Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Video Shampoo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Video, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s jump to the end – what do you want to be remembered for?

Charlie:
At this point I’ve become pretty strong in my resolve to enjoy the quality of my life and that includes the undertaking of what I do. That has become a priority in daily life, because of certain personal aspects of my life. Brook and I both have our own personal agendas, and because of that we don’t have expectations for the legacy of our work or its impact. I hope it helps add a beautiful whisp of color to the world, but ultimately I think that’s all one can ever hope for. I want to continually feel that what I’m striving to do is put out the most positive output that I have available to me. That’s the core of everything to me, especially as I get older, and the days ahead are becoming fewer than the days behind. It’s obvious to me that I should not waste time and do arbitrary things. Whether it’s in my personal life or professional life.

Brook:
In trying to build a life I can live with, two goalposts became clear: seeking truth and bringing about positive change. That became a mantra for our business. We’ve already accomplished a lot of positive change with our videos. I hope they are seen in the far future, like time capsules from the past and a glimpse into our era.

Legacy always makes me think about a quote from Cloud Atlas:

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

I don’t expect to be remembered, but I do hope that the ripples we make today birth a brighter future tomorrow.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Brook:
I graduated with a studio arts degree in graphic design. Charlie and I met at my first design gig out of college and we clicked pretty much immediately. I was taking photos daily when the DSLR video revolution hit, and so I felt naturally drawn into the world of video production, which Charlie was already a part of. I loved making videos as a kid, so it’s incredibly cool to be doing it as an adult.

Charlie and I decided to start Video Shampoo, a band name we gave ourselves, to start making videos for people who needed them. We wanted to enact good things around us with our work. It was a little chaotic in the early days, but we were accomplishing that goal. We have more of a process now, but every client’s need and situation is unique. We see if documentary video is something that can help them. There is incredible power in showing people the reality of someone’s situation and how/why they’re doing what they’re doing. We’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years.

We’re feeling proud of our recent Suncoast Emmy win for directing a short-form series, “Art in Tampa”. There were so many challenges on that project. It took all of our years of experience to get that project across the finish line, so when it was recognized it felt great and is owed to Charlie’s relentless commitment to making the best work possible.

Charlie and I are producing our best work right now and that’s what I want people to know.

Charlie:
After high school I was floating in place. There was a period in my early twenties that I felt going into a creative profession was irresponsible unless it had some white collar element to it. So I pursued becoming a mechanical engineer. Brook and I have had conversations about having similar feelings. For better or worse we both came to loggerheads with the white collar approach to the arts. I felt out of sync with the beaten path, and I had opted out to a degree. Between 2001 and 2003 I had barely completed a handful of college classes, mostly introductory level courses, but had virtually done nothing of any consequence towards starting a career. I was captivated with art, and writing music. My grandmother invited me to take a college-level drawing class with her, and it was something I finally excelled at. Then towards the end of 2002 I befriended an elementary school art teacher who got me a job as an afterschool tutor. I found that I was suddenly excited about the future again. Up to that point I had been treading water in my life. Everything I had done up to that point felt so inconsequential.

I’ve got a theory that I wasn’t alone, from hindsight and from what I know about our generation generally. We were a generation told that our value would be determined by a college degree. Many of my friends were practically picking their careers from a hat only to end up with huge amounts of student debt, underemployed, or feeling empty. I think what happened to a lot of us is that the maps we were given were of the old world which came to a thunderous end as soon as we entered it. We came of age at the beginning of a new way of life, a new kind of society. The structure of reality had been shattered and forever changed. It’s still changing and always will. I think it happens to every generation. Then they realize that many of the rules are disposable. You have to write your own rules.

So in early 2003 I moved to Florida to become an art teacher. That ultimately didn’t happen because in my typical fashion I missed the university’s entry deadline. At some point over the summer my father saw a commercial for degrees in video production. I think for my own sanity and my own artistic life I leapt at the opportunity because there was a feeling of desperation that I had to keep moving forward. I decided emphatically to become a creature of forward movement and that I had been treading water long enough. Though it wasn’t teaching art, my childhood dream had been to make special effects miniatures for movies and so I figured video was close enough. The idea of working in any creative field made me content.

It was in my first video class that I realized there was something about the language of video that I understood. It has rules and its own science. It’s all about experimentation, seeking ways to break the rules because that’s where the art is. Video is highly technical, but it’s inherently an art medium. It’s the most modern form of communication and embodies all of those elements of grammar, interpretation and context. It can be instructional or it can be poetic. In video I found that everything was flexible and the better you got at breaking the rules, the more depth you could reach. Looking back it was a choice that led me down a path that I never saw coming. In many ways it’s been a skeleton key to my dreams and nightmares. Video has been the yin and yang of my life.

Brook is one of the few people who can tell me what it is I’m doing. He does it in his own way. Often I see the big picture so broadly that I get lost in the atmosphere and start to lose coherence. He’s excellent at laying out a framework. It’s about trust, but he can contextualize things for me when I have gone so high up all I see are clouds. He helps me find a way out and refocus so I can start moving again. He’s never scared of going too far. I think that’s how we ended up with our name, Video Shampoo. He has the guts to exit the safe zone and it’s that shared commitment to creative freedom that has always been behind our best work. It’s a real privilege to work with him.

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

Brook:
I wish we got more involved with community and networking events earlier. It’s important to integrate your business into the fabric of your city so people know who you are and what you do. It’s never a bad time to see and be seen, do interviews like this, or participate in creative gatherings. This is something we are still working on as introverts.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Charlie:
I don’t know what our reputation is in our market, but we have caught on to a few things, which is that you can make real connections if you remember we’re all human. What happens, and I think it’s really sad, is that in some professional and social respects, the human element is forgotten because of fear. At a certain point people hide themselves and instead put on a mask of the status quo. There’s a lot of marketing idealism while not living up to those ideals. Sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself if you’re living your truth or doing something because it’s good for an image or the bank account. That can be a hard conversation.

We decided early on that if something is not true to us we should walk away from it. So we did our very best to completely stay true to ourselves and build something we’re proud of, because we believe the spirit of our work and relationships are what’s important, not the image. That can bring with it a sense of righteousness that is dangerous for a creative company because at some point you can’t turn down everything that isn’t a completely perfect fit, or can you? It can also start to force this binary perspective onto things which can bring powerful clarity, but also create its own kind of fear and confusion. There needs to be an in-between and its the in-between that requires nuance.

We’ve really put all of our efforts into staying true to our core beliefs about where we fit in this world and the impacts we’re capable of making and the kind of impacts we choose not to make. There are some types of work or trends that we just will never get involved with. Maybe that means we miss out on lucrative projects or networks or recognition, but at some point you’ve got to get real with who you are. From an artistic, professional and personal perspective, I think we’ve found our niche because of the things we’ve chosen not to do as much as the things we’ve chosen to do. It’s like drawing with charcoal: it’s from layering the shadows that the image starts to emerge.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.videoshampoo.com
• Instagram: videoshampoo
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/videoshampoo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/video-shampoo
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@video.shampoo?si=bYjc4ssU-UI4YJPM

Image Credits

Charlie Diaz, Brook Eschenroeder, Daniel Reyes, Thaddeus Cesari, Mike Christopher, Ryan Zarra, Kanica Him