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

Kevin, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our mission took us by surprise at Wewa Films. We are a documentary company. We have a really heartfelt, cinematic style. We started out wanting to make those kinds of films.

And we do, just not in the way we expected. Early on, we had no portfolio. So we started making little documentaries about artists and artisans, people in our community.

Then our phone started ringing, but it wasn’t those types of people. It was corporate leaders, people who ran big organizations. They had seen our work and wanted that style for themselves.

They were tired of slick, sterile, traditional corporate videos. They wanted to show the heart of their people and give them the production value they deserve. They wanted our style.

So we ran with it. Now our mission is to work with big brands and organizations to tell their story and elevate their people. We want them to look and sound their best, be proud of themselves and the way they are represented.

Our mission came to us and we love it.

For Redfish Film Fest, we were more deliberate. We wanted to start a film fest in our hometown of Panama City, Florida, but we wanted to own a niche, not just be another film festival where we would never stand out.

We love documentaries, so we looked around for other documentary-only film festivals. There were only a handful in the whole country. We had found our niche and our mission.

We celebrate and elevate documentaries and documentary filmmakers. We had more than 90 submission in our first year, with films from students and amateurs, but also PBS, NatGeo, NASA, and other big streamers. Film industry pros came to Panama City from all over the country. It turned out they were looking for something like this.

We are honored and thrilled to give them a home.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I made my first video when I was 40 years old, at a corporate job. At 45, I co-founded my film company. At 48, I co-founded a film festival.

I think that’s important because it’s easy to think if you don’t start businesses when you’re very young, you won’t at all. The businesses I love started in mid-life.

But my corporate experience is part of the value Wewa Films offers. Heartfelt, cinematic corporate videos are our niche. That’s because I know how big organizations operate, their brand standards and structures, and the problems they have have. They are less concerned with the latest social media trends than they are with recruiting, internal morale and recruiting, and investor relations. I knew all that because I had been there.

We coupled my corporate knowledge with my business partner’s astonishing cinematography and boom – we’ve built a business on it.

We’ve worked for McDonald’s, Toyota, HCA Health Care, Tyndall Federal Credit Union, and other big brands. They are comfortable with us because we understand their situation and needs, but bring the production value they want from the film world.

Our proudest moments are when we deliver a video to a client and they say, “We never thought we could look and sound this good. This is the heart of who we are. We can’t wait to share this.”

We love it so much and feel honored to show that, in the end, even the biggest businesses are made of people with hearts who want to do a good job.

Redfish Film Fest does the same thing, but in a different way. We provide a platform for documentary filmmakers to showcase their amazing work and a place for them to be celebrated and cherished.

Both businesses exist to elevate people and let them be their best selves.

What a job.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Both of my businesses are story driven. Wewa Films tells the stories of others. Redfish Film Fest provides a place for others to tell their own stories.

So our marketing is basically telling stories. Our most successful marketing are long-form social media posts telling the stories of the people we work with. Most marketing “experts” will tell you that people don’t have an attention span anymore, that they won’t read, that you have to hit them hard and fast to get their attention.

We have not found that to be true. Human beings are hard wired to crave stories. If you tell them well, people will pay attention and want that for themselves.

The more stories we tell and the more businesses we elevate, the more our phone rings.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

When we started out, we had no money for marketing. We just had our social media channels. I’m a writer, so I started writing stories about people we knew and our experience with clients. We had no idea if that would work because it wasn’t what people consider conventional marketing.

It was risky because everything you read about marketing says that won’t work. But it did – and continues to – for us.

Our first client is named Lori Allen. She runs an amazing organization called the Gulf Coast Children’s Advocacy Center. When we finished our project with Lori, I wrote a long Facebook post about her and her organization. The post was not about us, it was about her. We mostly wanted to say thank you. We didn’t really even think of it as marketing.

A couple weeks later, my phone rang. It was Jennifer Conoley, the director of Florida’s Great Northwest. She wanted us to bid on a project. We won the project, did the work, and then we wrote a long post about it.

Then my phone rang. It was Kelli Godwin, the director of Gulf County Florida Tourism. She wanted the same thing.

And on and on. The risk of doing long, thoughtful, heartfelt posts about our clients led to more clients. And still does.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wewafilms.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justakevinelliott
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/justakevinelliott
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevincreates/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@creativebizpod