I never planned to be a marketer. I didn't study marketing in school. It never even occurred to me to see if my school offered any courses along those lines.

At the time in one's life when they are looking career-ward, I was mostly focused on heady things like philosophy, and artsy things like filmmaking. When I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2005, I went on to California Institute of the Arts to get my Masters of Fine Arts in film & video directing.

As it would turn out, I was among the first waves of students to reach film school in the digital era. To the credit of the school, they did their best to adapt to this massive shift, but they didn't know what to do with kids like me who had grown up with digital cameras and editing systems we could run on a laptop. We were itchy to make things, and I was the worst. I dropped out after a year, convinced that I already had skills enough to monetize.

Although I now realize how foolish I was, I wasn't wrong. In May of 2006 I took what was meant to be the remaining two years of tuition money, bought a 1080p digital video camera, a workhorse desktop, rented some office space in Hollywood and started a video production company.

We were called “OneStep Productions”, named in reference in the song One Step Beyond, by the band Madness. I chose it in honor of my dad. Who I have a beloved early memory of dancing around with as this album played. Also, “don’t watch that, watch this…” was too good of a clip for our production card. Look it up on YouTube. The video is outstanding. (Not mine, Madness.)

At first we were focused on digital video, and it worked well. The market was still not adapted to the idea that you could make a 5 min film for 10x less than before. This meant we could charge 8x cost and still undercut the competition.