About / Tim Medina / Strasburg, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

I make brand films during the week and folk horror on the weekends.

Both of those are the same job, and this page is mostly about why.

Writer & director

Lancaster County, PA

Stump & Root Co. since 2024

Films since 2026

Phone of the Dead, a short film in development from Stump & Root Films

Tim Medina | Writer & Director

01 · Who

The short version.

My name is Tim Medina. I run a creative studio in Strasburg called Stump & Root Co., I direct short films under Stump & Root Films, and I host the Christian Filmmakers Guild once a month in Lancaster.

The commercial side pays for the film side, and the film side keeps the commercial side honest. That is not a compromise, it is the arrangement, and most of the studios I admire are built the same way.

My first short, What Beckons in the Wood, is a 1930s folk horror piece about a man who is offered exactly what he deserves. We shot it over winter nights on borrowed land, lit almost entirely by candles inside the frame, with a crew who mostly worked for the love of it.

The second one, Phone of the Dead, is written with my wife Deborah, and is in development now.

Production photography from Stump & Root Films

Tim Medina · Writer & director

04 · What I am after

Most short horror is built around a gimmick. That has never been what I want.

I want to use the elements of horror to reach something deeper, the heart of what it means to love one another and to grieve one another, which is only love that has nowhere left to go.

The films I keep coming back to are the ones that ask something of the person watching. Not a puzzle to solve, but a question you carry out of the room with you and are still turning over on the drive home.

Tim Medina · Writer & director

I am a Christian, and that shapes what I think a story is for. Not that every film has to say so out loud, but that I believe stories are true things about the world rather than decorations on top of it, and that the craft is worth doing well because the one who made us makes things well.

Practically that means characters get consequences, cheap endings get cut, and nothing gets to be shocking for its own sake. There is a difference between a film that looks at something dark and a film that enjoys it.

The name

A shoot shall come up from the stump.

Isaiah 11

Isaiah 11. Stump & Root Co. grew out of that root, and the film work is the shoot coming up out of it. Same stump, two things growing, and the word shoot happens to mean both.

05 · Get involved

For anyone who needs the specifics.

Tim Medina · Writer & director

Based in

Strasburg, Lancaster County, PA

Founded

Stump & Root Co., 2024

Film arm

Stump & Root Films, 2026

Camera

Sony FX3

Glass

DZO Arcana Anamorphics, Sigma Art

Post

Premiere, DaVinci Resolve

Travel

Regional, and further for the right project

If you are trying to work out whether we are a fit, the fastest way is to watch the film and then send me a paragraph about yours.

I read everything that comes in myself. There is no producer to get past and no form that goes into a void.

Thank you. We have it.

We read every one of these ourselves, and we will get back to you within a few days. If you are auditioning, we will send the script and sides then.

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