Humble Beginnings

Two-thousand ten has been our biggest and busiest year yet.  We've been doing an average of three weddings a weekend for the wedding season itself, as well as a host of other assorted jobs - training videos, a couple birthdays, a hyptonist's show, among others.  But we weren't always this wildly popular and in-demand (saying those words makes me feel a little better about myself, even if they are a wee bit exaggeration).  Oh, no.  Steady State, formerly Focus Ring Productions, had some rather pitiful, and embarrassing, roots in early 2007.  

Kevin and I had been shooting digital video for years; in high school we'd run the weekly video announcements, had shot numerous awful music videos and shorts, things of that nature.  We were really into video creation but had no formal training or experience.  So when one of our friends from high school asked us, in late 2006, to shoot her wedding in January of the following year... :

"Sure, we can do that," we replied confidently, just knowing breath-taking wedding videography would be a piece of cake (ah, ignorance is a wonderful thing).

"Cool.  So how much do you charge?"

The world paused.  How much do we ... charge?  The thought of commanding our own prices had not yet occurred to us.  What were our services worth?  A hundred dollars?  A thousand?  We honestly had absolutely no idea, so we began investigating.  Three days and eight hours of intense competitor-scrutiny later, we arrived at a decision: "We'll do it all for six-hundred dollars," we said, knowing we were giving her one hell of a deal; anyone else, we had concluded, would be charging at least twice that amount for the services we were offering.

"Oh, that does sound like a good deal," she replied, and our breath caught -- would we actually get six-hundred?  To broke, unemployed college students, this was like winning the lottery.  She went on, "but I have $200.  What can I get for that?"

The sound of broken dreams fluttering to the floor, I can tell you from experience, is much like a soft blanket of snow falling throughout the night - not distinctly audible, but viscerally palpable.  Our hearts, now located somewhere around our socks, were rushed to the ICU as we lamely accepted her terms.  Two hundred dollars... how insulting!  But it was, too, our first actual paying gig, and the primary reason for our formation of the business.  If one person would pay us to film her wedding, why not others?  Why not the world?  

And that's how we got started.  Kevin and I formed Focus Ring Cinematic Productions in the Spring of 2007.  Along with a friend and sort-of partner, a girl named Karri, we forged boldly, if somewhat incompetently, into the world of wedding videography.  

And we're still here today.

-Steady State

Little company, big steps, and a few small stumbles.

Saturday, August 21st, 2010.  The job was a big one.  In fact, the job was our biggest one yet as a company: three employees and fourteen hours' video and photo coverage.  The mere thought of getting up at 6:30am to make an 8:30am go-time was daunting, but we're professionals!  We knew the work involved and we committed ourselves to it.  We were going to do the best job anyone's ever done on this green earth, by George, and nothing was going to get in our way.

Except.

1.  Sleeping through my initial 6:30 alarm and waking up at 6:55.
2.  One of my partners having something roughly resembling the European Black Death Plague virus and throwing up almost as soon as we began our trip north (he eventually stopped, but was under the weather the whole day long).
3.  The motorbike cop who lasered me at fifteen over I-5's speed limit and felt a $287 speeding ticket would improve my day (My partner riding shotgun, the un-sick one, told me oh-so-helpfully after the fact "Oh, I thought you saw him there."  Thanks Kevin; I didn't).

  We ended up making our shoot by 8:45 -- fifteen minutes behind schedule, but not bad, considering the massive amounts of delay and disaster that plagued the trip up.  We got in place, got set up, and began the longest day of my working career as a videographer.  Around 10:30pm we finally wrapped up, said our goodbyes, and called it a day.

  The clients were fantastic -- not a wedding-bound couple, actually, but a Hispanic couple with a three year-old daughter destined for her Catholic baptism and after-party.  The shoot itself, once the shoot itself finally began, went smoothly.  We took thousands of photos and hours and hours of video, and we're going to produce some seriously gorgeous stuff for these people.

  As a last note, I want to mention the girl herself, the three year-old.  Her name was Alyna and she was such an adorable kid.  I'd gotten together with the family to shoot what I guess would be the three year-old equivalent of engagement photos, at a park up in Beaverton, a few weeks before.  She'd been shy then, kind-of afraid of me and avoiding me.  And the same was true at first this morning.  But I worked at her, kept waving and smiling and making absurd faces (after the baptism, of course -- I'd feel pretty fantastic if I interrupted such a solemn event with a monkey expression), and by the end of the evening she was clinging to my arms, saying "No va, no va!" over and over again ("Don't go!").  She was SO cute and we got so many amazing photos of her -- I'm very excited to start going over this material and get some of it online!

  Mom, dad: call us in twelve years for her quinceañera!   

--Steady State