Zeek Earl
“My parents did not put much emphasis on their lives into generating wealth. When I was in middle school they moved our family to Kenya and taught in an international school, made no money doing it but just wanted to give their kids that experience. It was awesome. There is was always an emphasis on what was exciting and life-giving.”
“I grew up largely without any cameras. The one VHS camera my Dad had was left out in the rain when I was about 6. My parents intentionally did not own television until I was fourteen. They were kind of against what they considered ‘mindless media’ and very much in favor of other more creative pursuits.”
“In middle school I took an interest in creating video games. Ultimately I found I liked having a greater amount of control over storytelling that filmmaking allowed. I bought my first camera, a Samsung mini-dv from Ebay and have continued to upgrade every couple of years, probably up until now. The most professional feature on the camera was that it came with an 1/8 inch microphone input so I didn’t have to use the on-board microphone.”
“My first films were made during vacations in high school. I would corral together a bunch of friends and create this hour long, monty-python like comedies.”
“When Youtube started, I did a lot of short films and sketch comedy. It was the early days of the format, so my friends and I were able to attract a small following. It’s was really fun to interact directly with an audience like that for the first time. That really affected my career and the most success I’ve had since then has been through the internet. Every ad or short film that has gotten someone’s attention and led to something else has been online.”
“I had planned on going to film school in Los Angeles and went down to check it out. I ended up talking to a lot of students that were finishing up school and having trouble getting into the film industry. They were getting to their final year and either doing awful internships at big studios or planning to move on to other things. It was an uninspiring trip.”
“So I decided to move to Seattle instead and got a degree in English and Creative Writing. I still made short films on the side. I went to a small liberal arts university called Seattle Pacific University. It was great. Growing up in the suburbs, the significant thing was moving to a larger city. My education was great, my english professors were fantastic but getting to interact with a more urban art scene was huge for me.”
“I graduated in the worst year of the recession here in America. If I graduated now I would have got an internship in a big marketing firm or something but there were so little opportunities then that I had to do something else.”
“My friends and I started participating in crowd-sourced ad competitions. There is a few companies that work with big brands and put out these projects and you make ads on spec competing for cash prizes. I did this for a while and was able to make a living straight out of college off of these contests.”
“I was living in a shitty house with 5 other guys. I would gather whoever was around, costume them as best I could, use the living room space as an studio. Together we would make these absolutely no budget commercials for brands like Microsoft. Doing that I raised money, bought better equipment and was able to start a small commercial company that has gradually grown over the last 5 years.”
“This was all right at the beginning of the DSLR revolution and there was still a large part of the low-budget industry that still use old school cameras and haven’t taken advantage of these much cheaper cameras that look cinematic. I bought a Canon 7D and a bunch of Nikon Ai-S lenses from the 80’s and started to leverage those crowd-sourced ads that I had made to a few local companies.”
“A lot of the first projects I did was for the university because I knew people there. I then put our work online and during that time we were very affordable. We charged next to nothing. We started to build our way up and established a client following and the clients just eventually started getting bigger and bigger.”
“We just did an ad for a Dell laptop for the Microsoft store. The client was in a huge hurry. So they asked us to do everything, concept through to delivery, with little oversight. And they liked it a lot. Those are really the best circumstances. When you can work with a client to tailor-make a concept to their budget. It is actually a lot more efficient.”
“My partner Chris and I have structured our company to pursue narrative filmmaking. We spend a month making a commercial so we can then spend a month shooting a film or writing a script. That's how our most recent short film Prospect got made. Prospect has done pretty well so we're at the point where our commercial work supports all the time and money required to pursue the feature adaption. It is notoriously difficult to make a living as an independent filmmaker, so we hope we can maintain this type of structure as our career progresses.”