, media theory, and music production. At the University of Oklahoma, Yorke and several other students formed the band Mediadroid, which recorded and produced an ambient EP entitled Darfur, with sales proceeds going to UNICEF. The band produced one more full-length album and an EP before disbanding in 2006.
After transferring to Austin College to further hone his skill set, Yorke co-wrote and directed the comedic short Finding the Truth: The Making of a Classic, along with several other shorts, which raised the profile of the media department and led directly to the institution’s significant investment in HD technology. In addition, Yorke worked closely with Glen Shenk at Video Post and Transfer, capturing, processing, and transferring a variety of films to various formats.
Yorke’s final college project, The Janterm Diaries, chronicles his experiences with a group of classmates on a month-long journey through Eastern Europe. The fourth short in the series, Chernobyl, was acclaimed for its personal, introspective look at the abandoned city and the people who once lived there. It is still screened for students at Austin College today.
Graduating with full honors, he was hired by Austin College to spearhead the New Media Department, where Yorke produced and directed several promotional videos for the college. In 2008, Yorke and his colleague Kevin Michael co-founded Xteamartists as an independent media house. Their first project was the emotionally jarring, feature-length picture Videotape. Along with co-writing the story, directing, and exploring nearly every facet of production, Yorke revisited his musical training to compose much of the original score. Following that, he edited and starred in the short film Bored Games, commissioned by the Sherman Arts Festival.
In addition to filmmaking, Yorke has published three books through Xteamartists. The first, Sharon Tate, written with the cooperation of the late actress’ sister Debra, was published on what would have been Sharon’s 69th birthday. Waiting for Love at Airports was published six months later. Both reached the top of the Amazon free e-book charts at numerous times in 2012. After a successful 2013 Kickstarter campaign, Yorke’s latest novella Runaway Empire was published in 2014, with a portion of the net proceeds going to the non-profit organization Sandy Hook Promise. He has since begun work with Kevin Michael adapting the novella to screen, and is set to direct as his next motion picture.