The Sauce
Awards, software, and everything else I’ve made since I picked up a camera. The long tail. Welcome to happy hell.
AWARDS
Bartender at Large picked up Best Documentary and Best Director (Erick Castro) at the Accolade Global Film Competition, and got into a handful of festivals along the way — LA Independent Film Festival Awards, LAIFFA, Cinema New York, Docs Without Borders, Singapore Independent Film Festival.
Also won a Legal Marketing Association video award — holiday card category, two years running, for Parker Poe — and a business plan competition back in grad school at Queens College.
SOFTWARE
Doesn’t matter anymore — any creative tool, I’ll learn it. Not hard in 2026. But I grew up making Doom WADs, was an Apple Genius back when you still needed the console, and a Tandy kid running DOS before that. Wrote NES music and burned it onto blank cartridges to play chiptunes before chiptunes were a thing, under the name Cold Cut Trio — named after Subway, because I liked Subway. Just a mad science experiment. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, Final Cut, After Effects, Blender, 3ds Max — if you put it in front of me, I’ll learn it.
BANDS
I like to say I invented the funny quips on Taco Bell sauce packets. That’s a lie. My ex did — got paid real money in LA to write those, while I was still driving us around in one shared car. We were also in a band together, Push Pals, out of Charlotte — I played bass. It ended over the car, plus some friendly rivalry over whose band was better. She’s still way too smart for me. Dating her was basically dating AI before AI was cool.
NOT ME
If you Google me, you might find a guy named Blake Rayner who ran The Orchard’s Australia and New Zealand business and signed Halsey and London Grammar. That’s not me — different Blake, spelled with no “o.” But I’m taking credit until someone makes me stop. I’m the Wario of life.
Also true, for the record: I’m the Bob Ross of Picross. I also almost married a lacrosse coach.
WHERE IT STARTED
Apple Inc. (2006–2010) — Sales, then Creative, then Genius duties, right as the first iPhone launched. Trained customers on Final Cut, Logic Pro, and the Adobe suite between repairs. That’s where I fell in love with computers and the digital arts. Studied at the University of North Carolina, class of 2009. Also once sold fine art photography through Timmermeyer Gallery, because why not.
PRESS
Video work has run on The Onion’s A.V. Club and Vice’s Noisey blog, both the US and Germany editions. I filmed Monotonix for Vice — a band who told me, straight-faced, that they wanted to be Led Zeppelin.
ODDS AND ENDS
Death By Audio built me custom pedals. A Place to Bury Strangers orbit. Twenty years of this, and I’m still finding things on the drives.
THE SCENE
I came up in Charlotte’s Milestone scene — the room that hosted legends before anyone cared, and where I opened for Battles. The people were the whole point. Andy the Doorbum, who ended up at East Jesus, the desert art compound past Slab City. Buck, whose parents framed his JNCO jeans and hung them in the house. Neil. Elevator Jay. Stranger Day. The skaters. My old bands. I know them all very well, and they’re in everything I make. I’ve shared houses with Jesse Clasen of HRVRD and Noah Warner from the Avett Brothers’ world. Donald Doolittle is tattooed on my knee. I know what I’m talking about.
I’m the bass player — the BurgerTime guy, running across the layers making the whole sandwich happen. Every CEO and power broker I’ve ever met wishes they’d done what I did. They chased money. I chased… creativity?
GWAR energy, but sweet. If I ever signed you a stupid autograph, I made you sign one back. And if you knew me then, you didn’t know a Blake at all. I went by Blade.
