A Brief Introduction
Brought to you by:
Simply Interactive llc.
Simply Interactive is Rusty Worden's pet project-run amok. It started out in 1997 when I was just trying to think of a cool url to grab where I could practice my web and multimedia skills without having to use up my company's bandwidth for space and traffic. Not soon after that it turned into a business where I was operating as an individual contributor and designing web sites for small and medium companies in the Bay Area.
Then the "Economic Downturn" happened. Suddenly web designers were a dime-a-dozen and my side business started to dry up. I still had my regular employment at the time, and was comfortable continuing my multimedia career with them. In early 2001, I started working more with video I had created rather than video other people had created. In doing this I scoured the market for the best tools to use to edit video and found that Apple pretty much had the whole market cornered with solutions so I purchased an Apple Powerbook and two days later had created my first family video. From there I was hooked.
Keep in mind, I have been working with motion graphics and video for 8 years already, so all the principles of development already existed, it was just a new set of tools that I was learning. Well, I showed my video to a friend and she was impressed. She commented:
"That looks really nice! I wish I could have a videogrpaher for my wedding... but gosh, they are SO expensive!"
To which I responded:
"Yea, they are."
And left it at that. OK... so I am definitely a guy in that I really had no idea she was asking ME to do her wedding. It wasn't until later that night when I was talking to my wife about the encounter that she (virtually) slapped me upside the head and informed me that my friend was asking me to shoot her wedding for her.
At first I was intimidated because it is certainly a big deal. But then I was curious. So I started doing some research into what constitutes a wedding video, and started getting ideas of my own for how to personalize the videos AND my service to meet the customers needs, not my company's needs. After careful consideration and budgeting, I realized that if I were to do this for my friend it would cost a lot of money to get the equipment I'd need to do the job right. I am a perfectionist so doing an "OK" job was not an option for me.
But after doing all of that, and a market study, I realized that I had something that most videographers these days do not have. A background in web and multimedia design.
Long story short, I agreed to do the wedding for my friend and started my business in the meantime. I formed Limited Liability Company and purchased the equipment that I did not already have. By the time my friends wedding came around, my company had already done 7 other weddings.
At this point Simply Interacitve is one of the bigger wedding video companies in this area whle still maintaining a personal client/studio approach.
My entire goal with Simply Interactive is to not compete on quality. My quality stands on its own and now matter how many times I tell you my videos rock, you will still only believe what you see when I show the wedding video to you. My goal is to focus on customer service. More on that later.
