We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chris Hollo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chris below.

Chris, appreciate you joining us today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

For me, tenacity and picking quality team members is what leads to success.

First, you have to be able to keep pushing no matter what obstacles appear in your path and that is not always easy. Pushing past your own self doubt and the roadblocks that land in your path is the key. In filmmaking. There are times when it’s a team sport and times when you feel like you’re all alone. The one constant is your ability to persevere no matter what. Ultimately, your ability to problem solve on the fly, and the way. you react to issues that invariably come up (weather, pandemics, equipment failure etc.) is what propels you forward.

The second part is picking quality team members whom you can rely on to help you through the daunting task of creating a feature length film. That includes pretty much anyone who has a hand in creating the movie such as actors, crew members, investors and vendors. Being able to rely on a team member to handle their role means wearing one less hat, which allows you to focus on directing and producing a movie in my case..

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

For me, still photography was magic. I had been capturing images and interpreting them in the darkroom for fun since high school, but it wasn’t until my junior year in college that I realized that you could make a living at photography. I got a job working as a first assistant to a commercial photographer which really opened my eyes to the possibility of converting my hobby into a profession. I shifted all my remaining classes to night classes and got paid to learn how to be a commercial photographer during the day. In 1989, I received my business degree and worked for another six months as an assistant, then went out on my own.

I think since the beginning, I’ve always been successful at being easy to work with, being easy to find and being efficient with a client’s time and budget. Clients also demand quality photography that solves their problem but honestly, I am rarely the only person who can provide them with that. When clients have a budget to work with, and a product or service to market, they need a photographer who is available, on time and efficient with their money. I decided early on that is how I would set myself apart from other still photographers. In the 35 years I’ve been a professional photographer, I’ve had the privilege to work in 47 states, several countries around the world all the while never really having a regular 9-5 day job.

About 20 years ago, I started thinking more in terms of capturing motion so I began a transition into shooting film/video which has been an adventure. Many of the principals of still photography carry over to shooting film/video so adding those services wasn’t too much of a challenge. I had been producing larger still shoots for years but I quickly found that shooting video required pulling together larger teams of often vastly different skills. Hiring makeup artists, wardrobe stylists and assistants for example was commonplace but then I had to find sound recordists and camera operators for example. The jobs and the crews became larger and more specialized.

Now, we shoot both film/video and still photography in about equal parts, often for the same clients at the same shoots. We recently completed our first feature length movie The Legend of Lake Hollow which is now available for rent or purchase pretty much anywhere you can rent movies including Amazon, iTunes, GooglePlay etc.

How’d you meet your business partner?

I first became aware of Mark Mosrie in probably 1988. The commercial photographer I was working for at the time kept mentioning a young photographer who was about to return home from being in prestigious photography school in California. He seemed to have a real concern that Mark was going to come back to town and take his clients. A few months later, I went out on my own and then moved back to Nashville to start my business.

Probably 15 years later, I was attending a local chapter meeting of a national photographic trade association in Nashville called the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and I met Mark. We started talking about our past and how we came up in the business and that’s when we realized that we had almost met in 1989, The photographer I had worked for had hired Mark as his first assistant after I had left. It was a small world moment and we got to share our experiences working as assistants which was a lot of fun.

Any advice for managing a team?

Sometimes when things don’t go exactly as planned, it’s hard to press on but when you have a crew of 20 people who are looking to you for guidance it’s more about how you react to the thing that has happened and less about the actual thing itself. When shooting our movie, there were times we had to pivot and move indoors so that we could keep shooting during a rain storm. Or an actor called in sick so we completely changed the shot list so that we could keep shooting. It’s making the best of the situation and being able to always have an answer to questions, even if that answer is “Let me find out and get back to you.”

Making a movie is exhausting, but we go out of our way to make sure that the set is fun, safe and positive. Having good catering is also a plus! We work hard to make sure that once the project is complete and some time has passed, that everyone will look back at their time working with us fondly.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.penumbra-ent.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/penumbrafilms/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/penumbraentertainment
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-hollo-07302a5/