Nicole Rinaldi is a filmmaker who shines at bringing authentic visuals to vulnerable stories. 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 either the most polite punk you know or the most grunge librarian you’ve ever met. The culmination of her bookworm tendencies, she completed the BFA program at Emerson in three years, becoming the youngest to do so.

 

She’s a garden weed that cracks concrete- thriving where it’s unexpected for her. She also loves that metaphor for her work: taking inner conflicts and desires and bringing them to the surface. She takes her below-the-line experience in cinematography and production into an interdisciplinary approach to directing and design. 

 

Her work visualizes inner conflicts and the stories we tell ourselves through poignant, symbolic imagery and design. Most illustrative of this is “When the Wolf Comes Home”, where the film’s color palette is derived from bruising. The lighting and design of the film depict growth and setbacks in the healing process for a dysfunctional family.

 

As a designer, she has worked on features and shorts, ranging from 1600's 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.