Our Films
Top Pup Media, LLC, the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas video production company founded in 1995 by Russ Pond, has produced three feature films: the award-winning thriller Fissure (2008), the action thriller Infiltrators (2013), and the award-winning drama Sunny in the Dark (2015). The same storytelling craft drives our corporate work for Fortune 500 clients including Cisco, IBM, and the NFL.
The Films
The search for what's real starts inside.
Top Pup Media's debut feature. A detective haunted by his own bad choices investigates an unexplainable death at a mysterious house, where every witness tells a different story. Starring James Macdonald (Phone Booth, Hollywood Homicide).
Breaking in is the easy part.
An action thriller written and directed by Michael Stokes, produced by Top Pup Media together with Advocate Pictures and MPS Studios. Principal photography took place in Dallas in July 2012. Starring Jonny Cruz, Hallee Hirsh, Nathalie Kelley, Steve Railsback, Robert Picardo, and Gregory Jbara.
Our greatest desire is to be known.
Therapist Jonah Bock finally moves into the loft he waited two years for, never suspecting that Sunny, a homeless young woman, lives in the crawl space above it and spends her days in his home while he is at work. Written by Mike Maden. Starring Jay Huguley, Hannah Ward, and Lee Meriwether.
Why It Matters
Russ Pond spent 16 years inside Nokia and Uniden before turning to filmmaking full time. After a run of short films, including Growing Up, winner of the Audience Choice Award at the San Antonio Independent Film Festival, he chose Fissure from more than 450 script submissions and took it from page to festival screen.
Feature filmmaking is the most demanding format in video production: months of planning, a large cast and crew, tight budgets, and no room for an unclear story. That discipline carries straight into the corporate, commercial, and training work Top Pup Media produces today.
When we build a brand film or a customer story, we work the way a narrative filmmaker does. We find the character, define the conflict, and earn the resolution. It is the same approach we describe in how storytelling drives corporate video.
Fissure and Infiltrators were shot with largely local cast and crew around Dallas-Fort Worth, so the people and relationships behind them are the same network we bring to every production.
Every project starts with the audience, the conflict, and the emotional payoff, not a shot list.
Lighting, lensing, performance, and sound held to a standard built for the big screen.
Scheduling, casting, and crew management learned on feature sets, applied to every budget.
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