We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Maggie Hartmans & Brittany Zampella. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Maggie Hartmans & Brittany Zampella below.
Hi Maggie Hartmans & Brittany Zampella, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
We just finished a feature documentary called “A Good Neighbor” that has been very dear to our hearts. It’s about an amazing activist named Lucy Molina who advocates for cleaner air in Commerce City, CO, one of the most polluted zip codes in the nation. Lucy’s kids were getting sick from exposure to air & water toxins in the area, so at its heart, the film is about the inspiring lengths a mother will go to protect her children. The film follows her 2021 city council campaign as she advocates for her community. At its core, the film is about the ways that racism, pollution, climate change, voting and local elections collide, all centered around Lucy’s amazing story.
We started our production company a few years ago with the hope of telling meaningful stories like this one. Within a few minutes of meeting Lucy we knew we wanted to tell her story. Not only is she an incredibly inspiring person, but we thought she would put a face to issues like environmental justice and climate change. We think the best documentaries are not just about the issues themselves, but the ones that create empathy for those impacted by injustice.
We started this project almost three years ago without any funding because we believe in Lucy’s story and the impact that it can have not only in Commerce City but in polluted areas around the world. Our goal with this film was simply to create awareness and we’ve had a lot of success with it so far. We’ve partnered with some amazing organizations in Colorado who support Lucy in her fight for climate justice. We had a highly successful premiere at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival. And we just signed with Good Docs, the company that distributed the latest Academy Award-winning documentary. We’re actually raising funds to secure distribution insurance to get this thing out into the world! People can go to AGoodNeighborFilm.com to find out more about the film and support the cause!
Aside from any accolades, we hope the film will bring real change to policy in Colorado, and create empathy for forgotten, struggling communities.
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?
We (Maggie & Brittany) met in 2019, both coming from creative backgrounds. Maggie came from the filmmaking world, having produced indie films, written award-winning screenplays, and produced at an Ad Agency. Brittany had been working at a documentary production company, working her way up from assistant to producer and social media content creator. We met in 2019 when Maggie had been hired as an editor at the company, and we hit it off immediately. We would often find ourselves dreaming about the types of content we would create if we had our own production company. There were a lot of late nights talking about how a lot of filmmakers, especially in the documentary space, focused on what’s wrong with the world, and not a hopeful vision for how we can make it better. While we agree it’s important to highlight injustice, we wanted to do it in a way that gave people hope for a better future. We dreamt of a production company that would create all kinds of content: Narrative films that create empathy. Documentaries that both highlight issues and present hope for change. And branded videos for ethical, sustainable, and inclusive clients. Everything we did would be for the betterment of the planet and the amazing people that live on it.
We came up with the name “Farsighted Creative” for our new production company. If you have farsighted vision, everything up close is blurry, but you’re able to see very far away with absolute clarity. That’s what we wanted our content to do, allow people to look forward without getting caught up in all of the noise of today.
Our dreams became a reality in January of 2020 when we branched off on our own and officially started “Farsighted Creative.” It was obviously a VERY interesting time to start a production company, but we navigated our way through the pandemic by providing post-production services to people filming their own content during quarantine. Since then we’ve produced two short films, the documentary, and countless commercials and promotional videos for brands doing amazing things. One of our favorite ad campaigns was for Simple Switch, a website that makes it easy for customers to shop pre-vetted ethical and sustainable products.
We pride ourselves not only on what we make, but how we make it. We offer carbon offsetting on all of our productions and are pioneering some sustainable filmmaking techniques that we hope to share with other filmmakers very soon. Diversity and inclusion is also super important to us. When it comes to casting and crewing up for our productions, representation is at the forefront of the stories we want to tell. One of the things we first bonded about was how powerful storytelling can be, and using the “with great power comes great responsibility” mantra with anything we create. Through this process, it’s been amazing to see how well our clients have responded to these values. If you’re working with a client who’s entire company is focused on creating sustainable alternatives, they love that we share those values, too.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
Starting a production company has been a learning journey, and we’ve had to unlearn quite a few things along the way. The filmmaking industry, and the commercial/agency space, often glorifies the hustle culture. However, we made a conscious decision early on not to sacrifice our well-being or our friendship for the sake of productivity.
The biggest thing we’ve had to re-learn is proper balance and workload. There are undoubtedly crunch times, especially when it comes to what our clients need and what we’ve promised to deliver. That’s why we are very thoughtful about how many projects we take on, whether client projects or getting our own films off the ground. If there’s a season that’s really busy with client work, maybe that’s not the time to start working on a new feature film, even if we’re really excited about it.
Both of us have had to encourage each other to prioritize mental health and well-being by taking days off when needed, rather than pushing ourselves to the limit. The best way we’ve been able to pace ourselves is by adopting an abundance mindset. Part of unlearning the hustle culture has also been unlearning the scarcity behind it. This idea that you have to get there first, always be the best, or that you have to accomplish everything right now. We’ve worked hard to focus on the idea that there’s time for all the stories we want to tell, and we don’t have to do everything today. It’s about pacing ourselves and savoring the creative journey.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
There are so many different stories we could tell! Pivoting to make our newborn baby production company work during the pandemic certainly took a lot of resilience. We had a moment in 2020 where we thought, “How are we going to do this when we can’t film anything?” What was amazing, though, is that it actually helped establish us as a great post-production house, which is where we get the majority of our client-work from to this day. Maggie’s “Covid-skill” became color grading, which has been such an asset to us and allows us to truly be a one-stop-shop for post-production needs. It’s such a great example of how creativity can thrive within the constraints of hard situations. We even got to do this great project where a company was filming a bunch of individual interviews and asked if we could get creative with editing to make it seem like some of them were in the same room, and it turned out really well! If we had just assumed our company wouldn’t have lasted through the pandemic we would have missed out on some amazing opportunities.
Contact Info:
- Website: FarsightedCreative.com
- Instagram: @farsighted.creative
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/farsighted-creative
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb7-4zCK3ueMMkWA_x_GI1Q
Image Credits
Farsighted Creative