Danielle Krieger
“Everybody in my family, including my great grandma have a masters degree, so education has always been very important to us. My grandma was an English teacher, so after we finished school each day, my cousins and I would go to her house to do extra assignments. As kids, we soon got used to doing a lot of stuff in a day.”
“When I was in first grade, my teacher suggested that I do drama or dance, because she thought I was very shy. I remember my mom being totally shocked at the time, because I had always seemed so confident.”
“When I started dance school, I totally loved it. Dance seemed to open up a new creative side to me. Then by the fourth grade, I was at a special creative school for a couple of days each week, where we got to paint, draw, make models - and just enjoy being creative.”
“Although my mom says she was never any good at art, my creative side was certainly influenced by her. My school art projects seemed to be the perfect opportunity for my mom to prove to herself, that she could indeed be creative!”
“All of my projects at school, under the guidance of my mom, would turn into these very elaborate things. Where ‘other’ kids would come in with a foam ball for the Earth, I would have the whole solar system made to scale. I quickly grew into a Type A personality, where everything I would do, turned out to be very complex and elaborate.”
“My grandpa had been the photography teacher at the local high school, so there was certainly some creative drift in the family. My dad had all of his old film cameras to play around with when I was young. So photography became a passion of mine from a very early age.”
“Although I loved my photography, I still wanted to continue with dancing or acting after high school. I have always felt that I could better express my emotions through movement, so I naturally assumed that this is what I would end up doing. It wasn’t until my sophomore year at high school, that my plans soon changed.”
“I had just met Casey during that year and found that we both loved photography. During the summer break, both of our parents wanted us to get summer jobs. My dad said that I needed to earn $500 during the summer and he didn’t care what I did to earn it. He then setup a couple of job interviews for me; all of which I got, but didn’t take!”
“Casey and I figured that we could do photo shoots for all of our friend’s senior portraits. At $150 a shoot, we earned ourselves $500 each within just two weeks! All without ever doing, that ‘real job’ my dad had hoped for.”
“The next year, Casey and I were competing with the local photography studio and were doing all of the senior portraits for high school graduates. That’s when it really started to snowball. That year we aimed at making $20,000 and that’s pretty much, how Mindcastle got started.”
“When it came to go to college, Casey and I both decided on the University of Washington to study communications. Both my parents had studied MBAs there, so that seemed a great result as far as they were concerned.”
“Because I was a creative person, I really felt that wasn’t the path for me. By this stage, both Casey and I were into photography and filmmaking, and I just didn’t think you needed to go to college to be artist.”
“When I applied, I genuinely hoped they were going to say no, so that I could go onto dance somewhere. I started that first year at college feeling pretty resentful, so I took classes that I thought maybe useful to me in the future. I took a whole series of acting classes, a set-lighting class, and of course, as many photography classes as I could.”
“I also studied business and marketing as part of my degree, which I found relatively straightforward. My dad is a CPA and CFO, and my mom is in real estate. Given that they both have MBAs, we were always developing different ‘hypothetical’ business and marketing plans for all sorts of things as a kid. Both my parents had a huge influence on me, so there was always this balance of creativity and business influences in my life.”
“In the end, university became a time for me where I could find my identity and gain more confidence. For example, being able to take writing classes helped me to really strengthen my skills. These were important experiences for me, because I had always had help from my parents in the past. Now that I was at university, I could find my own path and find out what sort of artist I truly wanted to be.”
“It was during our third year at college that we got the call from ESPN to do our first big commercial job. Here we were in our junior year, being flown to New York all expenses paid to shoot the NFL draft!”
“From that time on, things just got bigger and bigger. It then became a real challenge for us to run a production company while also being full time students. Casey and I would spend most days sitting in class working on our laptops, trying to edit photos, write scripts or doing our company taxes. We never seemed to have enough time in the day, to keep our commercial life separate from our school life.”
“Casey then got this great opportunity to shoot a film in India as well as several shoots with Major League Baseball. We both decided that he should probably focus more on his career as a Director & DP, than finishing his communications degree. In the end, we decided that I would finish the communications degree and Casey should work more on shooting.”
“It took a lot of really hard work to build our company back then. Much of that success, comes down to the fact that both our parents really believed in us. Casey’s dad and my parents, helped us initially with buying equipment. Although these were loans from the family, we still needed to do a full ROI and work up a business plan for the investment. Those loans were invaluable to us until we were in a financial position to finally invest in gear ourselves.”
“Since those days working for ESPN in our junior year, we have gone onto to work with Canon, ESPN, NFL Network, ELLE Magazine, Microsoft & Nike among other great companies. Our projects have been nominated for numerous awards over the years, including several Emmy Awards. We now direct films and commercials for campaigns all over the world.”
“From those early days shooting school portraits, Mindcastle has grown into something very special. Casey and I seem to have found the right path for ourselves, where we’ve been able to grow and develop our approach to storytelling. I guess you could say that we found our passion at an early age.”