In August 2017, I served as the Executive Producer on Saint Frank with my friends and partners at Vinegar Hill. After a job goes wrong, Frank is called to clean up a mess he didn’t make. It’s a short film about best friends caught in a lose-lose situation.
Only a few months before, I had left my corporate job as the chief creative director at a Fortune 500 to start Bugle, a full service independent creative agency made in Washington, DC. Saint Frank was my first major personal investment and set the direction for the type of business I wanted to run.
A disciplined mentor of mine once told me, “Be careful what you do because you’ll end up doing it.” It’s a piece of advice that stuck, and for me, acknowledges business can enable art and that art should propel creative business ventures.
Like all creatives, I want to play my part in telling stories that move people. That means two things as a business owner of a small but profitable local agency. First, funding passion projects creates spaces for me and other artists to explore and express a more original side of our art. Second, it moves us as a collective increasingly toward the type of work we aspire to do more of (with the kind of people we want to do it with).
On professional assignments, Bugle and Vinegar Hill are always thinking about how to bring filmmaking into our commercial projects. Saint Frank was a shot to turn the camera towards ourselves, and direct the skills learned on client sets toward the production of our first sideshow film.
Iron sharpens iron.
