We were lucky to catch up with Morgana Wingard recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Morgana thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today.

If I was starting over again today, I would have studied business in undergrad and gone for an MBA — with a lot of classes on law because no matter what business you’re in you’re going to need to sign and create a lot of contracts. Then, I would have gone for what I wanted from the beginning instead of trying to take the “safe” route. I’ve ended up doing pieces of what was in my heart from the beginning but I often wonder where I would be today if I started pursuing that first instead of other jobs that seemed more stable and accessible. The funny thing is, when I completely dropped my dream of a career in film and photography and ran away from it (or so I thought), I ended up running right into it. Someone tell me how that works?! Lastly, I would have jumped on social media in the beginning and focused on building an audience. As much as I detest social media, it’s become a necessary part of building a successful business and getting client work. I see clients hiring people because of how many followers they have on social media and that gives them more control over the content they create for the client.

Morgana, 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?

My name is Morgana Wingard. Today, I’m a producer, director, cinematographer, and photographer. In 2013, after losing my dream job in New York City, I started my own production company, Namuh Media. In short, for the last ten years, together with talent from around the world, I have produced documentary films and photographs about social impact around the world for clients including UNICEF, CARE, USAID, Doctors without Borders, and Michelle Obama’s Girls Opportunity Alliance (an initiative of the Barack Obama Foundation). We provide end-to-end film production services with a specialty in international social justice stories.

I have to thank my clients for where I am today. I was too scared to go for what I really wanted at first — photography and eventually film. So, I started as a graphic designer and often included my own photographs. Eventually, my clients started asking me to do photography as well. That went on for a few years until I had a client who had hired me to do an extensive photography project across Africa. At some point, they changed the scope of work to video and that forced me to really figure out how to start sharing stories through film. With a lot of ups and downs, it was a non-stop hustle from there — until Covid-19 stopped that train of course.

One of the projects I’m most proud of is a series of 5 films I got to produce for Michelle Obama’s initiative to support girls’ education (Girls Opportunity Alliance). We filmed 5 stories about 5 girls in 5 countries who had to overcome extreme challenges to get an education. What was really special about the project was that I got to co-create the films with the girls themselves (who were really young women at this point). We wrote the scripts together and planned the scenes together. Then, we worked with the local organizations that had helped them to get an education and selected girls in the current programs to act out the older girls’ stories. These were not professional actors, but they did = an amazing job. My favorite is a story about a woman named Rebecca in rural Kenya who experienced traumatic gender-based violence in a coming-of-age ceremony when she was a little girl and refused to let the same thing happen to her girls. You can watch “A New Rite” on my website: https://www.morganawingard.com

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

There are so many great online services to help with small businesses and film production out there these days. Here are a few of my favorites:

Automated Transcription Service (that you can export to Adobe Premiere): https://www.simonsaysai.com/
https://www.temi.com/ and https://www.rev.com/ are also good for automated transcription
AI Voice Over: https://murf.ai/
Real People for Voice Overs: https://voice123.com/
Venue rentals: https://www.peerspace.com/
Cheap legal advice: https://www.rocketlawyer.com/ or https://www.legalzoom.com/
For collecting feedback on film drafts: https://frame.io

Have you ever had to pivot?

As with many, everything changed when Covid hit. Film production stopped completely so all my work dried up by May 2020. Ever since I lived through the world’s largest Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2020, I wanted to do a personal project about survivors. So, when client work stopped in 2020, I decided to start a photography project. So, I began reaching out to Covid-19 survivors in New York City, where we were living at the time. My husband and I spent months going around the city photographing and interviewing people about their experiences with Covid-19. Eventually, we were running out of money and had to move out of our apartment. So, we decided to make the best of it and do a road trip across the country interviewing and photographing more survivors, but this time film it and make a documentary. Long story short, that turned into a 20-month road trip to all 50 states in America and a documentary film series. You can watch the films on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/survivordiariesofficial) or our website (https://thesurvivordiaries.com/).

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.morganawingard.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/morganawingard/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morganawingard/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@SurvivorDiariesOfficial
• Other: Survivor Diaries Film Series: https://thesurvivordiaries.com/ https://www.youtube.com/survivordiariesofficial https://www.patreon.com/survivor_diaries https://www.tiktok.com/@survivordiaries https://www.facebook.com/survivordiariesofficial https://www.instagram.com/survivordiariesofficial https://www.twitter.com/CovidSurvivors