WEBVTT
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Hello and welcome to underdogs, bootstrappers and game changers.
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This is for those of you that are starting with nothing and using business to change their stars, motivating people who disrupted industry standards.
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This is the real side of business.
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This isn't Shark Tank.
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My aim with this podcast is to take away some of the imaginary roadblocks that are out there.
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I want to help more underdogs, because underdogs are truly who change the world.
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This is part of our Content for Good initiative.
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All the proceeds from the monetization of this podcast will go to charitable causes.
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It's for the person that wants it.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of Underdogs, bootstrappers, game Changers.
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And guess what?
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I got my great friend Daveed here today.
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Motherfucker, all right, yet another one of my friends that does amazing things and is super afraid of the camera.
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And we were just talking about it right before the episode started.
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Believe it or not, I was the most afraid that you could ever be of the camera.
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I mean, I turned down four reality shows in our first business.
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They approached us, you know, wanting to do it.
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I was like no way, you know, I was afraid to even say like if you talk to me about the business, it's like yeah, I'd say I work there.
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You know you could probably never.
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In the club days I wanted to be on a reality show, I wanted to do this and that, but I don't know what's changed.
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But I've always liked being.
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You know.
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Now it's behind the scenes, but I have footage from those days like terabytes, because I would have cameras following me through the clubs.
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And I look back and it's good because it's humility and I'm going.
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And I look back and it's good because it's humility and I'm going, oh no.
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You know part of me.
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I was approached really young to 21 or something like that with a reality show when I was doing the concert stuff and like I'm kind of glad for not doing that.
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Right, yeah, well, I mean, I knew people that did it, yeah, and I still know some that are, you know, later in life, yeah, and you know later in life, yeah, and you know a couple of them still holding on to that.
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I mean well, and the other thing is like, how many stupid things did we do when we were 20?
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Oh yeah, and that's now.
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That's out there for the world.
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The poor kids now growing up with social media their stuff's out there anyway.
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It's right in front of you, yeah.
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I mean I was being the idiot filming, you know, having the uh, you know film crews follow in everything, but never did anything stupid on camera.
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Yeah, but I can just imagine that the 20, 20 something year old oh.
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God.
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So David is my business partner in our uh, bigger production company, um, and so I invited him on today because, like, his story is an underdog story, um, so kind of like some preface.
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Like this year we've done offspring music video, so got really cool shout out to castles and coasters, by the way.
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And yes, yes, uh, like they let us go out there.
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It's here in Phoenix, um, and it's an amusement park.
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And they let us, like, can I use the word, free reign?
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They really like it was free reign.
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Yeah, I mean they Gail, she was the point of contact, but trying to get a hold of them.
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The initial idea was to film in Santa Monica and that came with a lot of restrictions and castles and coasters, came with a lot of like, less restriction and a lot of freedom, and they actually like set the rides for me to say like let's go now, yeah, you know, in the summertime, so you know you don't have anything.
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It was a really cool experience being able to be and then like we made those poor kids ride the roller coaster.
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The actors, oh they loved it Like 50 times.
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Yeah, Shout out to them too.
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I mean, they loved it Like 50 times.
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Yeah, shout out to them too.
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I mean they, they loved it, they were, they were, you know, all happy about those scenes.
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I of course made the excuse of, like I got to operate the camera so I can't get on that fucking thing.
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No way, no.
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I really enjoy when we get to work on those projects.
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Did another one for Walmart this year.
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Played around with some stuff for Yellowstone's food product brand got to be the cowboy got a Stetson hat out of the deal, yeah, and of all this stuff.
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It's been an adventure last couple of years and it's been interesting to see where it's going, compared to what I've been doing for the last 15, 16 years out of the 18, almost 19 years.
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I mean, and folks I want to preface this for you too.
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David is another one of my friends that won't get in front of the camera.
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I've dragged him in here today.
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Um, he like he could have a laundry list of people that he's worked with that you would recognize, um, when we do shoots, uh, he will sew the costume or, excuse me, the dress for somebody.
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He will make the jewelry from scratch.
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He will build a robot, if that's what it takes to get that production done.
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He turned, uh, one of our studio buildings into a graveyard the other day and shot this really cool.
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Actually, we'll try to post some pictures in this video so you can see, like, some of that stuff and, um, amazing creative that I work with and I really enjoy when we get to work on really cool projects together.
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I love that stuff.
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It's just about you know documenting it.
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I have such a hard time with self promotion.
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That's why my social media is, you know, it's never consistent.
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Yeah, what I built social media on was a platform that I was utilizing for, for monetization, which was publishing, and that involved a lot of the you know, posters and girls and stuff like that which I guarantee you've seen some of his posters out there and stuff, whether you know it or not, yeah, they're.
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I mean they, they've been put through so many stores and so many places and stolen countless times.
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So you know it's not me making all that money with it.
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It's other people, you know, stealing it.
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But the thing is that's not who I am, that's not my persona.
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All the girl stuff, the models, you know I love working with those people.
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It's been amazing to do that.
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It's just I'm behind a curtain, I don't show my face and I don't talk about much, and so people have an idea about me.
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Well, what's interesting too?
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It's like people are going to have those perceptions too, and you and I have known each other a long time, and I even had some of those perceptions about you when we first met.
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Of course I feel bad about it now.
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No-transcript true at all.
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You know, and like it's.
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It's so funny about my friends that are like these hidden gems, like David and squally is another person that's been on here.
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You know it's like you guys are doing so many amazing things and the people out there that are popular for doing these things aren't even holding a candle to you guys doing these things, like squally and fitness.
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He builds his own equipment, literally has a whole welding shop that he builds his own equipment and invents workouts, you know, and that's that's what I would have loved starting out with this.
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Um, because that's what I had to do with all of my equipment, I couldn't afford anything, so I had to make my own filming rigs, and all that too.
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That's where I want to go today and that's where you know I always have a hidden agenda, you know.
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Yes.
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I want to help my friend face, fear, um and uh and get him out there in the world.
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But uh, hidden agenda for you folks today.
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Um, the message is everybody says I need this to start, I need that to start.
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I was working with somebody yesterday and she's like I need this and I need that and like thousands of dollars worth of stuff.
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I'm like no, you don't, you don't need that stuff.
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And so let's backtrack for a second.
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Like you, first start getting into photography right With generally is really expensive.
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Like I have a couple thousand dollar camera that I shoot photos with.
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Oh, and it's nothing in comparison to what it was back in 2006.
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Talk about it when I started in 2006, I had the most base model of a Canon, yeah, and that was still about $1,000, and it was a kit lens just crap.
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But for me, I didn't look at this as learning photography.
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I even went to college and took some classes of photography and dropped them quick, mainly because they wanted me to get into film, and I realized I'm broke, yeah, and I started this.
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I'm telling you so broke.
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It was a decision of $50 to either eat food or purchase dome lights from Home Depot, and I literally can show a picture of these things.
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I had no idea about color, temperature, lighting, anything technical.
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To this day, I really don't rely on anything technical, and when people, I mean, just as you know, we work for a magazine.
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One of the many fights that I got into with people was the editor, and it was about how I Photoshop something and he had a whole way of complaining about it.
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We got into a fight and he said I went through and just did it 30 minutes, sent it to him and I said I get to the same result.
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Yeah, this is what it looks like.
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It's better than what you were doing.
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You know not to brag, but that's how uh it's a good point because you know, like we teach certain somebody a certain way and say it has to be done this way.
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Well, curriculum, yeah you look at, uh, everything from how we were taught math to how it's taught now.
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Sure, when I look at photography and I look at, you know, people, like even somebody who may have worked with recently they're technical, yeah, but it kind of loses the magic.
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They're holding onto something and romanticizing of the way it should be.
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Yeah, and we live in such a, you know God, creatively diverse environment in this world that why does it have to be in these constraints?
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When I started this, I didn't want to follow the uh, the rules, and part of it was, yeah, I wanted shortcuts.
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You know, there was a sense of two things survival for me, and that's one of the, the, the things, that's instinctual fucking survival, um, which I've really have been shedding over the past few years and being a little more comfortable, but in the beginning it wasn't about.
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You know, I need to technically do this, I need to frame this like this, I need to use this type of lens.
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I was just gathering all the crap that I needed to to create what I wanted.
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The first photographs I ever took were in my backyard of firecrackers in a bottle, because I just wanted to capture the motion of it.
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I didn't know what I was doing for the next five years.
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I still didn't know what I was doing, but it you know the fucking first business card, it's still on my refrigerator because it's, you know, I like to bring myself back down to earth.
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Yeah, I have a business card where I made what was called a multiple.
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Yeah, and I've done a handful of these throughout the years where, like Sean Marion from the Suns was in one, carey Hart, the motocross guy, yep, and the first one I did, I had an idea.
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I was like I can put myself in one photo, but like five of me, and I have like five different characters in this photo and one of me is without a shirt on.
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Uh, now I put this on my very first fucking business card and under it says I do weddings.
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So I found this not that long ago, showed my wife and of course she's like like really, I'm like okay, I didn't know any better, you know, but that's how I started.
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You know it was.
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It was a concept.
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How do I utilize these tools to get to that concept?
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And, not having money, you have to really navigate resourceful.
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You have to navigate through um what you don't have and it's.
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I can tell you so many times about wanting to give up because I see these other people that were, you know, nepo babies in LA having everything gifted to them.
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Their parents were in the industry.
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For the 18 years I've been doing this, I'm still an outsider.
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You know I'm not respected through some of those channels.
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I don't do things the way I'm supposed to Most people.
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You know bullshit rules.
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You know, I want to bolster that too.
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It's like there's a good documentary on Netflix, uh and uh, it's like the 30 for 30, but this one's about the yacht racing in um uh, I guess the Americans, for they're so heavily funded there's a yacht race that they just destroy everybody on and these kinds of scrappy Australians came out of nowhere and they actually hired an engineer that was like out of a different industry and the boat had always been built the same way, and then he actually uh, took a shot at it and he built the rudder system completely different and when they first came out, like the Australians, this is, this is like a bigger upset than like any in like sports history really, and they're just killing them and they're like disguising the rudder, basically.
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But the point was it's like this guy came out of a different industry and said why don't we do this rudder thing a different way?
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And that boat now is the way they build boats still, and it's like that's what I see about your style too.
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It's like you didn't lock into like somebody else's style.
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You found your own, and I think that's what gives it so much beauty.
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I found my own.
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It was adopted, though I mean, when I started it was looking at other people's work, you know, in earlier in the industry, you know having relationships, you know, with someone that was model, getting to go to photo shoots and see other people that I thought were way better, and then also being told, like you can't be here because I don't want you to see my secrets.
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Yeah, and after being told that so many times and trying to contact people through MySpace, you know, people were assholes to me.
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I didn't understand the simplest concept of how that flash worked or why it worked.
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Yeah, and it was like mind blowing to me when a guy that I knew, yzie Doug Yazzie he was another photographer really loved his work.
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Yeah, I had gotten a studio.
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I acquired the studio.
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It was just a bare warehouse with swamp, cooler and Tempe, okay, on university, and this place was, you know, rundown.
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Yeah, and a couple of people had a print shop.
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Friends, I used the back of this place.
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Uh, friend, you know, made friends with this.
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This guy, yazi, um, he had lights which were, you know, like holy shit, these were thousands of dollars.
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Yeah, strobe lights still no concept how they worked.
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He came by one time, uh, brought some friend photographers I have a back alley and there's these big bay doors and they had a model standing there and it's all shadowed and it's all in the background, sunny.
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They snap a photo, it goes right to the laptop.
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She is lit up beautifully and I just go what the fuck was that how?
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And he helped me learn that and so we made a deal.
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You can use the studio whenever you want, keep the lights here.
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I could use lights.
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Yeah, so that was my first you know real um introduction to that.
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Yeah, he was, you know he was.
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He was very helpful and instrumental in in showing me the concept of lighting and strobe lighting when you um, let's talk about like, like, I know one of the things that you did when you first started.
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You were using those like $2 flashlights at home Depot.
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Well, uh, the flashlights.
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The flashlights actually came later on.
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I was using dome.
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You know these, those dome lights, little silver things from home Depot.
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Yeah, the flashlights came later on and I think it was more of um, a reflection of where I started.
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Okay, and when I first started that I I thought, well, why couldn't I just utilize something from, you know, the broke photographer who's getting into this?
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Cameras are getting cheaper.
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You can get one of my old cameras, you know used one, for a few hundred dollars.
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Yeah, why couldn't I use, you know, flashlights to light a scene and create something cinematic?
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Um, and I think the first one I did was with my wife.
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We were in Marina Del Rey place.
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We used to rent out their little apartment and, and I put this scene together.
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We can cut to that too to show it.
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But I mean, she sat for two hours while I tried to light this scene and I was able to do it.
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But when I had proof of concept, I thought this is great, this is amazing, I can do something, but I can show people.
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Hey, you don't need to have a huge budget.
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Yeah, because that was the problem I had is where I started was the pie in the sky.
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Yeah, I really looked at like the big production is where I want to be.
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Sure, I want the most expensive lights.
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Never could afford that.
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Um, so I had to force myself and be resourceful to get to you know where I at least felt like I wanted to be, or you?
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know I, I want to, like, I want to and I hope I don't preface this question wrong but it's like so we have right right now.
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It's like you can go out there and buy a ten thousand dollar camera to shoot photos with right and then like you have some like in the quality of the photographer.
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It's like, weigh in for me, a amazing photographer with a cheap camera versus a crappy photographer with the best camera on the planet.
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What's the better photo?
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I mean that's, that's subjective.
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Um, some people fall into it.
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I have fallen into photo shoots where I go, holy shit, I didn't know I was going to create that.
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I have a plan, but there has been times throughout my career where I put something together.
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It's not necessarily this genuine plan.
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To the client I'll bullshit it Like that's what I meant to do, but I also.
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That was a learning moment for me too.
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But going back to your question, you can have and I've seen it, I've seen photographers that they shoot all natural light.
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Yeah, and we'll get into this too, because where I started, I started half you know ass backwards.
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Yeah, from from how lighting works.
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But I've seen photographers that do this beautiful natural light stuff and it was stuff I could never do.
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But they couldn't get into a studio.
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They couldn't do anything with strobe lights, they couldn't manipulate light.
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A studio, they couldn't do anything with strobe lights.
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They couldn't manipulate light.
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Yeah, they knew a reflector.
00:18:00.681 --> 00:18:04.684
The problem I had was I started completely backwards.
00:18:04.684 --> 00:18:11.087
Okay, I started with strobe lights in a studio because we were still in that era of like fashion.
00:18:11.087 --> 00:18:14.412
Yeah, and I was nowhere near fashion.
00:18:14.894 --> 00:18:19.164
But David LaChapelle was a photographer that I like.
00:18:19.164 --> 00:18:25.609
I really just, um, I looked at his work and I was just so impressed, enamored with it.
00:18:25.609 --> 00:18:30.461
Yeah, um, his stuff was so colorful, he had set design, he had budgets.
00:18:30.461 --> 00:18:34.916
Yeah, uh, I, he was someone that I wanted to kind of start modeling my work with.
00:18:34.916 --> 00:18:44.522
There was another guy out of, I don't even know if I'll mention his name, but he would do these live photo shoot things, but everything was based in strobe lighting.
00:18:44.522 --> 00:18:59.891
So when I learned, I learned the more expensive route, I learned the non-technical stuff and I learned how to manipulate my lighting, versus starting out with the basics, which is, just how do you light with a window?
00:18:59.891 --> 00:19:02.199
Yeah, you know how do you create soft shadows.
00:19:03.682 --> 00:19:12.476
And so it took until my wife, you know I, when I had met her, we had gotten married and she was doing some modeling and she was doing it for fun.
00:19:12.476 --> 00:19:14.000
You know, she's very competitive person.
00:19:14.000 --> 00:19:19.063
She did it for fun, but I wanted her to work with some other people, cause I, I wanted her to see how my industry was.
00:19:19.063 --> 00:19:30.438
And she got to work with some some good photographers and I loved some of the photos, cause I was like, oh my God, I see her in a different light, but natural light with some of them I was like, okay, I needed to learn this.
00:19:30.499 --> 00:19:40.950
It took that that long, um, you know, for me to start learning natural light, and when I started I was still struggling and cheating it because I had my old ways.
00:19:40.950 --> 00:19:42.392
Yeah, and this is what we do.
00:19:42.392 --> 00:20:00.136
When we don't know, we revert to default yeah, that's what I call it Um, to where you, you scare yourself and you don't push yourself to the next challenge, and that's fine sometimes, but if you're not learning to move forward, so learning the natural light it was, uh, you know, falling on my face.
00:20:00.136 --> 00:20:20.346
So then I started renting studios that had natural light and then I started understanding I could take video lighting and I can create and manipulate light and make it look like natural light, and so that was allowing me to take some of my skills from strobe lighting, studio stuff to, um, you know, making soft shadows with video lighting and less expensive stuff.
00:20:20.346 --> 00:20:28.828
Yeah, but all of that kind of led into the flashlight photography, okay, you know where, where it was like, oh, an idea of the broke photographer again.
00:20:29.329 --> 00:20:30.896
And that's what I want people to really understand.
00:20:30.896 --> 00:20:35.695
It's like you know, you don't have to have every fancy item on the planet to start this stuff.
00:20:35.695 --> 00:20:40.605
Actually, there's another story I'll drop here which I actually think has been on this podcast before, but it's one of my favorites.
00:20:40.605 --> 00:20:52.517
It's this guy that wanted to get into the belt business and he'll remember here some of the details, but it's like it wants to get in the belt business Machine costs a hundred thousand dollars, Doesn't have a hundred thousand dollars, right?
00:20:52.517 --> 00:20:57.986
He could just say I don't have a hundred thousand dollars, I have to fundraise, I have to do whatever I got to do to get to the a hundred thousand dollars.
00:20:57.986 --> 00:21:00.609
Instead, he thought about what do I, what do I have, Right?
00:21:00.609 --> 00:21:01.978
And he had $10,000.
00:21:01.978 --> 00:21:07.465
So he went out there to home Depot or something, got a bunch of parts and he built a machine for $10,000.
00:21:07.465 --> 00:21:12.078
And that machine was actually better than the a hundred thousand dollar machine and recreated the whole industry.
00:21:12.378 --> 00:21:16.224
Yeah, well, and it's sometimes you have to fall, you, you have to work in reverse.
00:21:16.224 --> 00:21:22.221
Um, it's funny, because now you're you're telling me about, you're talking about the quality of like equipment.
00:21:22.662 --> 00:21:25.755
Yeah, uh god, how long ago was this?
00:21:25.755 --> 00:21:28.702
Well, I have like some nice cameras and stuff.
