About Austin Film Crew

John Franklin Rinehart

Filmmaker. Founder, Austin Film Crew. Creator, Texas Legacy in Lights.

From a small farm in Gonzales to large-scale commercial production and permanent public experiences, John Franklin Rinehart has built Austin Film Crew around the idea that meaningful places deserve world-class storytelling.

The path moved through music, film, brand work at real scale, and eventually back home, where Texas Legacy in Lights proved what can happen when ambition finally matches the story a place has been carrying all along.

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Between the horses and the edit bay was where I found home.

There are many things those two worlds can learn from each other - not least that they need one another to survive.

The Beginning

Art, Texas culture, and the road into film.

A trumpet, a farm, and a long stretch between the world he came from and the work he felt called to make.

I grew up on a small farm in Gonzales, Texas. Cactus, post oaks, old tractors, and the occasional coyote. Film was not in the cards. But my uncle John Harvey Nelson played fourth-chair trumpet for the DFW Symphony, and from a very young age I loved watching him play. Inevitably, I was given a trumpet, and my life of walking a tightrope between art and Texas culture was born.

I traveled the world playing music. When I finally burned out, I found film. The spark had been there since childhood, but it felt like a pipedream - something so far beyond my world that making a living from it boggled the mind. Strangely enough, it was through that tension between art and the land I came from that I found my calling.

I studied music in Sydney. Started a production studio in California. Moved back to Texas and built Austin Film Crew. Over the years we produced work for Walmart, Dell, Intel, and Keller Williams - real commercial production at real scale. But the work that changed everything started closer to home.

Gonzales

The hometown that became the proving ground.

A foundational Texas story was hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to match it with enough ambition.

We all have the right to remember our history. While we might not always recognize it, having a history is something to be grateful for - something not everyone possesses.

I looked at my hometown and saw something most people had stopped seeing. Gonzales played a foundational role in the birth of Texas. The Come and Take It story. The DeWitt colonies. The Runaway Scrape. But the history was fading. Parts of the community felt invisible, even though their story was woven into the very fabric of Texas independence. And I thought - why does this town not have the same kind of experience you would find in San Antonio or at a Disney park? Why does the size of a city determine whether its story gets told with ambition?

So I built one. Texas Legacy in Lights is a permanent 3D projection mapping experience at the Gonzales Memorial Museum. A live-action narrative film cast directly onto the museum wall, twice a night, six nights a week - built to run for ten to fifteen years. We developed it with Gonzales Main Street, funded through the Gonzales Economic Development Corporation, supported by the City of Gonzales. The whole community had a hand in it.

When a story is told that way - night after night, year after year - it stops being entertainment. It becomes something people share across generations. They start to see themselves in their own history. Visitors come from outside and experience something that only exists in that place. And the town changes. Not because someone came in and changed it, but because the people who live there remembered what they already had. That was always the point.

Why This Work

Small towns have big stories.

The job is not to reduce those stories to fit their context. The job is to elevate the context until the story can finally be told at full scale.

I think about Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci a lot. Both were men ahead of their time. Future thinkers. People who saw beyond the norms but chose to work within a society that was not nearly as advanced as they were - to help people move forward, even when it went against what was considered appropriate or real.

The world gets pushed forward by ideas that make us think, that make us a little uncomfortable. Nobody likes to acclimate. Your body does not like it. Everything is changing around you. But the people who push us farther are the ones who usually make us uncomfortable first.

I see that in this work. Most people look at a small town and see limitations. I look at a small town and see a story that nobody has had the nerve to tell at the scale it deserves. If we did not do it, no one else would. We had to become our own heroes, step up, and face the tough choices. If something was worth doing, it was worth doing right.

I often thought of myself as like Willy Wonka - trying to inspire belief in others, ignite a sense of magic. The most beautiful part of this whole thing has been watching people start to believe. In themselves. In their community. In their history. I hope they never forget that they can achieve anything together.

What We're Building Now

From one city to a network of permanent attractions.

What We're Building Now

Texas Legacy in Lights proved something in one city. A permanent, story-driven experience can transform how a community sees itself and how the world sees that community. It generates tourism. It deepens civic identity. It creates revenue that lasts.

Now we are building projects that connect multiple cities through their shared historical DNA - stories already rooted in the past becoming new cultural and economic infrastructure across entire regions. Not temporary exhibits. Not one-off productions. Permanent attractions, anchored in real history, designed to run for years.

The model works. The question now is which communities are ready.

If your community has a story worth telling permanently, we should talk.

Austin Film Crew is building permanent public experiences for communities that want history, identity, and tourism to work together over the long term.

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