We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tony Ayala Fuentes a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Tony thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
To talk about meaningful projects, it’s important to first regard the ones that weren’t meaningful and the commonalities among them. I think what kills businesses straight out of the gate is not having any meaningful reason for doing what they’re doing. I would say that most get lost in the fantasy of it all. They might start with a cool logo or a cool-sounding name or a product that is ambitious but, in reality, well outside of their means. So it all just comes across as a malaise of self-aggrandizement. Most skip out on what a business really should be—leaving the world a better place than how you found it. Now, sure, that sounds a little like an idealistic wet dream. But in reality, it’s holistically pragmatic. How can you expect anyone to give their time, effort, and money into anything less than that? Most of us work for free, so we need a compelling reason to buy into what you’re selling.
And this circles back to “We’re There Films,” a meaningful production company. Their mission is entirely antithetical to the current-day indie production scene in a good way. I initially asked them what their “angle” was and what was the thing that “Made them special.” They said: “Friendship.” Which is not something you typically hear from most indie production companies but if you look at every thriving artistic scene, that’s kind of a common theme. If you look at the 70s punk scene with Blondie, Iggy, and Richard Hell or the “movie brats” scene with Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg, there was a strong sense of community. They were all friends and tried to help each other rise to their full potential; subconsciously, they all bought into the concept of: “The rising tide lifts all boats.”
Meanwhile, in the social media age, we’ve completely lost this. Instead, it’s less about the attention of the company, the attention of the cause, and more about who will get the most attention. This leads me to surmise that We’re There Films will be around for a long time because they emphasize that the interpersonal relationships within their company will ultimately be the gravity that keeps individuals revolving around their cause.
Tony , 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?
I work in video marketing, but, I originally wanted to be an actor and attacked it full force. In fact, at one point in time, I was ranked top 3 monologists in the nation at the International Thespian Festival. I pursued different stage acting projects with relentless dedication; I played roles such as Coriolanus, Macbeth, and Hamlet. But something changed. In college, I taught an acting class for adults with disabilities. To see the growth and joy throughout this class had been infinitely more rewarding than my time on the stage. I realized that what I was doing with my acting was motivated more by solipsism rather than something meaningful and that maybe I wanted to explore other fields. I changed my trajectory in life completely; I ended up working for a nonprofit for individuals with Down Syndrome and found myself in a marketing role. I was initially intimidated; this was a completely different world than I had been used to. But one day, it kind of clicked. I found that there’s not a whole lot of difference between marketing and acting. With acting, you champion a character by telling a story. In marketing, you champion a business by telling a story. And through trial and error, I found that videos were ultimately the best way to tell that story. Through videos (and other means that relied on image-based storytelling), we were able to win a grant for 33 thousand dollars for our nonprofit. Tickets to our programs sell out, our donations are steady, and we are faring better than most nonprofits struggling post-lockdown.
I realized through this experience at work that we are becoming more visual as a species. I mean, we have always been visual, but with current technology around film, we are able to engage with images, sound, and story like never before. And that is vital to any business. And this is what I aim to provide.
That said, I hope you know that I am not Rodger Deakins, I am not Robert Richardson, nor have I ever claimed to be. What I can do is tell the story of a company that is honest to its core values using video.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
When I started in my trajectory, my mother got diagnosed with cancer, my father got diagnosed with a Neurological condition (all of this happened in the span of two months), and I had to step up, I had to take on responsibilities as I was taking responsibility for my life. Although I try to make sure that I have a balance in life between work and family, that experience taught me something. In that period, I spent a lot of time in hospitals. I realized that there is one thing that ties every hospital together. There’s always a T.V. In hospital rooms that are stocked with life-saving machines, there’s always a T.V. remote in the forefront. Stories may not be medicine, but stories give you a reason to keep breathing between the medicine. I remember my mom telling me not long after a seizure that she didn’t want to die because “West Side Story” was getting a remake, and she wanted to live long enough to see it. Stories really are the glue that binds people to some kind of hope, and every day, that binding gets looser and looser. Especially now, it’s difficult to find anything to be optimistic about. But it’s up to storytellers to keep kindling some kind of meaning in all of this chaos.
Contact Info:
- You can reach me at: [email protected];
Also, check out weretherefilms on Instagram. I did work with them recently and they are literally the best.
Image Credits
weretherefilms on instagram molly.kauffman on instagram