We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alan Davis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. One of the most important things small businesses can do, in our view, is to serve underserved communities that are ignored by giant corporations who often are just creating mass-market, one-size-fits-all solutions. Talk to us about how you serve an underserved community.
Serving the underserved is extremely important to our business. Given the opportunity, we give of our time and services to elevate the voices of those who are otherwise underrepresented. Our company would not exist without those who believed and invested in us. We want to pay it forward.
Prelude Series
One of the ways Davis de Dios Media gives back is through our “Prelude” mini profile series, which highlights young leaders and artists of color. With Prelude, we want to provide a platform for these young leaders and artists, and help amplify their voices in the greater community.
The short documentary pieces are posted online and on social media increasing their visibility online. Check out the Prelude Series page here: https://davisdedios.com/prelude-series/
Kenneth Shirley, Marc “Give me Más” Sanchez and Earl Mitchell are the subjects of the first three episodes of “Prelude.” They are young leaders who are making a tremendous impact within the community and it has been our privilege to be able to help tell their stories.
The first episode focused on Kenneth Shirley the CEO of Indigenous Enterprise. Watch the episode on Kenneth here: https://vimeo.com/641256318
Indigenous Enterprise is a troupe of indigenous dancers who have performed different traditional Indigenous dances all over the world. From the Sydney Opera House in Australia to the Joyce Theater in New York City and most recently at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, these men and women draw huge audiences in big houses by sharing their cultural dance with the world.
Indigenous Enterprise’s impact when it comes to raising awareness about Indigenous culture is amazing. One story Shirley told us took place after one of their performances in Australia. After the show, an audience member approached Shirley and told him that he thought Native Americans were actually extinct. Indigenous Enterprise’s work is helping change people’s understanding of Indigenous cultures globally.
Indigenous Enterprise’s website can be found here: https://store.indigenousenterprise.com/
The second episode is on Marc “Give me Más” Sanchez an up-and-coming animator attending the University of California, Los Angeles. Check out the piece on him here: https://vimeo.com/641258219
Sanchez uses his animation “to help individuals see themselves through the stories and characters he creates.” His latest animation “Sombras” has won awards at multiple film festivals including DocLA, San Luis Film Festival, and the Indie Film Festival. “Sombras” is currently not available to watch because it is going through the film circuit. Watch the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/596820252
During the pandemic, Sanchez returned to his hometown of Yuma, Arizona, where he also worked as a teacher and football coach at a local high school. While teaching Sanchez mentored his students and athletes. He used his own journey as an example of how they could strive for more and follow their own passions.
Sanchez recently returned to Yuma to show “Sombras” at a local theater in front of his community.
Our latest episode of “Prelude” is on former NFL player Earl Mitchell and his dedication to his hometown. Check out the video on Mitchell here: https://vimeo.com/679780927
After an exciting 10-year career in the NFL, which began by drafted by his hometown Houston Texans and ended with playing in Super Bowl, Mitchell returned to his hometown of Houston, Texas. Soon after, he joined The Houston Texans Legends Ambassadors program and got involved with their mission of building a better Houston.
“The Legends are a unique and integral part of the Texans stated goal of being the most community connected sports franchise in the world,” states the Texan’s website.
Mitchell specifically likes working with kids while volunteering. While growing up, Mitchell wished that he had the opportunity to speak with an NFL player. So he enjoys providing kids in his community with that rare experience.
When he’s working with kids, he tells them they don’t need to be nervous to talk to someone.
We’d like to take the opportunity to say to our readers – If you know a man or woman of color that you believe belongs in this series, please feel free to forward them to us! We’re looking to continue growing the Prelude series.
O.D.D. Scholarship Endowment
Davis de Dios Media also invests in the future of education. Through our Olesen, Davis, de Dios Creative Group, we started a scholarship endowment at the University of Arizona that awards annually through our O.D.D. Science Multimedia Scholarship. The scholarship, dedicated to the late state herpetologist and photographer Dr. Cecil R. Schwalbe, is awarded to a student at the University of Arizona School of Journalism who shows a passion and excels in telling multimedia science stories.
The scholarship awards $1,000 to the recipient and can be used to purchase essential gear like a camera, lighting or sound equipment or be used to help offset tuition costs.
Jordan Chin, our first recipient, has been nominated for several regional Emmy Awards for his work at Arizona Public Media. As the first recipient, Jordan also received a broadcast lighting kit from StellaPro Lights, our lighting sponsor, plus a one-on-one training session for an additional value of $1,000 on top of his monetary scholarship. Read more about Jordan’s accomplishments here https://davisdedios.com/2021/11/08/2021-odd-science-multimedia-scholar-wins-emmy-award/
Tucson Botanical Gardens
Finally, we’d like to mention our recent partnership with the Tucson Botanical Gardens!
For the next year, ending in February 2023, Davis de Dios Media is an official Media Partner for the Tucson Botanical Gardens. As part of the partnership, our company will be creating photo and video content of the gardens.
We are also committing to several visual campaigns throughout the partnership to help promote the Tucson Botanical Gardens space, events and new ideas. Be sure to follow us and the Tucson Botanical Gardens on social media, for updates on some of our produced content very soon.
Read more about the partnership here:
https://davisdedios.com/2022/02/01/davis-de-dios-media-partners-with-tucson-botanical-gardens/
We’re extremely excited for this opportunity to work with the Tucson Botanical Gardens. The Gardens is a non-profit rooted in the community and has a long history in Tucson!
Community is a big word when it comes to Davis de Dios Media. Our company wants to be engaged and involved in our community because we are nothing without it! Our mentors and community helped our company succeed and we want to pass that on.
Giving back to members of our community is our small way of helping!
Alan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Sure thing!
Davis de Dios Media is a media services company based in Southern Arizona, but we also have clients across the continental United States. We bring together a team of award-winning producers, photographers, content creators, graphic designers, and more, to help our clients reach the widest audiences possible.
Our services include Cinematography, Photography, Director of Photography, Commercial Video, Video Editing, Campaign Development, Previsualization, Second Unit Photography, Crew, Production Assistant, Documentary, Casting, Website Design, Social Media Marketing, Graphic Design, Corporate Videos, Instructional Videos, Portraiture, Drone Video, After Effects Graphics, Live-streaming, Script Writing and Consultation.
Along with the Tucson Botanical Gardens, our client list has included the likes of Arizona State University, ARRI: The Motion Picture Company, Bear Essential News (Tucson, AZ), Canon USA, Education Week (based in Maryland), eiotown (Los Angeles, CA), Film Creations LTD, Genetic Literacy Project, HTG Molecular Diagnostics, Light & Motion Stella Pro Lights, Microsoft, National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation, Reid Park Zoo (Tucson, AZ), Reporting Unlimited (Tucson, AZ), Sacramento Zoo, Science Magazine, Scientific American, SoCal Edison (Southern California), Sunnyside Unified School District (Tucson, AZ), Tactile Medical (Minneapolis, MN), Tucson Local Media, Tucson Sentinel, University of Arizona, University of Pennsylvania, University of San Diego, Vanderbilt University and several other local and international businesses.
Our goal is to always create a visually evocative campaign that best showcases our client’s needs or products to their chosen markets. We work closely with our clients throughout the creative process to provide them content that is best shaped for their digital needs!
We also offer licensing options to our thousands of hours of footage and photography content that we have amassed in our library over the years.
Here’s a little on our leadership:
Alan Scott Davis, minted in January 2022 as the new Chief Executive Officer for Davis de Dios Media, Alan will lead DDM’s corporate efforts moving forward. Alan is a two-time regional Emmy Award-winning documentarian, who brings diverse skills in filmmaking and documentary storytelling. Alan’s passion for digital stories and strategies in storytelling make him a huge asset to any team. His keen sense for movement and composition in his filmmaking style really adds a dynamic energy that helps projects come to life. He is originally from Fullerton, California, and has a degree in broadcast journalism, specializing in science documentary from the University of Arizona School of Journalism.
John de Dios – John, a former producer for National Geographic Society, draws from near 20 years of experience in leadership roles, photography, producing, and design. John’s background in news and science gives him a watchful and analytical eye for trends, especially when working with our clients during the creative process. John leads client and community relations at Davis de Dios Media, with a focus on our community and non-profit giveback programs. John is also a huge animal lover, enjoying the company of dogs, cats, snakes, and everything in between.
Jonathan Olesen – Jonathan brings a youthful energy to the team. His experience in modeling and being an on-air talent gives him added perspective of what needs to be expressed in the messaging the clients need for their productions. Jonathan, an avid consumer of market news, also spends a great deal of time looking at creative trends and investments for the creative group. Jonathan also serves as the development officer, focusing on business needs in technology and operations.
That’s our company in a nutshell! We love collaborating to create awesome visual content that is memorable and fun for our amazing clientele who we also love!
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process?
Every digital product created by Davis de Dios Media is customized to our client’s specific needs by our award-winning professionals. The gear we use is essential to creating high quality content and we’d like to take this opportunity to share the tools we use in our daily operations.
Each piece of equipment or software listed below is included in our workflow because it is battle tested as far as quality and consistency. We hope this list will be helpful for companies that are gleaning for insight on production teams and the gear essential to produce professional content.
Our flagship video camera is the Canon C300mkii and our secondary cameras are the Canon EOS R5 mirrorless cameras. Since we live in the desert and everything is extremely bright, we shoot in Canon’s C-log 3 color profile. This color profile comes with Canon’s more recent pro and prosumer cameras. The color profile allows us to capture a wider dynamic range that is necessary when shooting in bright locations. Which is basically everything in Arizona.
For lenses we use the XEEN Professional Cine Lenses when shooting dialogue or interviews. These cinema lenses help give our products that “movie look”.
When shooting action shots, wildlife or on a gimbal we use the Canon RF Lenses because of their auto focus capabilities. In particular, when shooting action with the Ronin RS2 gimbal, we like the RF 15-35mm f/2.8 L IS USM Lens. The wide lens in addition to the in-body stabilization that comes with the lens creates shots that are unbelievably smooth. You’ll hear YouTubers like Peter McKinnon call this type of footage “crispy” because it looks like your camera is floating in free space.
For on location audio we use the Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun microphone for our primary audio recording. For a secondary audio backup, we use multiple Tascam DR-10L Micro Portable Audio Recorders. The Tascams are small, record clean audio and are easy to hide! They are also a good cheap option that doesn’t sacrifice quality. Just make sure that you bring a good set of headphones to monitor your audio before you start recording.
To help with color correction, we use the Calibrite ColorChecker Passport Photo 2 on sets. It ensures that we have perfect color at every location. This passport provides you with all of the colors and shades of grey you need in post-production to make sure your color and exposure looks rich and full.
For on location lighting we use StellaPro’s CLx lights and we also use their new Reflex S light. These lights provide an incredible amount of light for a battery-operated LED light. They are a bit pricey compared to their competition but the quality, power and portability that they offer makes them worth the cost in our opinion. These lights provide our company with an unbelievable amount of flexibility that works for both cinematography and photography. They’re small and simple to operate.
**For light modification our company uses Profoto modifiers to work specifically with the StellaPro lights. These modifiers help soften the light that comes out of the powerful StellaPro lights. Recently we’ve also brought V-flat World’s large white/black gator boards to help us shape the lighting in our scenes.
For tripods and sliders we use ProMediaGear. Their carbon fiber gear is lightweight and durable. The video heads we use that go on top of the tripods/sliders are Manfrotto 608 Nitrotech Fluid Video Heads.
Now moving on to software and post-production.
All of our video editing is done with Adobe Creative Suite. We use Adobe Premiere Pro to do most of our heavy lifting and storytelling. While we use Adobe After Effects to create motion graphics and do more advanced compositing and color correction.
One of the most important Adobe Creative Suite plugins that we’ve purchased is the Red Giant Complete package by Maxon. Specifically, the company’s Colorista and Denoiser tools are spectacular and have helped our video quality get to the next level. The specialized control tools that come within the Colorista plugin transformed our overall product.
Finally, we use Triple Scoop Music for all our music needs. They provide licensing that is perfect for our company and a tremendous number of options when you purchase their monthly subscription.
So yes! Manufacturing our own products requires a high level of customization and specific gear. These are the tools that we use to create our client’s trendy visual content so that they can share it with their audience or customers!
How’d you meet your business partner?
I met my business partner, John de Dios, in a 400-level science journalism class while I was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona.
Professor Carol Schwalbe, now a dear friend, brought John in as a professional mentor to work with students who were new to multimedia storytelling like myself.
At the time, John had taught multimedia storytelling at the journalism school for close to a decade and had also taught for The New York Times’ Student Journalism Institute, and for a variety of national journalism organizations for many of years. So, I was eager to learn from him!
Throughout the semester, John helped me develop the necessary skills to become a beginning multimedia storyteller. We even worked together at the Biosphere 2!
I would take the skills that John and Professor Schwalbe had taught me and produce content for the University of Arizona’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. I am still very proud of those early projects. Our team would win two consecutive regional Emmys for best topical documentary while I worked there!
As I developed as a multimedia storyteller, John and I continued working together on different visual projects.
Through John’s amazing network we’d produce videos for National Geographic, The National Science Foundation, The University of Arizona and Arizona State University to name some of the big ones.
Then through my other mentors Bruce Dorn D.G.A., Cody Sheehy and Rick/Paul Rose of Film Creations LTD we’d work on videos for Canon USA, ARRI: The Motion Picture Company, Arizona PBS, Jim Click Automotive, Long’s Realty, The Special Olympics and many more!
In the Summer of 2018 John and I decided to create our company Davis de Dios Media and that’s when the Megapowers were bonded, yeah! (Pro wrestling reference!)
Contact Info:
- Website: https://davisdedios.com/
- Instagram: @davisdedios
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davisdedios
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/19097461
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCokF1BIBmduBsnu6r08zqtA/
- Other: vimeo.com/davisdedios
Image Credits
Davis de Dios Media