Nicole Rinaldi is a Director and Designer with a particular interest in short-form for its capacity for experimentation. She’s resourceful- she took an old watercolor set and construction paper and turned it into a short that became an official selection at Animayo, an Academy-Qualified festival.

 

She’s young- but that’s because she hit the ground running. She completed the BFA program at Emerson in three years, having to fight the administration to become the youngest person to do so.

 

She’s a garden weed that cracks concrete- thriving where it’s unexpected for her. She takes her below-the-line experience in cinematography and production into an interdisciplinary approach to directing and design. 

 

With a concern for the future of filmmaking, Nicole volunteered for Film Fatales and prioritizes stories that are underrepresented. A key aspect of her style is to make sure the camera is at eye-level with the subject, making sure an audience isn’t looking down on or looking past characters because of a common unconscious bias in camerawork. 

 

As a designer, she has worked on features and shorts, ranging from 1600s period pieces to a storybook village, to even a grimy motel built in an AFI lecture hall. Nicole is drawn to films that allow her to elevate the narrative by integrating psychological elements into her design. For instance, in the Panavision New Filmmaker’s Grant Film, The Chosen One, she utilized vertical lines and pinstripes to emphasize how trapped the protagonist felt in his current world.