Alumni Success Story: Amanda (Hams) Melby

Amanda (Hams) Melby, 1992 Tech High School graduate, grew up around music and theater. Her parents owned Al’s Music store in St. Cloud and her mother was a longtime play director in St. Cloud Area School District. It’s no surprise that Melby found her passion in film. Her latest film, “Raising Buchanan,” has just been named Best Picture in the Red Rose Film Festival.

After high school, Melby focused on a music and theater career at Concordia College in Moorhead. She soon recognized it was too much to juggle both. Instead, she narrowed in on theater and picked up English as a double major. Not willing to give up her love for musical performance, she continued to play the cello in the orchestra at Concordia. She graduated with her theater/English double major and moved to Washington, D.C. where she interned in arts management at The Kennedy Center of Performing Arts.

Her experience with arts management landed her several jobs which meant traveling between Cleveland and Washington, D.C. to manage different art centers. After being downsized to one, Melby realized she wanted to be back on the stage. She began to act full-time in Cleveland and eventually moved to Los Angeles, California. For five years, she had a variety of acting jobs until she and her husband moved to Arizona for his job and to start a family.

“When I moved here from LA,” says Melby, “I was looking for a scene study class … to participate in – like I had been doing in LA for years. There weren’t any! So, I started one. It steadily grew into a full-service studio offering professional training for adults, teens and tweens. We also offer classes for kids, occasionally, and summer camps. I love teaching.”

Melby’s acting studio, Verve Studios, focuses on technique and then on applying that technique to any medium such as commercials, film, TV, stage or voice-over. She has grown her business to include six additional teachers, one a faculty associate at Arizona State University, who recommended her for a position at the university. Melby now also teaches a 300-level course in the theatre and film department each semester.

Owning and operating a studio didn’t keep Melby from her passion of acting itself. She continued to take on roles while she taught.

“What I found here [in Arizona] … I was getting cast in a lot of big parts in small things or really small parts in a lot of big things, and so I decided that I wanted to produce my own film,” explains Melby.

Melby on Candid Camera
Melby on Candid Camera

Through her studio, Melby has been a part of 28 short films, whether it was writing, directing, producing or editing. She is also one of the creators of “Screen Wars.” Its first season was nominated by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for seven Emmy Awards and won four of those awards. However, she knew she always wanted to do a feature film.

“Raising Buchanan” became that film.

“I have a good friend … named Bruce Dellis, and he and I knew we always wanted to work together on a feature film,” says Melby.  “He wrote it [“Raising Buchanan”] for me, with me in mind as a character. We developed the script, went back and forth with changes and iterations. We did a table reading with some actors we really liked. I produced it and raised some money and hired the rest of the staff.”

The feature took a little over a year to film and edit. They debuted the film at the Arizona Film Festival in April of 2019.

“That was well received. It was very cool people came out for it,” remembers Melby. “We’ve played in other film festivals since then. We’ve been in Manhattan, New Haven in Connecticut, Franklin, Tennessee and then Syracuse, New York and we just did the Twin Cities.”

Melby and Dellis have the next several months booked premiering their film at festivals around the United States. The film will then be released for streaming.

Melby is excited about her future. She’s achieved her dream of producing and acting in a feature film. She’s brought her passion for theater on and off the stage together. With the spotlight on her, her future has never looked brighter.

Updated May 12, 2020

“Raising Buchanan is now available to watch and stream! The film can be found at iTunes,  Prime Video or https://raisingbuchanan.com/vod for a full list of platforms.