We were lucky to catch up with Matt Conant recently and have shared our conversation below.

Matt, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, let’s jump into one of the most exciting parts of starting a new venture – how did you get your first client who was not a friend or family?

I was working from the end of high school through all of college at a sound studio. It was a very small sound studio, basically one guy, and outside contractors as needed, so I was pretty much the only person working there on a daily basis besides the owner/boss, Joe, who was (and still is) the nicest guy ever and a perfect mentor for me.

I started there knowing little about sound, but knowing a little about music because my father had been in the classical music world for my entire life and then some. I began by wrapping cables and burning CDs, and eventually began going graphic design and website work, and printing and deliveries and setting up mic stands and running cables, and sometimes monitoring the sound board if Joe had to be in 2 or 3 places at once, which often happened.

He was always the primary audio engineer, but I was also in film school at the time, and learning more and more about video. Gradually, Joe’s audio clients began to ask if he did video as well, and between Joe’s cameras and mine, we had a decent setup to do live multicam video recordings, so I sort of became the de-facto video department at this two-person company. Both the audio and video side grew over the years, and it took several years, until I was well out of school, before we finally had a client ask us if we could do a project, and the answer (behind closed doors) was… “Um… can we?”

Most of our projects had been single-day endeavors to that point, and usually something the two of us could handle ourselves. This particular gig itself would have meant 50-60 days of recording, a large investment in new gear, and larger crews recording than we’d ever sent out before. Joe said he was pretty sure he didn’t have the capacity to do both this job and all his other audio clients, and he wasn’t even sure he had the capacity to budget it all out. My advice to him was “Don’t say no!”

I spent a week or so calling companies, getting quotes on gear and rentals, even calling a helicopter company (this was before the invention of drones) to ensure we could get all the requested shots at the required quality. When Joe seemed skeptical of the time commitment, I told him if it came to it, I could handle the entire project through my own recently-incorporated company without disrupting his other projects at all, and I’d continue to work for him the rest of the time. We would run the post-production and audio work through his facility and it would be a sort of partnership production. It helped to have a creative partner who trusted me with his client and his company name, that we had worked together for nearly ten years at that point, and that he knew I wouldn’t promise something I couldn’t deliver.

It was my first time budgeting something out of that size, but Joe had full trust in me, and once I had created a quote that surprised even me, he said “If that’s what it costs, that’s what it costs. The worst they say is no.” It was a tense couple of weeks around the holidays waiting to hear back, but eventually they gave us a yes, with a caveat: could we shoot 2 sample days to show them we knew what we were doing? Given the size of the project, that seemed fair, and we asked for a small retainer up front to cover the crew and rental costs for that shoot. Although we didn’t end up going with the cameras we had rented for the test shoots to do the rest of the video, we learned exactly what the client wanted, what would work and what wouldn’t moving forward, and most importantly, the footage we got looked phenomenal.

That was my first client that helped me launch my company, I was able to hire many talented friends and colleagues to help make it the best it could possibly be, and the final video wound up for sale in the client’s gift shop for many years to come.

Matt, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a filmmaker by training, so I’ve worked on all sides of that industry now, at least behind the camera. I have written, shot, directed, produced, and edited projects from 30-second commercials to full-length feature films. I have a company, Cinevore Studios, that does creative in-house work, sometimes comedy, sometimes science fiction, and sometimes gamer-targeted content. And I have a commercial production company, Crystalline Studios, that does commercial and industrial projects for everything from law firms and medical organizations to artistic and cultural non-profits.

On the commercial side, a client comes to me in need of marketing or internal education or the like, but have no idea how to put that together, so we usually talk with them, find out what they need, and help brainstorm solutions. We can do everything from writing a script through casting, crewing, budgeting, scheduling, video editing, any needed effects, and the final video upload to their website, or to send off to a funder or grantor as the case may be.

On the creative side, usually the idea is ours, mine or one of my writing partners. We decide whether it’s more fitting to be a short film, a digital series, a TV show, or in some cases, even a novel or a game. Either we find funding and produce it ourselves, or – now that I live in LA – I create a pitch deck and sometimes a pilot script and set about pitching the project to various studios and networks that have the sort of distribution platform or partnerships that the project would require. (Basically, independent filmmaking vs. studio filmmaking)

For both companies, I’m most proud of our ingenuity, our voice, and our execution in bringing a project to fruition. Anybody can shoot and edit video given some training. But some people either lack the ideas to create something unique, or the ability to develop that kernel of an idea into a complete project that can actually be pitched and sold – which is really the hardest part – and we’ve managed to do the latter more than a few times.

For commercial clients, I want people to know that they can trust us to find the most reasonable, and yet most creatively interesting way to bring their ideas to life. We bring our own ideas to the table, but we’re just as happy to execute your vision as to provide our own.

The same goes for writing for TV. I am an Author and Show Creator as well these days, and often generate my own concepts for books or TV shows and write, pitch and sell them to networks or publishers. But I’m just as happy functioning in a TV writers room, lending my voice to the chorus in helping make an existing world with existing characters sing in a unique and fun way.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I’m pivoting all the time!

I went to school and studied film to make creative fiction projects, but I began my career doing commercial video production because that was where the money was, and that was what clients were willing to pay for. Nobody wanted short films, YouTube barely even existed yet, and there was no local infrastructure where I grew up for studio film production.

I probably could have had a very fulfilling and lucrative career doing just commercial work, because I still enjoy doing it. But I also began writing and producing creative projects on the side, with the profits from my commercial company, and people kept wanting to see more and more of those. I made a web series with some friends called OverAnalyzers, then another one called Nerd vs. Geek, and it blossomed from there. So I pivoted into the creative side, and eventually into writing specifically, the part of the production process I most enjoyed, and where it seemed my talents shone through most brightly.

I’m still writing TV pilots, but I’ve also written four novels with my writing partner Lauren Cipollo – three sci-fi, one fantasy – and we found a publisher for the sci-fi trilogy in Aethon Books. We’re also developing two tabletop role-playing games, and really just looking for any fun places we feel we can lend our creative voices.

It’s all related though. I’m telling stories regardless of what part of the creative industry I find myself in, and that continues to make me happy.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Every day is different. Some days I wake up and do full days of web design for a client. Other days I’m writing a chapter of a novel. Some days I’m jumping between a half-dozen different projects, from a podcast script to a pitch deck to a T-shirt design to a meeting with a development executive somewhere. It can be exhausting, and writing novels or TV shows with the hope of getting them sold is not always the best business plan, but it can also be a lot of fun. It keeps me creative and I feel like I’m always looking for unique solutions to strange problems that emerge. Most people have no idea what I’m talking about when I talk about what a normal day looks like, but I also know a lot of people who have the sorts of jobs where they literally don’t want to talk about their day because they find it boring, or literally nothing happened. My day might be stressful and bizarre and unreliable and underpaid sometimes, but it’s always something different! And usually, it’s something interesting on top of that.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.cinevore.com, www.crystallinestudios.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cinevorefilm/
• Twitter: twitter.com/cinevore
• Youtube: youtube.com/cinevorefilm, youtube.com/crystallinestudios