We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Trent Ammons a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Trent, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

The story of my path to get me where I am currently today has been complete destiny. By my senior year of high school I had finished up all of the classes I needed to graduate. In pursuit to get the most out of high school that I could, I randomly asked to join the broadcasting class where the school news had been produced. I didn’t have the required entry level journalism class to be accepted into the broadcasting course but met with the teacher and explained that I was trying to broaden my horizons. That teacher took a chance on me and unlocked my soul’s purpose in life. To use creativity, passion, and outside of the box thinking to tell a story through video. I was hooked.

After my senior year of high school a group of friends and I decided to make a bucket list of things to do over the summer before we all went on our separate paths for college. Float air mattresses down the intra coastal waterway and see how far we could go, make bike jumps into isolated ponds in the woods, ride our mountain bikes to a different city. I took it upon myself to document all of our crazy adventures and began “The List Productions” with a $100 waterproof camera that I bought from Walmart.

Fast forward several years later, I had joined the family business importing recycled water bottles from Peru into the United States to sell to companies who would turn the recycled plastic into polyester carpets and clothing, synthetic wood, and automobile liners. It was here where my Dad taught me the ins and outs of business ownership. From invoicing, administration work, accounting, management, purchasing, sales, customer service. I had learned how to run a functioning business from bottom to top all while continuing to create videos as a hobby on the side.

In 2016 Hurricane Matthew hit our coast with tremendous force and the first thing I thought to do was roam the flooded streets with my gopro and a newly purchased drone. The video was a hit! ABC asked me to use the video and from there I was flooded with Facebook messages to do video. I finally decided to take this hobby of mine, form a business, and make this a side project while I was working for the family plastics business. After a year of filming real estate videos, I decided I really missed filming fun and exciting videos of people in their happiest moments. I asked one of my friends if I could film their wedding video for free and from that moment on my life changed forever.

In 2017 the recycling industry took a major hit from China’s Operation National Sword initiative which was a major disruption all around the world. In order to save the family business my dad and I decided to stop taking salaries until we could float the business again. I was out of money and out of time so in August of 2018 I decided that I had to make a decision so I jumped in head first to my video jobby and went on a mission to build a business from the ground up with no scheduled income or any idea how I was going to make this work. Over the next 5 years I put in 90% pure grit alongside 10% of my business knowledge and turned a hobby into a sold out wedding videography business for the past 3 years.

Everything in my life has happened for a reason. My teacher giving me the chance to introduce me to the world of creativity through video, my dad’s meticulous lessons on how to run a business from every angle, my friend’s letting me film their wedding video, and a complete jump of blind faith to turn a hobby into a successful career. It was all to send me on a rocket ship towards using my passion to make the world a better place, one frozen moment in time at a time.

Trent, 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?

My name is Trent Ammons and I am the sole owner of The List Productions, LLC, a wedding videography business out of Myrtle Beach, SC. From a high school summer’s bucket list and a collapsing family business, to a sought out wedding videographer up and down the East Coast of the United States. My life has been a journey unfolding in warp speed in which I have somehow ended up finding my life’s purpose through freezing people’s happiest moments in time through video production.

The List Productions has always been one thing to me – my passion. My goal was to always keep this fun while relying on my business management experience to make sure that it is something sustainable. My whole life has been about creating a positive experience for other people. Wedding videography has been so much more than just making a video although sometimes I wish it were that easy. Wedding videography is about making someone’s fairytale come to life and that isn’t always by putting a camera in someone’s face. Sometimes it is comforting a couple who have every single emotion running through their mind before making the biggest decision of their life. Sometimes it’s making someone laugh when the skies open up and dump rain on the day that they’ve been planning for 2 years. Most of the time it’s running to the bar and grabbing drinks for the bride and groom while everyone is running circles around them and trying to get a word in.

Making people feel comfortable and excited is what I do. I never wanted to be an influencer, I never wanted this to feel like a job, I always wanted to just be myself and pray to the heaven’s above that someone would like my creative way to tell a story. I’ve always tried to stay away from boosting my social media, I wanted it to be a metric for how I was doing and it was a simple plan – Want more followers? , push the boundaries of creativity, make something different, find a way to bring out emotion in the people who were at the wedding but also for the people who just “liked” my social media pages and were genuinely interested in seeing what I created next.

That’s been what I am the most proud of – creating something that was just special to me. Not many people know about the story or meaning of “The List Productions”. It would have been much easier to name my company “Trent Ammons Videography” or “A Piece of Your Heart Weddings” or something relevant along those lines. I wanted The List Productions to always be a reminder to create something that provoked my own emotions. There have been plenty of times that I have cried watching videos of other people and that is what I love so much about this job, I get to create lifelong friendships. No sales gimmicks, no script, it has all just been laying my heart on the line and receiving countless words of affirmation and gratitude in return. That is my dream life – creating emotion picture films.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Instagram! I was always a huge advocate for Facebook. It was great for getting my content out there in a place where moms, dads, uncles, and aunts could share their family members wedding video. It was also a great tool for building interest from nothing to something but Instagram is when things really took a turn for me and I was SO late getting into it.

While living in Charleston, SC I met a dear friend at a random adults kickball league who was a wedding planner in the area. We talked about how we could bring our own unique talents together to benefit each other to grow our own business. One of the biggest things that I came out of that with is “not everyone is related to the couple in your wedding videos, you have a lot of people who found you online and just like watching your videos but don’t have the attention span to watch 7 minutes of someone’s entire day”. They encouraged me to start making 60 second trailers (the max video length allowed at the time on Instagram) as soon as possible after a wedding that would give the couple a preview to share with their friends but also provide a marketing tool for other wedding vendors to share their work, let other followers keep up with my newest creation, and provide myself with a tool to reach new people who are just scrolling through their news feed.

Instagram was the perfect home for that. The biggest difference, in my opinion, between Facebook and Instagram was that Facebook had become a platform for sharing media and Instagram was platform for consuming it. Everyone wanted to see something new from someone they never met. We were all scrolling madly to find the most captivating people and this concept is what took me from reaching friends and families of my clients to reaching the world.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

This is a double edged sword. Being a creative is so fulfilling and heart breaking at the same time. My favorite part of being an artist is that I always get to push boundaries and make my own decisions. The problem is that when those decisions fail there is no one in the world to blame but yourself.

I was always a team sports person growing up. Football and Baseball were always my thing. It wasn’t until I found track and field where I really found my passion for competing. Call me arrogant, but there was something so intriguing about putting all of the weight on my own shoulders and putting my destiny in my own hands. I spent my whole life playing team sports and then left everything to pursue individual competitions with track and field my junior year and swimming my senior year. Both sports I had zero training in, but I had the need for speed both physically as well as my mental curiosity to become great at something fast.

I say all of this to give background to when I learned the success of my own accomplishments and the heartbreak of falling short. There’s no better feeling in the world than putting my heart and soul into creating a wedding video and receiving true heart felt joy from the couple I sent it to. It’s so amazing to see how my videos touch people in ways that I never thought of. I’ve filmed butterflies flying in random flowers for someone who, unbeknownst to me, had a very meaningful tattoo of a butterfly. I’ve frozen a moment in time between a bride and her father who later passed away who has constantly reached out to share her gratitude that his memory lives on forever. These are all of the things that keep me going. The hard part is when I give everything I can into someone’s video and I get the feedback that there are things that they would like to change. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does, it’s only a few changes, but in my mind I’ve failed to give them something that triggers their emotions or accurately depicts the way they experienced the best day of their life and that is soul-crushing to me because all of the blame falls directly on me.

Creativity is a Beauty and the Beast and learning to love both aspects I think is what truly builds an artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thelistproductions.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/thelistproductions
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/thelistproductions
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/@MyrtleBeachWeddingVideographer

Image Credits
Jeff and Molly Patterson Photography Natasha Coyle Photography Stephanie Cranford Photography The List Productions