Biography
Neal Hallford was born in Sapulpa, Oklahoma to school teachers Henry Hallford and Betty Hallford, and raised into a loving, academically-oriented family that he says were also gifted, natural storytellers who supported his varied creative and dramatic interests in writing, acting, and film making.
At seventeen, just days after graduating from high school, Neal started a job as a disc jockey at KTOW, a local country and western station outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Taking full advantage of the production studio at his disposal, he and his best friend Ron Bolinger wrote and produced "Uncharted Regions," a Twilight Zone-like series of weird tales radio dramas that aired intermittently between 1984 and 1989. These radio dramas would later play a key role in helping Neal land his first professional writing job.
In 1990, just six months after graduating from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in radio, television, and film production, Neal took a job in the computer gaming industry where he quickly established himself as well-respected writer and game designer, responsible for the creation of a number of best-selling and award winning computer role-playing games including "Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra," "Planet's Edge," "Betrayal at Krondor," "Dungeon Siege," and others. In 2001, he condensed his experiences into the book "Swords & Circuitry: A Designer's Guide To Computer Role-Playing Games" which he co-wrote with his wife Jana Ondrechen Hallford. (Later on, they would lift a portion of the book's title to be the name of their film production company, Swords & Circuitry Studios.)
Despite having been a backyard filmmaker at thirteen, and having received his degree in film production from the University of Oklahoma, and having regularly written and directed actors like John Rhys-Davies and Kate Mulgrew and Ron Perlman as part of his game production work, Neal didn't become directly involved with film and television work until moving to San Diego in 1996 where he became a collaborator with screenwriter Jimmy Diggs, best known for his work as a writer on "Star Trek: Voyager" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."
Since 2006, Neal has become a very active cinematographer and director in the local San Diego indie scene. The first dramatic piece from his production company, a black and white horror movie entitled "The Case of Evil" styled after the classic Universal movies of the 1920s-1950s, bows at the Horrible Imaginings Horror Film Festival in October 2014. He is also a co-producer and the director of photographer for "The Con of Wrath," a documentary directed by Star Trek expert Larry Nemecek about a notoriously gone-wrong Star Trek convention in 1982.
In 2017, Neal rebooted his "Uncharted Regions" series with a pilot episode, "Someday, Over You," which opened the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival in San Diego, California. He and his wife continue to produce new episodes for their first season.
