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

Kevin, appreciate you joining us today. What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business

Imagine being out in the middle of the northern Nevada desert on a documentary shoot. No one around for miles, the late autumn sun sinking low in the western sky, chill wind picking up, and you’re hopelessly stuck on a winding dirt road. I lived that moment while filming one of our recent documentary projects “On the California Trail: Preserving Gravelly Ford”. Our crew car, a rented SUV, was bogged down in several feet of trail dust, on the actual California National Historic Trail. We were stunned! We had four wheel drive, and ground clearance, and modern tech…. and while waiting to get towed out, we thought of letters and diary entries we had read about emigrant parties and their wagons getting stuck in similar places. It made me and our crew feel a direct connection with the travelers who had come through here in the 1850s. Our car was successfully freed and we started to film shortly afterwards, a bit more wary, a bit more cautious, and a lot more appreciate of the comfortable hotel rooms, soft beds, showers, and hot food that awaited us each day we finished our documentary work. The emigrants didn’t have any of that. The documentary came out beautifully, by the way.

Kevin, 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?

Hello there! my name is Kevin Marcus. I’m a Los Angeles native who grew up on cross country roadtrips and fell in love with the vastness and diversity of the United States, the deserts, mountains, and grand expanses of the west. I grew up to be a history nerd, majoring in cultural anthropology/urban geography before going to photography/film school in Santa Barbara.

I founded Knowledge Tree Films in 2009 as a mindfully creative agency and production house. Our specialty is story driven media production, branding, and marketing. We work in many different genres, all with the goal of contributing positive energy, education, and entertainment to our world.

We do this by approaching our documentary and narrative work with no fear of acknowledging hard facts and authentic emotion. We approach our social media and commercial work by attention to detail and finding the right story, along with the right voice to communicate it. We’ve built our own brand on the quality and thoroughness we bring to each job, and continue to evolve our work. We will never stop evolving, learning, and expanding our storytelling palette.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I had a fear of fully committing to my ideas and my instincts when creating intellectual property for the TV and film markets. In my early 20s, I had a slate full of ideas for movies and TV shows, and as I started to land work and meet already established industry individuals, I was been taught by said established companies and producers that my greatest chance for success was to conform to “what the market wants”. I standardized and watered down my ideas, to fit in, and then struggled to make any mark. To put it simply, I “dumbed down”. One day, now in my mid 30s, I took a meeting with a streaming service producer. I had a sizzle reel for a “dumbed down conformed cable tv style” travel show. The sizzle reel had hints of the history and culture I wanted to focus on, scattered throughout the sex appeal shots, the corny jokes, etc. The producer watched my reel a few times, then asked me: is this the kind of show you want to do?

I answered, well, yes, if this is what sells, then I’m ok with doing this. So, he asked the same question again: Is this the kind of show YOU want to do? I hesitated, then answered no. He told me to forget what others were telling (and at this point I was also telling myself), and go make the sort of sizzle I WANTED to make. So I did. And by the time I did, the channel my producer contact worked for had been sold and he was let go. Such is this industry. But since that experience, I started a slow and steady shift to making content the way I want to make it. And I started connecting with clients who liked what I had to offer. And that energy shift and commitment to story integrity lead to an evolved business integrity. People I compromised myself to work with were no longer viable and I either cut them from my life or they removed themselves once they realized they couldn’t take advantage of me. Our company just landed a huge new client. The client summarized his path to success “do things the right way, your way, and the money will follow”. That is what I started doing just in the past few years, and the client is right. What a difference it makes. A tremendous life and business lesson.

How’d you meet your business partner?

2009 was the height of finding jobs in Hollywood through Craigslist- I’m not sure if I miss this era or not. I think I don’t miss it…. well… Whatever the good or bad was with job postings on that site, I most definitely found work on there, as did many of my friends and colleagues.

Many of these postings were for inconsequential day jobs, but this one mid summer post caught my eye, asking for a producer type to come in on development of a multi-tiered science fiction epic: mini-series, graphic novels, feature film, the works. I applied to the ad, and received a response from Ray, already a producer on the project, inviting me to meet the team and suss out if we liked each other. I went, I met, and we did, at first.

The project was helmed by a former child star and a head writer. They quickly started to prove they didn’t have the connections, the IP, the funding, and the ability to lead. When the religion of said head writer was pushed into the project heavily, I was done, and within 3 months of occasional meetings and phone calls, announced my departure at the final meeting I attended.

Ray approached me afterwards and asked to hang out some time in the future. I told him sure, not putting any specific energy or effort behind that. The following year, I conceived my first major documentary project. The director I was working with hired Ray to be a part of the production, surprising me. We became friends for real over that project’s many months, and by the time it ended, Ray joined Knowledge Tree Films as my producing partner. Today we are family to each other, and can proudly look back on 15 years of friendship and professional collaborative partnership.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.knowledgetreefilms.com
• Instagram: @knowledge_tree_films
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KnowledgeTreeFilms/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-marcus-39852b12/
• Other: www.darkwaterpilotphotography.com

Image Credits
All photos by Kevin Marcus