Cody Deegan
- Director
- Actor
- Writer
Cody was born in Bakersfield, California in 1973. His family moved to
Fallon, Nevada in 1976 where he spent his childhood with an older
sister and a twin sister. Cody wanted to make movies at the age of four
after seeing Star Wars. He developed his drawing skills by drawing
action scenes from movies he'd seen and of movies he envisioned making.
Cody lived in a sparsely populated neighborhood so he would play
multiple characters in his home movies. He loved stunt work and visual
effects - he often jumped off his parents' roof into bean bags and
attempted to simulate gunfire and explosions. In high school Cody was
in charge of putting on performances at school assemblies, which
usually involved primitive pyrotechnics. He studied Live Action Film
Production and Character Animation at CALARTS from 1991-1995 while also
studying music and participating in the experimental animation and
theater schools. After college Cody worked at an art store in Reno,
Nevada and painted murals in homes. In 1997 he was offered a tattoo
apprenticeship. He opened his own tattoo shop in 2000, but closed it in
2003 when his son Kaleb was born, whom he had to raise on his own. Cody
started work on his first feature movie in 2003 in which he wrote,
storyboarded, designed and created costumes, ran camera, edited,
composed, and created visual effects. During this time he wrote and
illustrated a series of books on building camera stabilizer systems for
independent filmmakers. He became a web-based flash developer in 2004
and gradually shifted his work focus to television commercial
production by 2009.