When you launched the business, were you in Portland? No, we were in L.A. My husband and I both grew up in the suburbs of L.A. And despite L.A. being, obviously, a huge mecca for video and whatnot, we gravitated elsewhere. We’ve been in Portland now for a long time. I love it here. People are always like, “When are you moving back?” And I’m like, “I’m not moving. We’ll come back and visit.” But yeah, I think the Pacific Northwest is home. JASON E. KAPLAN Tell me about some of those first jobs that you were doing, wedding jobs. How did you market yourself? How did you find people? We were at that age when we had just gotten married, and we knew a lot of other people who were getting married. So it wasn’t terribly difficult to convince a friend or a friend of a friend, to be like, “Hey, you know, I really want to try this thing,” to do it for free or for $500 and just kind of get our foot in the door. I’d never had to do sales before; I was an engineer. It was subscribing to this whole 10,000-hours thing, like you’ve got to get enough reps to know what you’re doing and just keep shooting and keep refining that. I taught myself how to edit using Final Cut 7 off YouTube, back when YouTube didn’t have what it has now. We both took workshops and we talked to people who were doing things that we wanted to do. When we started off, it was a free wedding, and then it was a $500 wedding, and then a $2,000 wedding, and then in about a year — a year and three months, I think — we got up to a $10 or $12,000 wedding, doing photo and video very early on. I look back sometimes on convincing people to give us [an opportunity] so we would have 10 weddings under our belt. But we just love making images and telling stories with those images. And I just can’t see myself not doing that now. If you told me, “Why don’t you go back to being an engineer?” I’m just not even thinking about that. What are some of the things that you’ve worked on more recently? I know you had a couple of short films that were shown around the Super Bowl.? For the 2024 Super Bowl, we did a couple of big things: We did the opening tease, which plays right before kickoff, with players and families. It wasn’t just us; it was a large team from the network and other shooters. Then we also did a short film that was kind of like a biopic narrative, but based on the true story of the Oakland Raiders. So we still do some sports stuff here and there. We mostly do branded content now. We’ve done full-blown commercial work, but a lot of it is kind of what I call human-centric, documentary-style storytelling that has a brand wrapped around it. We’ll often do things about a person who uses a product, but in a way where there’s a personal story behind that, and we leverage our event and documentary background to work with them where we’re telling their story authentically and beautifully, in a way that’s true to them. It’s different from a commercial, where you have actors and a script; what we do is kind of interview-based storytelling and day-inthe-life coverage of what they do, how they do it and why they do it. That’s probably one of my favorite parts about what we do, just being able to meet people, learn from them, learn about them, learn about their cultures. It feels silly sometimes to call it a job. I’m grateful that that’s what we get to do so often, just to get a glimpse of people’s lives and be able to share that more widely with the world through storytelling, through video. What are your thoughts moving into 2025? I don’t know. It’s still early. Hopefully we refocus on our company and our clients, like, what are the stories that we want to tell? What are the stories that are interesting to people? There are things that we naturally gravitate toward, but it’s kind of an unknown right now. 2025 feels a little less defined than some other years. I don’t know if you’re getting that sense from other businesses too, but it feels like it’s a little nebulous. I’m hearing that there’s some anxiety in ad and marketing spaces, in particular; people don’t know how much they want to spend because they don’t know what the economy is going to look like. There’s also just conflicting and confusing feedback from clients. There’s one train where everybody wants TikTok-style, short-form stuff. Then some people will be like, “Now it’s the long-form YouTube stuff; everybody wants more in-depth storytelling.” In recent years it feels like long-form documentary storytelling has made its way into streaming and all that. It’s really about trying to understand, where does the market want to go now? Do you want the short-form stuff or the long-form stuff? We’ve done plenty of both; we’re trying to kind of understand what the market needs are. It’s an ever-changing thing. 11
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