We recently connected with Andrew Rurik and have shared our conversation below.

Andrew, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

We are actually still in the process of completing one of the most meaningful projects I’ve gotten to work on, so stay tuned for full details coming next year!

What I can say about this project — a documentary feature — is that we’re following the recovery journey of a survivor of multiple strokes, work through physical therapy and training for a big adventure: getting out into the backcountry once again and going backpacking with his friends.

I immediately felt a connection to Ian, our subject, after watching my grandmother and a very close family friend have strokes several years prior. I’ve seen the struggles of the recovery journey and the impact that it has not just on the person, but the ripple effects to their community. Events like this have a blast radius.

We’ve been following Ian for nearly a year, but his journey has lasted almost seven years. I’ve been there firsthand to witness the rollercoaster of emotions, the painstaking and careful efforts to relearn basic tasks, and the moments of victory that come with breakthroughs and gaining just a little bit more independence back.

Prior to his strokes, Ian was an avid backpacker and incredibly active person. Much of the time he spent connecting with his friends was venturing off the grid in the backcountry. Several years ago, he set a goal: to get back out there again. This has been a significant motivator for his recovery process, but it is absolutely an incredible challenge. Dynamic terrain changes, inclines and declines, and trekking distances through the eastern sierras is a task for an able-bodied person, so approaching it with significant physical deficits makes it all the more challenging!

This project, and the time spent with Ian, has been a powerful testament to the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Andrew Rurik, and I’m the founder of third shift, a visual content studio that helps brands and businesses who believe in better be seen and understood.

We work with companies to find stories, individuals, or representatives that embody the spirit of their brand, living out their ethos, and share them on their platforms. Not necessarily specific product marketing pieces (though we do those, too), we prefer to dig a little deeper and find the stories that contribute to who the brand is and what they stand for, not just what they sell.

When I was fresh out of film school, I spent nearly half a decade in Hollywood as a lighting technician, working on music videos, TV shows, and features across the globe. After a brief pivot to higher education to help develop the curriculum for a new film school, and a two-year stint leading media productions for a non-profit I launched Third Shift.

End of the day, I love stories. I’ve produced two feature films that address some personally relevant topics that hit close to home, directed several documentary shorts that have won awards and screened at festivals across the US, and helped shape content for brands like Savage X Fenty, Diadora, Bank of the West, and more.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Third Shift was born out of a slow start. Even when I worked in Hollywood, I would still get calls from friends to come shoot and edit stuff with them. These would be little tiny things like “Oh, I want to launch this clothing company, come on down to the beach let’s shoot a promo, I have $100 and I’ll buy you dinner after” — and I’d be absolutely down for the journey. I loved getting to create this stuff alongside collaborators I admired.

This basically continued for the better part of a decade. At every job I had, I was also taking freelance work on nights and weekends. This wasn’t always to make ends meet (though as a newlywed in Los Angeles, it certainly helped!) — I really just loved getting to do this part of the job too, having a little more freedom to dream with people who would push me creatively and demand better and better work. All these freelance gigs helped me in the work I’d do in my day jobs and all my day job work would help me in my freelance gigs.

At a certain point, I was effectively working a full-time job and about 75% of another full-time job with all the freelance work I had on board. A few extenuating circumstances at the full-time job (namely: the boss I had, and who I really liked, left for a new role at a different company) and doing some math meant that if I devoted the newly freed up time to growing the freelance work, this could become a full-time job on its own.

Now, six years into that journey, I’ve never looked back. We’ve now grown to a small team, and the work continues to grow further!

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

It’s perhaps not the most scalable method, but the best source of new clients has arguably been my lack of fear of starting conversations with the people I’m sitting next to in airport lounges, restaurants, and other events. Being able to connect with people, 1-1, share the story of what we do and how we do it, is the best way we’ve been able to share the vision of who we are and who we serve. Plus, the nature of traveling for production means we’ve gotten to meet and subsequently work with brands and businesses from all corners of the US.

Contact Info:

• Website: thirdshiftcreative.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andrew_rurik/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewrurik/
• Other: https://vimeo.com/thirdshiftcreative https://medium.com/bythirdshift

Image Credits
All photos credit: Blake Williams, except the two photos with the filename that starts with TNF, those two photos credit: Taylor Fiore