It’s kind of an accident that I do what I do. My first major in college was computer science - I had a vague dream about doing CGI at Industrial Light & Magic (George Lucas’ visual effects company). But I dropped that after my first programming class, when I lost my mind spending a night looking for the one missing comma that kept my marching band program from running. After that I was totally clueless.

 

I thought about majoring in film because that was the only major that had course descriptions that sounded interesting, but I wasn’t artsy and it sounded too expensive (cost of buying film and getting it developed). Then I found out that television was a major, it looked similar to film but less artsy, more practical and cheaper. It was only available at Boston University and Syracuse University at the time, so I went with Boston because Syracuse sounded way too cold. I figured I could be a producer at a talk show or something, because I liked planning and checklists.

 

The second project I did at Boston was on Hoa ʻĀina O Mākaha, a farm that does work with kids at Makaha Elementary. Over winter break I interviewed the owner and got some footage around the farm, and spent a lot of hours back in Boston in a tiny reel-to-reel edit bay putting it together. The farm ended up asking if they could use it to show funders what they do. I was totally shocked that my little school project could be useful for an actual organization doing real work.

 

Later that year, I was watching Oprah and she said something about television having the power to change the world and I was like, “YES! That’s what I want to do.” I told my brother that I wanted to make videos for nonprofits for free, so they could use it in their work. And he was like, “Dude, how are you going to eat?” Which was a good point. So after graduation, I went to work at KGMB and eventually ended up producing commercials at Oceanic Time Warner Cable, but maybe once a year I was able to work on some kind of meaningful project for a nonprofit.

 

After almost a decade of commercials, my therapist was encouraging me to try new things and get back to doing stuff that made me happy. That got me away from commercials, and I spent about a year working for a judge - a dream job for this Law & Order junkie. But working for the state was running my finances into the ground, and being a single mom at that point, I couldn’t afford to stay there. Nolan and I were trying to produce videos on the side with dreams of one day doing it full-time, so I told him I was ready to make the jump. If it didn’t work, I’d be in debt and needing to find a new job - which was exactly the spot I was in at that point - so it was time to poop or get off the pot.

 

We knew that we *could* do commercial productions for corporate clients since we did that before, but then we may as well go back to Oceanic with a regular paycheck, health benefits and a 401k. So we decided to focus on nonprofits and small businesses - organizations we connect with, people we like, and where what we create is meaningful and helpful to people working to make the world a better place. Running a small business isn’t easy, but I couldn’t be happier 💕