By Sean Yoder

Before opening Witches Hollow Winery and Mad McIntosh Cider at Titan Energy Park, Angela Eliasz worked in special effects in Hollywood. Then, she decided to make a change that led her to create her signature drinks in Bellefonte. If I was going to choose another career, let’s do what I would be doing in my leisure time.

Angela Eliasz is the co-owner and winemaker at Witches Hollow Winery and Mad McIntosh Cider at the Titan Energy Park. With half a million square feet of space, tenants have been revitalizing this building complex that lies between Logan Branch creek and Route 144 in Bellefonte. Eliasz and her partners have repurposed many of the leftover elements of the manufacturing tenants that called the space home throughout the 20th century.

Eliasz left the movie visual effects industry in 2012, moving from Los Angeles back across the country to her native New York as she learned more about the wine and cider industries. She then made her home in Bellefonte and worked to open Mad McIntosh, which operates in the space alongside Alloy Kitchen.

Tell me about how you got into movie visual effects.

I’m a creator. Art class was always my favorite. I was watching the movie F/X and there’s a part in the parking garage where somebody gets decapitated. I sat with that VCR tape going forwards and backwards going frame-by-frame trying to figure out when it went from a live person to how they actually cut that film and threw the fake head down. Movie magic just fascinated me. I was doing Super 8 films, and you had the cutouts, we did a movie where a girl was walking along and aliens came down and abducted her. It was just kind of strange for grade school. Very X-Files. I knew I wanted to do it. But it wasn’t like we grew up in LA and there was a film industry. How do you do that?

I got my degree in international marketing and graphic design and I ended up in an animation studio doing their marketing. They said ‘We’ll teach out how to animate.’ The first movie I ever worked on was Shadow Creature. I did hand-drawn animation. We hadn’t even gone into computers yet. I was hunched under an Oxberry animation stand drawing electrocution of the monsters. The film would be projected onto the table and I would go frame by frame and draw the electricity.

I then went into graduate work in Toronto, they accepted me into their international program. And I lived and breathed it. It took about a year after graduation to end up in the film industry, never giving up. I ended up living in Hawaii working for Square Pictures working on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. That was my first 3D movie. When that movie ended, I got a job working at Sony on the first Harry Potter movie.

Tell me about how you went from the film visual effects industry to the wine and cider industry.

When I was in L.A. doing special effects, I was studying for my WSETs, Wine & Spirit Education Trust to just understand the nuances and the terroir and the regions. I wanted to become more knowledgeable in my wine making by going down the WSET route.

When visual effects left L.A., I had a choice. I could follow the industry which, I loved my career in visual effects. I could follow where the next government subsidy was going to take it. It wasn’t staying in Hollywood anymore. I was going to have to sell my house. I was going to have to move. I’m getting too old to move when a government chooses where my next job is.

So, what did I enjoy doing? I really liked the winemaking process. I loved drinking wine. I loved pairing it with food. I was going to culinary school in the evenings. If I was going to choose another career, let’s do what I would be doing in my leisure time.

Lets fast forward from that turning point to the present. How was your 2022?

On February 23 we opened to public. So it hasn’t even been one year that we’ve been open.

It’s been exciting to see the reaction from people who knew the Titan Energy Park as Cerro Metals or Titan Metals. They come back and experience it not as a working institution or where they go to make a living, but where they spend their leisure time afterward.

What a great group of people we have in this community. Everybody’s been so welcome. It’s an eclectic group.

Why is Titan Hollow such an important part of Bellefonte?

We’re still carving our niche. This building is just so cool. The floors and the rusty walls and the I-beams, just the enormity of it. It’s been a pleasant surprise to learn how important this building was to the community, and not even necessarily the building, but this space. What this space represented. People either worked here or their family worked here. It was a way of life. Then just to have it shut down overnight, what do those people do? They didn’t move. They didn’t follow the next film and go someplace else. They reinvented themselves, found jobs a little further out, but they already had roots here. It’s fascinating to see those people. Because it wasn’t that long ago that it shut down.

I have clientele that come in and say ‘That crane used to move this,’ or ‘This was the loading dock.’ It’s fascinating and it’s very humbling to know you are the newest tenant in a space that so much history.

We want to do it right. We want to honor it.