Sebastian Sada’s fascination for filmmaking can be traced back to the countless MTV music videos he would watch as a young boy after school. However, he didn’t care as much about what he was hearing, as he did to what he was seeing. “For me, the music was second to the visuals,” said Sada, a McAllen native.
Young Sadas was enchanted by how the videographers of those music videos used a variety of angles and techniques to capture singers and dancers. He was amazed by how much creative cinematography could add to a song.
That passion for film took Sada, a 2015 graduate of McAllen’s James “Nikki” Rowe High School, to taking on one of the most important production roles for the new CW Television Network series “Walker,” which was created by Anna Fricke.
The show is a reboot of the 1993-2001 “Walker, Texas Ranger” series, featuring Chuck Norris, and follows the same narrative: Cordell Walker, a widowed father, returns to Austin to rekindle his relationship with his family. However, Walker, a Texas Ranger, is suspicious about the death of his wife and seeks to get to the bottom of it.
Jared Padalecki plays Walker, while Lindsey Morgan plays Micki Ramirez, Walker’s new partner who is one of the few women Texas Rangers in history. The show debuted last month.
Sadas, the director’s assistant for the series, said the new show dives into new familial themes that almost every watcher can relate to.
“This new version of Walker is more dramatic than the original and is more grounded on familial issues and connection and personal ties, as opposed to any larger crime or investigations,” the 23-year-old said. “It is more about family and trust and the process of letting go and I think in 2021, after a really rough year, so many of us can connect to these central themes.”
After graduating from Nikki Rowe, Sada studied film production at the University of Texas at Austin. As a senior, he took part in the school’s UTLA program, which sent him to California for his last semester.
Sada interned for a talent agency in Beverly Hills, as well as London Alley Entertainment, a production company in Santa Monica. Through the latter internship, Sada was a production assistant for Ariana Grande’s music video for “Thank You, Next.”
The McAllen native’s past film experience also includes being a casting assistant for the first season of the Facebook Watch show “SKAM Austin,” a day player for the show “Walking Dead,” and an extras casting assistant for Prime Video’s show “Panic,” which finished filming last year.
As the director’s assistant of “Walker,” which is currently being filmed in Austin, Sada is responsible for being the communication liaison between the director and other departments of the set, and he said much of the managing and leadership skills he has stems from a production and arts program he took in high school.
Sada took part in the district’s Practicum of Arts & Video program, dubbed KMAC, which is where he wrote, filmed and edited his first film. It was in this class that Sada learned how to write captivating scripts, and edit films and music videos together.
During his senior year, Sada presided as the “station manager” of the class, overseeing the production of the program’s newscasts and other projects.
“I was given the task of managing content creation, and being able to see projects from beginning to end was a great learning experience for myself,” he said. “I was navigating the work of several departments and guiding everyone toward one singular vision.”
Being station manager for KMAC, he said, prepared him for his current role as directors assistant for “Walker.”
“KMAC certainly laid the foundation for my work as a director, as a creative and even now as a directors assistant on Walker,” Sada said.
Rob Garza, who has been the instructor of KMAC for the past 19 years, and said Sadas was “not a student you forget for all the right reasons… He was creative in his cinematography and how he directed, and how he lit scenes and what wardrobe his actors wore. He was detail oriented all the way to how he edited things.”
Garza and Sadas have kept in touch ever since their days producing on campus together.
“I am incredibly proud but not surprised,” Garza said of Sada. “I am very proud of what he has accomplished so far; I am not surprised that he has accomplished it, because you would know from his high school years that he was going to do great things.”
