We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lexie + Nick Trivundza. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lexie + Nick below.

Alright, Lexie + Nick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?

Thanks so much for allowing us to be a part of Canvas Rebel! It’s awesome to be a part of such a cool community!

Before we get into why taking vacations are so important here’s a a little background on us.

We’re Nick + Lexie and we own Adventure Company, a creative studio that produces and directs films, shorts films, series and commercial advertising.

We love adventure and filmmaking!

Our films have screened at Film Festivals around the world which has been amazing! Our more recent series, BackSpace gained 100K views in the first 24 hours and has gone on to be viewed over 1 million times in over a 100 different countries. We were both surprised and excited that there’s so many fans out there! Our previous projects include our feature film Danger! Danger! which made its World Premiere at the Pasadena International Film Festival, with an international release in 2022. This was our second feature film following our debut award-winning film, The West and the Ruthless, which premiered at AIFF with a global release by Sony Pictures. On the commercial side, we’ve worked with some great brands and clients such as Apple, The Academy Awards, Visa, Google, Mattel, Harper Collins, and Adobe to name a few.

Now that you know a little bit more about us and our company, back to the question at hand, do we take vacations?
ABSOLUTELY! We DEFINITELY take vacations and believe they are extremely important for creatives and business owners!

Vacations for us are a time to recharge and become re-inspired. Owning a creative studio requires work and can take a lot out of you. There’s a lot of creatives out there that suffer from burnout which is completely understandable since creative work requires passion and constant creativity. We believe in order to avoid burnout and to really live your life, vacations and specifically unplugging during those vacations is especially important.

On the business side before we head out of town, we try to notify clients and producers at least 1 month in advance letting them know that we will be unavailable. We always set our autoresponders so no one feels like their being ghosted. But we don’t take calls or emails while on vacation. That’s a huge thing for us. This is a time to unwind, recharge, experience new sites and sounds, eat new foods and take in all that the world has to offer!

While on vacation we find that adventure is really amazing for the soul. It makes you excited for life. It allows you to see the world differently. It even ignites ideas & stories.

For us, these new stories and ideas allow us to also location scout the area we are adventuring in for upcoming films or projects. We explore every nook and cranny of a place. We ask the questions of would we want to return to this place to film a movie? If it’s a yes, what would the story be? And then if that all works, what would the actors and crew experience be like? Where would they stay – what airports are nearby? Is there infrastructure for film here?

For instance, recently we went to Walt Disney World. While there we explored Epcot and Typhoon Lagoon and found out you can film there. It just made the entire vacation even better. We talked about a story of an adventurer walking over the rope bridges with waterfalls nearby or exploring a cave. We pictured characters having a conversation in the Epcot Pavilion of Morocco. It reinvigorated us, it made us think of new and exciting stories.

For our series BackSpace, it was on a vacation that we ignited the idea of the world of Backspace. We had just explored the Grand Canyon and we started talking. We talked about how fun Sci-Fi series could be. We talked about characters, locations, what would it be like to explore new worlds!

Now sometimes it doesn’t need to be a huge vacation, sometimes allowing yourself to adventure close by works too! A few years ago when we needed a little break away from work, we would drive to Vasquez Rocks nearby. We’d unplug and not check emails while there. We’d hike and talk. One day, we realized we loved it so much that it would make a great filming location. We had the perfect script called DANGER! DANGER! and Vasquez made for the perfect location! We ended up shooting there a few months later.

We also use Film Festivals as a way of vacationing as well. We get to meet new people, go on new adventures, talk about film and get to see our films up on the big screen which is amazing!

After the vacation, we get back to work feeling refreshed, re-ignited and re-inspired. We find that after a good vacation there’s so much more creativity and problem solving we can pour back into our company and the creative projects.

That’s the wonderful thing about vacations, they make you think in different and interesting ways.

We believe the best vacations change you in such a great way!

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Some books that have definitely impacted our creative entrepreneurial thinking are “The Art of” books. There’s so many different “Art of” books out there for different films. We spend so much time looking at these beautiful books. What we love about them is all the creativity. Some of it gets into the final film but sometimes the most inspirational artwork never makes it in. Sometimes it’s these little pieces that didn’t even end up in the film that allow for a spark for your own idea or world! There are also interviews with the directors or lead artists on the project that can be super inspiring as well! It’s so interesting to see all the different worlds and characters they create and how creativity ebbs and flows into something truly amazing!

Another resource that we love is StudioBinder on Youtube which is absolutely amazing for filmmaking learning. We find so many creative nuggets to this channel that are so helpful for newcomers and seasoned filmmakers alike. There’s so much good content about all the aspects of filmmaking. We truly believe in life long learning and this channel is so inspiring and really gets into the nuts and bolts of story, directing, cinematography, camera angles, how to shoot action sequences, editing, sound design, location scouting and so much more! We highly recommend checking it out!

https://www.youtube.com/@StudioBinder

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

We believe a super rewarding thing about being a creative is the fact you get to play in different worlds! One of our favorite things is to create worlds that don’t exist in real life or no longer exist since they are long gone or only exist in memory. It’s exciting to figure out what the terrain looks like in your world, what kind of characters live there, how do they interact, what kind of clothes do they wear, how do they get around? Sometimes it takes some back and forth but when you create (or discover) a world that speaks to you, there is absolutely nothing like it!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.adventurecompany.org
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/adventurecompanyllc/
• Youtube: BackSpace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi_lChXKs0c
• Other: Adventure Company Films: www.adventurecompany.org/films

Image Credits
Adventure Company LLC