Phanatiks Entertainment

Phanatiks Entertainment. We are an independent video and
audio production company based in Newburgh, NY. Phanatiks Entertainment is a LLC consisting of Shawn Strong
and Umar A. Mutakabbir.
The company has existed and growing since its conception in 1999, solely as a music production studio. From its birth, PE catered to local artists to record their songs/albums, mixing and recording, artist development and CD production of finished materials. This company was developed from the creative mind of Shawn Strong, a 34-year old Newburgh, NY native. Shawn started as a music producer and still has some desire for the music until video
production came into his life while being a student at Orange County Community College. Evolving from being a DJ then music producer, Shawn began learning the facets of technology to take advantage of the aspects for being a propagator of visual communication. His road of mainly being self taught since graduating high school at Newburgh Free Academy, then migrating to St. John’s University to major/minor in Fine Arts and Communications respectively in Jamaica, Queens, NY. It was soon after he and then roommate opened a music studio and some years later becoming an audio engineer. Since 2007, Shawn has been a student at Orange County Community College or SUNY Orange in Middletown, NY majoring in Visual Communications. There is no media degree so he was opt to take the VC degree learning a vast amount of knowledgeable programs including Adobe’s Photoshop,
Illustrator, InDesign and at most his favorite, Apple’s Final Cut Pro. It is Apple’s Final Cut Studio programs which Shawn favors and uses most for the now video programming and production for short films, features, music videos, commercials, PSA’s, etc.
In 2008, along comes Umar Abdul-Mutakabbir, which Shawn knew for some time but did not know his interest in film/video. After talking about one of his poems, this opened up some dialogue about a piece Umar wrote and wanted to do something with it. The outcome, ‘StraightLand,’ their first feature film in the works written by Umar and will be directed and edited by Shawn. Umar is a 31-year-old Brooklynite now living in Highland Falls, NY. He is an intimate writer and fond reader of Edgar Allen Poe in which he was named after at birth. He writes in a way a singer sings, with passion. Writing is his “escape.” Through out junior high school and high school he read plays, poems, short stories by various authors like Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Helen Keller, and being ininfluenced by musicians like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Pearl Jam.
Shawn and Umar, work together as the lead members of Phanatiks Entertainment to be one of Hudson Valley’s premiere company for producing films and videos. Their visions and ambitions will simultaneously entertain, inform and showcase their expressive forms of art.
If pictures are worth a thousand words, Phanatiks Entertainment plans to produce a thousand sentences with
their motion pictures!