Welcome to Pack Creek Productions
Pack Creek Productions is the film and video production company of award-winning filmmakers Michael Chandler and Sheila Canavan, who live and work just outside the town of Moab in Utah's spectacular canyon country. Moab is home to two national parks, boasts some of the nation's most scenic locations, and offers one of the rare places in the country with easy access to the Colorado River’s rapids.
We're surrounded by breathtaking views of the La Sal Mountains and the intricate red rock sandstone formations that give Southeastern Utah's high desert plateau its distinctive character.
Michael and Sheila have been making films here since 2001, when they left the San Francisco Bay Area to come to Moab's thriving community, an eclectic mix of writers and rock climbers, filmmakers and four-wheelers.
We hope you'll join us soon.
Michael Chandler, Producer/Director
Michael Chandler is an Academy-Award nominated filmmaker, working in non-fiction and fiction film. Michael and Sheila's documentary feature Knee Deep won four Grand Jury Prize awards and was aired on the PBS documentary series Independent Lens. Variety called it "a stranger-than-truth tale, both amusing and appalling. " Michael's film Forgotten Fires probed the burning by Ku Klux Klansmen of Black churches in South Carolina. Bill Moyers said about it: "If we wanted a real dialog about race in America, we'd start with this film." Michael has produced and directed documentaries for the PBS series Frontline. Blackout, a co-production with The New York Times, was the first media program to expose Enron's financial manipulation of energy markets. Secrets of the SAT dealt with the impact of standardized testing in college admissions and won First Prize in Broadcast Journalism from the Education Writer's Association.
Michael was a writer and editor on the Oscar-nominated The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, edited the Academy Award-nominated Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey, and wrote and edited the Oscar-nominated and Sundance Grand Jury Prize-Winner Freedom on My Mind, the Emmy Award-winning Yosemite: The Fate of Heaven, and ABC's Can't It Be Anyone Else?, for which he received the Christopher Humanitarian Award.
Michael has also edited feature films, including Never Cry Wolf, Mishima, and Amadeus, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.
Sheila Canavan, Producer
Sheila Canavan produced the feature-length documentary Knee Deep, which has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary Film. Her film credits include Waldo Salt: A Screenwriter's Journey and Yosemite, The Fate of Heaven. She is also a nationally-known attorney in consumer law and predatory lending fraud, specializing in financial abuse of the elderly. She served a three-year term on the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council, which advises the Board on its responsibilities under the Consumer Credit Protection Act. 
Photo courtesy Sarah A. Miller & The Salt Lake Tribune
