THE TEAM

PATRICK CURRAN

Patrick is an award-winning writer, director, producer and actor from Newtown, CT and has been working in independent film for over 15 years. His short film ’Snowbird’ (2025) won Best Comedy Short at both Woods Hole and Block Island Film Festival, Best Narrative Short at Twelve Lions Film Festival, and Best International Film at Louth International Film Festival. His next projects, ‘Golden and Gone’, a spec feature, won Best Screenplay at the 15th LA Comedy Festival and ‘Fetch’, a multi-award winning short screenplay now being expanded into a feature, are both in active development.

Patrick is also a Nicholl Fellowship Semifinalist (Top 50, 2016) and makes his career as an actor in commercials. He lives in Los Angeles.

Instagram: @paddy_curr

DEVIN SKRADE

Devin is a writer, producer and actor from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He made his living appearing in print, commercial and television over the past 20 years in Los Angeles, but after landing a role on the hit television show Mad Men as the affable racist “Chip”, he realized his true passion was more in the crafting and writing of stories.

The award-winning short film ‘Snowbird’ (2025) was Devin’s first foray into producing, but he’s worked in a number of rooms developing television shows, and co-wrote the optioned horror feature ‘Rakshasa’ with his wife, writer/actor Ansuya Nathan.

Instagram: @devin_skrade

Snowbird

Snowbird was the inaugural project for Bottle of Smoke Films. With a short film script in hand, Pat and Dev set about raising the budget in March 2024. The cameras started rolling on June 1st.

Logline: A self-taught rocket scientist invites a big city journalist out into the desert to cover a launch that will prove, once and for all, that the Earth is flat.

Shot in four days – a half day on a sound stage in Los Angeles, followed by three and a half grueling days in the desert – Snowbird was equal parts love and ambition. Some would say the film shot for the moon, but as Lyle famously said, “The moon is not a variable in our experiment. We’d never make it.”

Snowbird is available to stream on the Bottle of Smoke YouTube channel.