Transmultimedia Entertainment is a film and television production company built on the idea that stories are not static objects, but things that move through time—shaped by the people who carry them forward. The work is not only to tell those stories, but to preserve them in a way that allows them to be seen and understood beyond the moment in which they were created.
Its founder, Richard Zampella, (SAG/AFTRA) came to filmmaking through a path defined as much by place as by profession. He grew up on a 100-acre property in the Highlands Region of New Jersey, where his father, a physician, owned and operated a former 48-room resort hotel as a nursing home from 1954 through 1972. The building was not an abstraction. It was lived in, worked in, and sustained through daily effort—patients moving through its rooms, staff maintaining its systems, and his father moving from one responsibility to the next.
That early environment established a way of seeing. The building was not defined by its architecture alone, but by the accumulation of activity over time. The work required to keep it functioning—quiet, repetitive, often unnoticed—became inseparable from the place itself.
Zampella’s first professional path was in acting. He studied at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University under William Esper, whose training traced directly back to Sanford Meisner. After moving to Manhattan, he worked in television and film, appearing in series such as Ryan’s Hope, Another World, All My Children, and The Guiding Light, as well as in feature films including The Thomas Crown Affair, A Beautiful Mind, and Six Degrees of Separation. His work extended into national campaigns for brands including Levi’s 501 Jeans, Frangelico, Macy’s, Maybelline, and Coca-Cola.
Parallel to that work, he spent years in the hospitality industry, working under Joe Baum at the Rainbow Room, and later at Le Cirque with Sirio Maccione and Aureole with Charlie Palmer. He went on to hold senior management roles at The Plaza Hotel, overseeing the Oak Room and Oak Bar, and at Essex House Hotel on Central Park South as Food & Beverage Director. These roles required not only management, but an understanding of systems—how spaces function, how people move through them, and how experience is shaped through detail and execution.
In 1987, Zampella enlisted in the United States Army, completing training as a Military Intelligence Analyst (96B) and serving for over sixteen years on the General Staff (G2) of the 50th Armored Division. He retired with the rank of Staff Sergeant. The discipline of analysis, structure, and long-term responsibility became another layer in the way he approached both work and decision-making.
In 2006, he transitioned fully into film production, working as a Producer & Editor with writer and director John Mulholland. Their collaboration on Cooper & Hemingway: The True Gen marked a turning point. The film was named a New York Times Critics’ Pick, by by Manohla Dargis, A. O. Scott and Stephen Holden. Webster said the picture was proof that the work of these two men "endures and so does what they stood for." The film was recognized for demonstrating how the work and values of its subjects continue to endure over time.
That project established the working method that continues to define Transmultimedia Entertainment: research-driven, detail-oriented, and focused on narrative continuity rather than isolated moments.
“The work is not simply to tell stories, but to carry them forward—so that what might otherwise be lost to time can still be seen, understood, and remembered.”
Subsequent projects expanded that approach across multiple platforms. Work for Paramount Pictures, Lionsgate Entertainment, and Warner Home Video included long-form documentary production and archival storytelling. For American Public Television, projects such as Inside High Noon (narrated by Matthew Rhys) and Elmore Leonard: But Don’t Try to Write (narrated by Campbell Scott) continue to air nationally on PBS and internationally on PBS America. The production of Sergeant York: Of God and Country, narrated by Liam Neeson, reflects the same emphasis on historical context, character, and continuity.
As Creative Director of Transmultimedia Entertainment, Zampella works across all aspects of production—cinematography, editing, motion graphics, sound design, lighting, and final delivery. The company produces broadcast-compliant masters for network television and streaming platforms, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Apple TV. The work is technical, but the objective remains consistent—to ensure that the story is carried intact from source to screen.
Underlying all of this is a single idea: filmmaking is not separate from preservation. It is an extension of it. The same attention required to maintain a structure—the repair of surfaces, the understanding of systems, the care of what has endured—applies to the work of documenting lives and events.
This idea is made concrete through Zampella’s stewardship of Idylease, a historic property built in 1902 and one of the last remaining examples of early twentieth-century resort architecture in the Highlands region of New Jersey. The building, once part of a broader network of hotels serving a growing middle-class tourism industry, now stands as the only surviving structure of its kind in the region. Its continued existence depends on ongoing care—work that is never complete and never final.
Transmultimedia Entertainment operates within that same framework. Each project—whether documentary, commercial, or design—is approached as part of a larger continuum. The objective is not simply to produce content, but to preserve context—to ensure that what is created now remains legible and meaningful over time.
In the end, the work is not defined by any single film or project.
It is defined by continuity—by the effort to take care of what has been placed in view, and to carry it forward so that it does not disappear.