Welcome to Alumni Live: The Podcast.

These are conversations with Grand Valley State University film and video

graduates about the industry, the film, video, major and alumni profiles.

Welcome to another episode of Alumni Live: the Podcast.

I'm Michelle Terpstra with the GVSU Film and Video Alumni

Board and the class of 1995.

I would like to welcome Bill Hasler and John Curtis from Ford Motor Company.

Bill is the Executive Producer of Creative Strategy, and John is an alum

and he's the Video Producer at Ford.

Can you talk about your roles a little bit at Ford?

What do you do there?

Yes, so currently I'm actually a Video Editor.

So most of my day consists of editing the videos that Bill's production team shoots

so I mostly edit those videos and then we post them on our site, Ford University.

John's pretty humble.

He's an Editor, that's the title we give him, but, he's

also a really great storyteller.

And that's what a good editor is, a good storyteller.

We can shoot great or bad film.

But once they get it, they're the ones who make the story come to life.

John's been very good at helping tell stories through editing.

you're more than, just our Editor, Jon, you're like our creative genius over here.

But anyway, as you mentioned, Executive Producer; it's just a

fancy way of saying that I lead Ford's in house production team.

And on a day to day basis, You know, I have two roles.

The one side of my job is managing the operation of our business unit.

But then the second half of my job, which is the best part, is just getting in this

creative space that we get to get into every single day that we come to work,

trying to figure out fun and exciting ways that we can share information

about our vehicles, our products, our services not only with our dealers, but

with all of our customers out there.

Nice.

There's a couple of things I want to touch on there.

First of all, you mentioned University.

Can you talk a little bit, what is the University you're referring to?

We've created a program at Ford.

We call it Ford University.

And as you might suspect it's a knowledge house.

It's where we basically create product awareness, where we create

how to training, where we just create visual representations of how they

might operate or what they might look like when they're out there.

And our purpose is really to not only educate our dealers on our vehicles

and our services I mentioned, but also to create content that our dealers can

share with their customers, whether it's through the internet, whether

it's through social channels, Or maybe even virtual sales rooms, so that the

conversations they have with their customers become a little more impactful.

So we create stories about how our vehicles function, about how

they fit into people's lifestyles.

And then we allow our dealers to use that content to help

connect with their customers.

For people who might already own a Ford they may come to us to get information on

the product that they purchased from us.

That's great.

Probably a lot better than getting information from TikTok.

Much better, and there's no tuition charges.

It's free, so , you don't go into debt getting this education.

Very cool.

You also mentioned your in house studio.

Is this something you've recently brought back, this in house studio?

Yeah, so we've never done this in house at Ford, at least not in recent times.

If you go back to the 1920s, Henry Ford actually had a film company and

was very much into creating film, but also taking a lot of photos.

But, we decided, at Ford, in order for us to be able to compete with Tiktok,

YouTube, a lot of the places where not only customers, but even our

dealers are going to get information.

And Ford just thought that's unacceptable.

We don't know that the folks on Tiktok are 100 percent accurate about our products.

We don't know that the claims they're making are valid.

Buying a car is the second, most expensive purchase you make in your life.

We want to make sure that people have the best information so

that they make the best decision for themselves or their family.

So Ford decided to insource that content production so that we could

create that influencer style content and share it with our customers and

our dealers so that we know they're getting the most accurate information

about our products and services.

So what is it like to work in your in house studio?

I felt like there was a need for this from the beginning.

An in house studio just makes so much more sense when you think about it.

Having to go out and find contractors makes sense sometimes, but not all the

time, especially if you have to do a quick turnaround or something like that.

It just makes way more sense to have an in house team.

So having the opportunity to be on this team, I reached out to Bill actually

because I was so excited that this was happening and I wanted to be a part of it.

, I think that having this in house production studio

is a great asset to Ford.

And for my role specifically, having in house editors makes just the same amount

of sense because how many times have we had quick turnarounds that you have to do.

Just having us available is way more beneficial than having

to call someone and hope that they're available to do an edit.

So, from my perspective, that's why I think it's beneficial

to have an in house team.

I think that was your question.

what is the culture like

We call ourselves the in house production team, the content production team.

And as we said, we recognize that advertising right now is in social media.

It's on YouTube, it's in Tiktok.

Smart money in traditional advertising is usually around live events, a

sporting event where we know people are watching those live and they

are forced to have to go through the commercials and in the traditional way.

But look how much of our content ingestion is now coming through

social media or other channels.

And I think we've all been a part of situations in life where we've read or

heard something in social media that we later find out was not accurate

or it wasn't factual or it was just completely wrong, but the way in which

it was presented really assured us that it was accurate or it made us

feel like it was good information.

Now in politics or other topics, I guess it's what people want to tolerate.

But if people are going to go make an expensive purchase, we

don't want them making those decisions with bad information.

This is going to give Ford an opportunity to get information to that's accurate

and better represents our brand.

Now, what does that mean in terms of building an in house production team?

Why do we need to do that?

Jon mentioned a minute ago that he heard we were standing up this

program and he came and found us.

And he's one of many who did that when we were standing up this program.

We found that there were actually a lot of people, even within Ford

Motor Company already, who have a background in Film, Video Studies,

this type of work, that maybe didn't always have this kind of opportunity.

Maybe as an audio engineer, they were working with the engineers to try

to figure out how to reduce noise inside of a vehicle much different

than the audio tech who's with us right now, recording, this podcast.

Two different things.

By bringing this team in house, we are actually creating a team of experts,

which helps ensure that the content that we create is fair and accurate.

But it also allows us to hire enthusiasts.

People who are proud to wear that blue oval or to represent the

blue oval when they come to work.

And I think in exchange, Ford has recognized that

creative folks are different.

We don't necessarily sit in cubicles in an office like

traditional corporate employees.

So, when you are in the building that Jon and I work out of, It's almost like

they've divided it down the middle.

On one side is the business operation, the program that supports this program

that Jon and I are running here.

then the other side is our studio.

And depending on which door you go in, the working is drastically different.

And that's because in our space, we have to have a space that helps us

think creatively, and helps us invent, and helps us try to make things

sticky, we call it, sticky, meaning that people retain the information.

And we found that the best way to make that stuff sticky is

through creative storytelling.

So where we've taken traditional product knowledge training, which is

usually thought of as maybe more boring or read this, answer some questions.

We're putting it on a level of like what Netflix and Amazon Prime Video do.

And that is to entertain you and to get you talking about what you just

watched at the water cooler the next day.

So if we can start to create fun and exciting content around the Ford brand

that's in the style or in the same vein as what we're seeing influencers

do, then we're gonna start to command time and attention from our dealers

and our customers and take that time that they're giving to influencers

away, and give that time to us instead.

Yeah.

So to plainly answer the question, the culture is great.

The culture is phenomenal because as Bill mentioned, everyone

is from different aspects.

A lot of people are from the production world, but

everyone's from different aspects.

That doesn't mean they were actually doing production work before this role.

Maybe they were somewhere else and this is what they wanted to do.

Every time I come here, We're always talking about the movies

we've seen, or how cool it was that this shot happened in this film.

We're just film buffs, I feel like, so it's very cool to have a

bunch of people in the same space who appreciate the same thing.

So I hear that Ford likes employees to work on their own projects.

And you recently worked on a film.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yes, we shot the film in 2021, so it was a very long time ago, and

we just finished editing this year.

Right before I started this role.

But we have talked about how many other people on this team have things outside

of this job that they are passionate about There's a couple people who have

films who are doing the film festival circuit right now as my film is.

So yeah, just having those people, like I said, in the same space

where we can talk about that.

That's very cool to have.

Having that opportunity is amazing.

I think it goes back to the question on the team culture that we've built here.

And I recognize artists are artists.

It doesn't matter what art form it is.

They just love to create.

And they're most comfortable and in their best element when they're

in that creative environment.

And so as I was thinking about how do I attract world class talent

in video production to a car maker?

Because as I went through college and studied Film Video Production

and then eventually went into the industry myself after college, I

didn't think coming out of college, Oh, are Ford and Toyota hiring, right?

I was looking more as like what's in Hollywood or what's in New York.

So as I started thinking about how are we going to get the kind of

talent that we want to get here?

I started thinking about what are we able to offer the staff that they can't

get or traditionally is difficult to get out in the real world so that we

both benefit from this relationship.

So I've long told my staff there's two career tracks on this team.

There's the lifelong track where you come and work with us creating Ford Productions

as as long as we're in existence.

And then the other track is, what do you want to do?

Maybe you do want to be out in Hollywood with Steven Spielberg creating movies.

Well, it's hard to get from college to working for Spielberg.

There's usually some steps in between there, and a lot of the time, that

is perfecting your craft, developing your artistic senses, and really

honing in on what you do well, and just taking that to the max.

And so here we can afford the team those opportunities.

They've got resources through the team.

But then they also know that, Hey, what you do in your off hours,

like any job, that's your time.

I'm not going to stop artists from creating in their free time.

So I just said, Hey, let's encourage it.

And we're even finding as some of the team is looking to create independent

films or things outside of work, they're actually tapping one another to come

and work on their projects with them.

Which is awesome because maybe that more junior level audio

person gets an opportunity to lead audio for an independent film.

Gets that credit on their resume and allows them to grow in

some way, shape, or form.

And I've even told the team when you know where you ultimately want

to go, please let me know so we can figure out how to help you get there.

There's enough folks on this team who've got a network of people that,

we can help make calls, we can help get folks to where we want to go.

So, buttoning up the question on the team culture and how you get to express

yourself creatively on this team.

I think for us it was just making sure we hired people who want to do

that and that's their passion and then just getting them together.

The next few months I'm excited to see what this team starts to

create as we ramp up production, because I've never worked with such

a group of passionate people before.

They were actually rioting because I was holding back production

like we're not ready yet.

They were coming to me like every day like we need to shoot something.

We're going crazy.

The people make the difference, as they say.

Now, a lot of students now really have this idea that the jobs

out there are all just gigs.

that It's not full time employment.

Do you have experience working as a freelancer?

And if you do, can you compare it to working for a company full time?

My whole life has been either freelance or corporate.

There's not really been a lot of in between.

One of my first gigs out of college was a full time position

in Austin, Texas that I took.

Then I moved home, worked as a freelancer for a while until I got this job.

So there's pros and cons to both, obviously.

The corporate gig, is more of a stable job, so to speak, where,

you know for the most part where your next paycheck's coming from.

The freelance world isn't quite like that, but you have a lot more freedom in

the freelance world to do other things, to take some time off if you want to.

There's two different kind of monsters.

I have found that, now being a father and having a home and everything,

the corporate gig is more for me, but I also have friends who still to

this day are doing freelance work in Detroit and very successful doing that.

So it just really depends on, how you feel, but there's

a lot of jobs out there in both.

So I would tell the students to explore both options and

see which one fits them best.

And certainly know, like you just pointed out, the pros and cons of both options.

because, oftentimes you don't have a choice.

Some productions just by nature are only gonna work with a freelance crew.

Movies are like that a lot because when the movie's over, it's not like they start

shooting the next episode of that movie.

Maybe if there's a sequel, that's different.

But, those folks who work together on that Steven Spielberg movie, only a

handful may go on to a different project.

And then the other handful go on to several other different projects.

They don't necessarily move around as a group.

And for people who like that sort of variety, one time you want to work on

a movie, maybe another time you want to work on a movie that's on location

remotely, or you want to work on an episodic, series or something like

that, you get that, flexibility, and to your point, you control your schedule.

Hey, maybe you don't want to work for the month of August, so you

don't book any, gig jobs then.

The downside, you don't work, you don't get paid.

We look at our team here and, everyone on my team is a full time Ford employee.

They get all the health care benefits and all the other benefits that

all the other Ford employees get.

They get paid time off.

There's not a whole lot of production jobs where they pay you not to come and shoot.

And then obviously like sick personal days and then all the benefits of

being an employee of Ford Motor Company.

So, as Jon mentioned, for some folks who may not always fit the traditional

production mold, it's hard to be married.

It's hard to have a family when you're in production because you

work long hours, you work long days.

We often joke, we see our production counterparts more than

we often see our own families.

And sometimes that's sad.

Our family should always be, number one, but we also have to pay

the bills and make life happen.

I would say for any student out there who's thinking about this as

a career, be prepared for that.

Some gigs, you may end up freelance and bouncing around.

You may enjoy that.

It may be the only way you can make a living at first.

But also start looking into, corporate gigs.

Traditionally, corporations have outsourced this type of content

production, but as we've started to get into this space more, we're

starting to find out there's a few other companies that are going

in this same path that Ford is.

I think Ford's probably one of the more aggressive companies out there in this

in house content creation, but when Elon Musk can go on X every five minutes

and make false claims about his products over ours and we have to go to an agency,

develop a treatment, schedule it , run it through legal, and then get it out.

Elon's already covered 20 other topics in that amount of time, and we

missed our opportunity for rebuttal.

With an in house team, and I'm not saying they created an in house team to go talk

to Elon Musk, but it allows us to be quicker to market, to get information

out faster, to get information to our customers and our dealers more quickly.

We couldn't do that without an in house team,

Plus, consistency is another thing that an in house team can bring.

Absolutely.

And people ask, Well, how are you modeled?

And I'm like, I've only got 40 people on my team.

Now, only 40.

Some people might think, wow, that's an army and others

may think, how do you do it?

If you were creating a feature film for a Steven Spielberg movie, 40

people that's the craft service team.

That's such a small crew.

But, we made sure that in addition to hiring passionate people, we

also made sure that the people we hired had multiple skill sets.

We wanted them to be able to wear multiple hats to work.

Jon yes, he's an editor, that's his main function.

But John can do so many other production related things to us that it allows

us to work in a model that we call pods, where all 40 of us can come

together to form a single pod, where we could go create something that's

more feature like, like an independent film or a more long form story.

But then we can also break out our 40 individuals into smaller

pods of three, four, five people.

So we can cover multiple things at the same time, and the versatility of the

individuals on the pod allows us to cover the important things, sound, light, and

obviously recording the video portion.

And that allows us, with just 40 people, to be able to produce over 200 pieces

of video content in a single year.

Henry Ford invented mass production of cars.

We like to say that Ford's also inventing the mass production of video content.

And we couldn't do that if we didn't have a versatile, passionate

team delivering that work.

So I guess for students out there, as you're thinking about, how

do you get your foot in the door think about the versatility, your

versatility: what are your good skills?

What are your okay skills and what are your horrible skills?

Be cognizant of those.

We have these reviews of our videos.

And the goal is not to say anything great about the video.

Instead, the goal is to talk about what we call continuous improvement.

How could we have made it better?

And it's not meant to be mean, like, oh, the sound guy's horrible,

he should be fired, right?

No, it's not that at all.

It's more along the lines of what could we have done differently

to have a better product.

And in that process, there's a lot of wins that come out of it.

To me, the single most important win is that individual is learning something.

They're being given information that they can then go act on to make

themselves better at what they do.

The second win is obviously for Ford Motor Company and for its customers,

in that we're continuously driving the quality of the content that we

produce to give you the absolute best product that we can give you.

And then I would even argue the third win there going back to the individual

who you're giving the critiquing to, it allows them to start networking with

other members on the team who may be particularly good at that skill set

and to almost peer share knowledge and learn from one another and even

coach each other to better success.

So the same can be done for students in college.

How do we get into the industry?

Well, what do you want to be?

Oh, I want to be a writer.

We don't need to be employed.

Just start writing every single day.

Give yourself a topic, create your own fake TV series, think about

character development, think about story arcs, all those sorts of

things and just keep practicing.

And then find people who can tell you the things you don't

usually want to hear, right?

Don't give it to your mom.

Why?

Every time I give my mom something, all she tells me is that I'm the

most gifted guy on the planet, right?

She is not a good person for me to give my stuff to because she's

just going to tell me it's great.

My dad, on the other hand, he has no problem telling me that something wasn't

good or this could have been better.

But that's always not good enough.

So I look to a friend of mine who not only can tell me when things aren't

good, but he actually gives me the information on why he feels it's that way.

That's the recipe for success when you understand the why part, it

allows you to make adjustments in what you do, in your process, in your

development, to just get better at it.

Same thing with the camera operator.

Oh, I want to be behind a camera someday.

Grab a cheap camera.

Your phone is a camera, right?

And just practice shooting things.

Practice framing.

Go back home and edit it.

When you chop two different things together, did the cut look funny?

Maybe it's because you had the people on the same side of the screen

when you needed them on opposite sides or whatever that might be.

So for those students listening out there that want to get

into this industry, just start.

It's really that simple.

Jon, I don't know if you have a different perspective on it.

No, just go do it with your friends.

I know it's kind of cliche, but my whole life has been making dumb videos

with my friends, and then I went to school for it, and we made a little

bit better videos with my friends.

And then you get into this, and now on this team, we're making

videos with our friends, basically.

So it never stops.

I'd say you just have to get out and do it.

I had the privilege of seeing Joel Potrykus' film this last

weekend at the Grand Rapids Film Festival, one of the things that

he said, was the exact same thing.

It's all about just making stuff with your friends.

And it can be dumb, and no one will ever see it, probably, but

you have that experience now, and you can grow from that experience.

And you just keep doing that over and over again, and even if you never

make a feature film that people see, at least you'll make a feature film

that you and your friends have made together, so I think that's important.

So Jon speaking of learning the craft, are there things that you learned at GVSU that

helped you in your career and in this job?

Yes, I mean, there's so many things, but the best thing was

just the people that I met there.

The person that shot my short film was one of my good friends,

Sean Mouton, from Grand Valley.

I met him at Grand Valley.

Half the crew was from Grand Valley.

You remember the people you had in class, you remember those

interactions, those relationships.

When you get out in the real world, you remember those people.

And I had the privilege of using a lot of those people on my film set.

Meeting the people was one of the most important things.

I didn't have a chance to do the summer film, but that is an

amazing experience for people.

To actually be on a film set as a student, learning the different types of roles

that you wouldn't have learned otherwise.

I Think a lot of people go to college for film and they just know

director, writer, cinematographer.

They don't know the other aspects that come into making a film.

So to have the summer film and to be those production designer, or maybe

a role that's less glorified is super important because maybe someone will

find a role that they didn't even know existed that they fit right into.

So I think that's super important.

Like I said, I didn't get a chance to do that when I was there, but

a lot of people I know did and they've found careers from that.

We're taking a short break to tell you about the Dirk Koning

Memorial Film and Video scholarship.

Here's Gretchen Vinnedge remembering Dirk Koning.

The Koning Scholarship enables students to get that kind of an education, to be

a good filmmaker, to be able to express their voice and to continue Dirk's dream.

For more information, and to donate to the scholarship, visit

the link in the description.

Now, back to the show.

So Bill, I know that you want to build a relationship with GVSU.

Can you talk about why and what your hopes are for that?

Yeah so my niece is a Laker.

She went to Grand Valley, graduated last year.

She was studying lower education.

She wants to become a teacher.

And while she was at Grand Valley she had told me over the holidays one year

about a video class that she took there.

Obviously she knows the work that I do.

When I lived in New York City and she was just a little kid, one summer

she got to come out and spend a week with Uncle Bill in New York and I

sent her to a film camp in New York for young kids, and she loved it.

So she was just telling me about Grand Valley's program and how

her friend Hannah was in it.

And I just started thinking like, oh, we're going to have turnover

on our team as our team members want to graduate and maybe go on

to Hollywood or do other things.

And we're going to need a mechanism for discovering talent.

I'm not an alum of GVSU, but I am an alum of another Michigan college, and

I thought, Michigan's got several really great universities and colleges,

and I just started thinking, like, there's a wealth of talent that just

needs to be harvested , and developed.

I literally asked my niece, hey, can you give me your friend's number

and let her know I'm going to text her so it doesn't sound creepy.

She introduced me to one of her professors, Suzanne, and we just started

chatting about what could we do with Grand Valley and have a mutually

beneficial relationship where Ford can benefit from having young, talented

folks who've got thoughts and ideas on how we can do things differently.

And how can we help them perfect their skill sets and develop them further so

that they can get the best opportunity they can give themselves to go out into

the real world and secure some work.

So, we've been talking about everything from using our team to help mentor some of

the students on some of their projects.

We've talked about actually coming out to Allendale or somewhere in

the Grand Rapids area and actually shooting one of our productions

there and inviting folks to come and shadow us during one of those shoots.

And then we're even talking about next summer hosting some interns from

Grand Valley, and how we would pick those interns would be based on merit.

What have they done through the university to showcase their work and earn their

way into an opportunity to come and be part of our team for a summer.

And see what we can do to help them get their career going.

Nice.

When I did my internship, I have to say, I learned so much in the first week even.

It was the most beneficial thing I did during my career was have an internship.

Yeah, I agree with that.

Especially in this industry where, a lot of times you have to be discovered.

In order to be discovered, you just got to be in the right place at the right time.

That old saying is it's very true in this industry.

My whole career started with me being in the right place at the right time.

I wish we could say it was because of all this money I spent on my education,

or all the stuff that I knew when, in fact, it really did not go that way.

But obviously, my success since that opportunity was based on

what I knew and what I could bring creatively to the table.

So when you think about that, yeah, you need to be in the right

place at the right time, but most importantly, you need to be prepared.

this is where I would say to the students, it really appears like

all you need to do is have a phone and you can start to create content.

And you can . but I promise you it's not going to be good content.

Stories have a beginning, they have a middle, and they have an end.

You're spending your money, or maybe your parents' hard earned

money, or maybe you're borrowing lots of money to get your education.

Study the craft.

Learn the science of lighting, learn how images are affected by lenses and

all these other things, understand how sound can help enhance a production.

We will watch a production that we do without any audio on, so

that we just focus on the visuals.

And we'll turn around and watch that same production with the monitor off,

and all we're doing is listening to it.

And they are very different experiences when you watch

them in those different ways.

So would you tell us a little bit about your career path?

You've touched on this a little bit, but where did you go since college?

How did you end up here at Ford?

Yeah.

So real quick, I just want to circle back because I forgot to mention the one thing

I did at Grand Valley because I didn't do the summer film, I had an internship

and that did change the course of my life because having that internship, I met

a gentleman who I ended up working for,

for the rest of my life and now we're lifelong friends too because of that.

So, definitely go out and do one of those two things . I know you have to, I think,

at Grand Valley, but if it's an internship or the summer film, those things are so

important to do as a young filmmaker.

Make sure you do those things because you have no idea how they're

gonna affect the rest of your life.

So after I graduated Grand Valley, I kind of fell into a lot of positions.

I applied for a job at a humor blog in Austin, Texas,

and they somehow accepted me.

So I moved to Austin, Texas for two years and worked as a video editor for them.

Then the gentleman I had interned for was starting up his own production

company in Detroit, and he offered me a position there, so I moved back

to Michigan to be a part of that.

We did a lot of work for the auto industry doing mostly PR videos.

While there started my own production company where I did just independent works

on my own and then had a bunch of odd jobs as, as a freelancer during this part

of my life where I bounced around a lot worked on a couple of commercial sets,

did a lot of independent stuff myself, and then I was looking to have that corporate

experience again because I didn't like the not knowing when I was going to work next,

when my next paycheck was going to come.

So, I just happened to find a job through an agency for Ford Motor Company.

For an organization that basically made videos to promote

a new working style within IT.

It's a long drawn out thing.

I won't bore you with that.

But I got this position from applying there.

And then through that position, networking with other people at Ford,

I ended up moving into the executive technology office where I worked

with the executives, making videos for them, running conferences for

them, doing their live broadcasts and then from there found this position.

It was a lot of going out and looking for it, but because of that, I

was able to find where I am now.

So I was born and raised in Southeast Michigan.

I was always aware of Ford.

Loved Ford as a kid growing up.

Never thought I'd actually work for the company, but really liked it.

I grew up in a household with divorced parents.

So my grandparents helped my mom out at times.

And on the weekends would spend time with my grandparents.

And on Fridays, my grandpa would let me stay up late past my bedtime as

grandfathers are supposed to do, and he would be watching Johnny Carson.

And, I was little, so I never always got the jokes or understood the

political humor or whatever it was that Johnny Carson was making fun of.

But I did understand laughter.

And I always remember as a little boy just watching my grandpa

laugh, and I found joy in that.

The fact that he was happy.

And it made me say, I want to do that.

Be Johnny Carson.

Well, that didn't work out for me.

But, I went to college in Michigan studied film, video, couple of other

things, did the internship circuit.

I worked at a radio station in Detroit, WJR, it was an AM radio station.

I had the 4 AM to 7 AM internship slot.

So I would wake up in Ann Arbor at 2.

30 in the morning, leave my dorm at 3 o'clock in the morning, drive all

the way to Detroit to do my radio internship, and then drive back to

Ann Arbor for a full day of classes.

And I did it because it was an opportunity that someone gave me.

And I wanted to try to make the most of it.

When I graduated school, I applied to film school at UCLA, was going to go out there.

And in the summer, between undergrad and grad school, I decided

I'd just go do an internship.

I applied for a bunch of internships.

Probably 12, 15 different internships.

And I ended up getting one for David Letterman.

So I went out to do the internship, worked there for the summer, and was

pretty much thinking about packing up to head home so I could pack

up to move west for film school.

And I got a call that they wanted to hire me into a full time position.

So I got in at the bottom at Letterman, literally working as an

Assistant to the Executive Producer.

Have you ever seen the movie Devil Wears Prada?

That is working inside of a Hollywood Producer's life right there.

I also learned the industry from the ground up and every element of production.

I am not an expert in camera, light, or sound, but in terms of running a

production operation, I really learned how to do that while working for Letterman.

I worked for his production company, Worldwide Pants.

Worldwide Pants made videos, not clothing, but Dave probably, while I

was there for the 15 years, probably did five, six different TV pilots,

a couple different movies, and so I really got to learn production in the

big leagues, working for who I always thought was a legendary figure.

But they also taught me the right way.

As an intern, I helped write thank you notes to the guests on

behalf of the executive producer.

And I can't tell you the number of times that he would walk out of his office

and I would get the stack of letters handed back to me, and 95 percent of

them just had a big red X through it.

No direction at all.

Which just meant you need to rewrite this.

And at the time I thought, this guy is a jerk, tell me what you want it to say.

Why don't you write this thing yourself?

And what I didn't realize was that he was actually grooming me to be a writer.

And taking me through the writing process of, yeah, you think

this story's done, it's not.

Tear it up and start over.

Rethink it.

Writers just continuously tweak and update and try to perfect it.

And that's what he taught me, was everything you're gonna go

produce starts with a script.

If that script is flawed or there's something wrong with

it, then your production's not going to go all that well.

So, nurture that thing and get it ready.

And then from there, it was being thrown on set.

I was even doing casting sessions at times.

So I learned a lot.

How all those things worked.

All this started from an internship.

So, any of the students at Grand Valley who are thinking, how do we get started,

even as Jon mentioned, there's internships everywhere and whether they're with

David Letterman or Jimmy Fallon or Kimmel or whomever you should also look

at opportunities at corporations and look for corporations that, you like

what they stand for and what they do.

If you don't like cars, you might have a hard time getting passionate

about creating content around cars if you're working for Ford or GM.

But if you are passionate, consider it.

Look for internships.

And again, Grand Valley students, I think you guys are lucky because

right now you're the only university we're forming a partnership with.

And that's mostly because we really like the ideas that Suzanne came up with.

We don't want to have an internship program because we think the interns are

going to create something great for us.

Maybe they will, that'd be awesome.

But we want the internship program because we want to help develop talent.

We want to help people get to where they want to go.

We have a saying within Ford where all the roads in America are paved for all of

us and all these roads will help us get to achieving our dreams and our goals.

And at Ford, we take it very seriously as we develop our vehicles, knowing

that our products are getting people to their goals, to their

dreams and where they need to be.

So that's in our DNA as Ford employees to want to help to want

to make the community better.

And we want to do that with young kids today, because 10 years from

now, I'm going to be working for them.

And they're going to be creating the messaging and marketing and

content materials of the future.

So if we can have any hand in helping develop good quality, smart storytellers,

not the sloppy influencers who don't think and just think they can turn

on a camera and their silliness is going to get them attention.

We don't want to cultivate that kind of talent.

We want true talent, smart people who really think about storytelling

and can help us deliver on that.

This seems like a match made in heaven, GVSU film and video

and the Ford Motor Company.

So, I want to thank you so much for interviewing with me today.

It's been a pleasure and I think this is really exciting what you're doing.

We're excited about it for sure, and we're really excited about

partnering with Grand Valley.

I just think that the program you guys have over there for film and video

studies, it's amazing as we've learned more about it, we're excited to get the

opportunity to really watch what your students do this year with their projects.

We're looking forward to selecting a few of them to come and join our

team this spring and summer.

I think it'll be a win win for all of us.

So, I appreciate you having us.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Alumni Live: The Podcast.

Subscribe to our podcast, to hear more from our alumni across the industry.

Check out Alumni Live on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, for more

conversations and networking.

Let us know what topics you want to hear our alumni talk about the

Grand Valley State University Film Video Alumni Network is here for

you, and we're glad that you're here.

Thank you for listening.