The Making of Grey Sky Films
Grey Sky Films is Turning 26!
Grey Sky Films is about to turn 26 years old. That’s sort of mind-boggling to think about—being “at it” for that long, regardless of what that thing happens to be. Keeping any business going for so many years can sometimes feel miraculous, especially when it’s yours, you love it, and you somehow keep finding new ways of doing things and discovering things you didn’t know. That’s certainly how it is for us. Getting to this pivotal moment, though, brings something of a jolt that makes you stop and think: Wait, how did we actually get here? The short answer is: with a lot of hard work and a ton of passion. The longer answer is a bit more involved…
Filmmaking is a deeply creative and expressive craft, and the people here at Grey Sky got into this field because of that creative calling. We love every aspect of making and sharing stories, and finding novel ways to do it. And there’s a profound satisfaction that arises from creating cinematic content that viewers can truly connect with. Many of our clients & followers don’t know that Grey Sky Films’ first storytelling mode of choice was music videos. Part of it was that some of us are musicians ourselves, and part of it was the power in creating a sense of connection with people everywhere through the synergy of music set to film. Obviously life led us to the exciting path we’re still on today: producing cinematic videos for businesses and brands.
Honoring Our Roots
We started out as filmmakers, writers, directors - and even actors - coming from a foundation of deep creativity. From there, we developed our business knowledge, growing into fully-fledged entrepreneurs who deeply understand our client's operations and needs.
So, How Exactly Did that Happen?
The whole adventure started with studying film at County College of Morris and William Paterson University in our home state of New Jersey. Going to school for film was a rich experience in countless ways. But like some who study economics or physics, what you go out into the world and do afterward can make everything you learned in college seem mostly theoretical. The real deal begins when you start working, and you find out there’s a sizable gap between the classroom and the career. That was how it was for us, and traversing that gap was the impetus for the journey from pure creatives to entrepreneurs.
Our early hands-on experience was gained by getting jobs as production assistants on active film sets. As writers, directors, and photographers, (and sometimes actors!) ourselves, the creativity was boundless and we were eager to dig in and make something. Working on set, though, it became immediately obvious: things were significantly different from what we’d hoped for or expected. The film industry is illustrious, exciting, and often full of the unexpected. But it can also be highly stratified and challenging to navigate, especially if you want to immediately get to work and see your ideas come to fruition. In many ways, there’s a very tall ladder to climb. This planted the first seeds of the Grey Sky tree.
Some Notes from Mark’s Diary
One early realization for me was the presence of the power dynamics that can be quite prevalent in this field, and it was disappointing to see how crew members (including myself) were treated. I thought, ‘I don’t want to do it this way. I want to actually practice what I went to school for. And I want everyone I work with to feel appreciated and welcome.’ So, fresh out of school, full of excitement, and fueled by rebellious energy, I decided to start my own music video production company and asked a friend from film school to join me on the escapade. Grey Sky Films was born. Right from the beginning, we made one of its cornerstones the respectful treatment of everyone we worked with. An inspired idea. The only problem was: we had no idea how to be a business. No equipment, no portfolio of work, and no business experience whatsoever. We did have a relentless willingness to learn, though—to try and fail until we figured it out. Thus began the “School of Hard Knocks” education in entrepreneurship.
No matter what career- or life-making skill we’re talking about, no one becomes an expert by just thinking about it or dabbling. We learn by doing. You have to dive in head-first and know that stumbling will be part of the process. We were scrappy and unafraid, so that’s what we did. And yes…we stumbled.
Looking back, it almost seems ridiculous to see how willing I was to take all those risks. But if it hadn’t been for that, I wouldn’t have made it. What I didn’t know at the time was that there’s another sizable gap here: the one between just being willing to go for it and becoming a distinguished expert and businessperson. That structure and refinement came with time (and all the hard knocks), though.
In those days of Grey Sky’s inception, the filmmaking aspect of starting a business was the most instinctive. So, once we managed to get our hands on a camera and a lighting kit, we were just getting out there and making films. When it came to the learning curve of actually doing it hands-on, it was easier for us to know what we didn’t know, and to focus on learning what we came to realize we didn’t master through the classroom. Our very first commercial project, albeit self-created & self-assigned, was a commercial for our friend’s dad’s pizza place. We cast friends, parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents. Mark even wrote the jingle and had a friend who sang opera record it, and voilà: the first Grey Sky Films production was created. We were nothing if not resourceful.
Fairly quickly, we saw the worth of investing in our own business by hiring people that would optimize the quality of our productions. On every shoot, we’d do our best to surround ourselves with as many expert craftspeople as possible, and we’d spend hours just studying how they did what they did. Take lighting, for example. If you’ve never been on a film set, it’s hard to know the immense amount of time, expertise, and concentration that goes into just the lighting. You might also be surprised how much the lighting alone has to do with the final quality of any footage, no matter how good the cinematographer is. When we were trying to “graduate” from our first phase of sports and wedding videos into making commercials and music videos, we would mostly be working with small budgets. Because of what we’d learned working on real sets right after film school, we understood the importance of good lighting. So, we’d put most of our small project budgets into gaffers—lighting experts—and we would just sit and watch them light a set. Through practices like this, we started to pick up more and more skills and get exposure to the spectrum of departments that comprise a full film crew.
Check out the Butchies’ “Send Me You” video, where Grey Sky Films brought in a true blue gaffer to create epic lighting
The In-Between: Living the Dream. Sort Of.
Then there’s the actual business side of everything. And entrepreneurship is a complex art. At the heart of it is the humbling reality of what it takes to be really great at something, coupled with what it means to systematically build and run an enterprise. It’s a challenging blend of maintaining an impossible confidence level, learning how to do a million things yourself, and then figuring out how to get help with what you’re not great at (or really don’t enjoy). At first, like a lot of inexperienced entrepreneurs, we’d made the assumption that we had to do all the head-first-diving-in and learning-to-swim by ourselves. Thankfully, we weren’t too far into our hard-knocks sojourn before we received the gift of knowledge from experts. It was the magic of mentorship—the goodwill donation of countless hours of time to teach—that essentially saved the day and helped lay the foundation for where we are today. We were lucky enough to find business mentors to teach us much of what we didn’t know, and to help prevent us from making mistakes we might never have recovered from. Because of our mentors, we learned to think like business people and were able to set Grey Sky on the course toward success, and for that we’re eternally grateful. But we wouldn’t reach the big turning point on that road to success for a while to come.
After we built up our gear and gained some basic business knowledge, things started to rapidly build momentum. While we did get some music videos and business-related projects, we found ourselves so busy with filming and editing wedding videos that it was hard to find time to do what we dreamed of doing. What some people might never hear or mention when it comes to realizing a dream is this: very often, on a path like this, you’re faced with a moment (or many moments) where you must choose. It’s easy to bet on the readily available income generated by something that happens to be there, rather than on the thing you truly want. But we did the scary thing, and at some point, decided to stop accepting wedding projects altogether. And because we took that leap, we eventually went on to film a lot of music projects, working with the likes of Tony Bennet, Roger Waters, Sting, Chris Botti, Bruce Springsteen, his wife Patti Scialfa, Train, Third Eye Blind, Mandy Moore, Demi Lovato, Jessica Simpson, Boys Like Girls, and Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe.
We were living our dream and having fun doing it. It felt like we were right on the verge of the success we’d sought for our first handful of years in business. But we still hadn’t quite figured out how to turn what we were doing into the well-oiled machine we wanted our business to be. We’d entered what’s known in business as a Critical Period, which most businesses experience right around the point we’d reached. It was at this critical juncture when our closest mentor, along with others, re-entered the picture and really helped grasp how to grow a successful business and turn the corner.
Tony Bennet, The Spill Canvas, My Chemical Romance, Secret Lives of the Freemasons, and Boys Like Girls are just a few of the artists Grey Sky Films worked with in our earlier days.
The Big Shift: From Stumbling to Success
Grey Sky’s trajectory started to shift, moving us closer to the kind of work we wanted to be doing and the business mastery we aimed to achieve. We looked around at the sparse level of creativity being applied to the realm of commerce and knew that more was possible. We knew that with some outside-the-box thinking and our background in making story-focused films, we could offer businesses a different way to authentically tell the world about their products, services, and cultures. Blending our wild sense of creativity with a strategic approach was a key ingredient in Grey Sky’s evolution into its current form.
With our mentors’ teachings as our springboard, we created video products and packages that made us more attractive and competitive. We started building our team, and hired our first sales and business development person. We became more and more strategic, and really started to shape our identity and signature approach to video production. When we found companies that believed in us enough to give us a shot, we looked beyond their immediate request for one type of commercial or another, setting our sights on what was possible. We spent time learning about them & what they were trying to accomplish. And after that, we didn’t just find someone to stand in front of the camera and tout their offerings. Instead, we took what is now our trademark daring approach, allowing ourselves to transcend the limits of the common, safe direction seen everywhere.
We developed a unique take on creative strategy by flipping ideas on their heads and asking how we could show instead of tell. One story that comes to mind is when Fathom Communications came to us with a fun challenge: teach people how to use an Optimum DVR and remote. It would have been easy to take a visual education approach to this, illustrating features and functionality the way an Apple commercial might have showcased an early iPhone. Instead, we went all-out on unconventional creative and filmed “The Set Up Showdown,” a gameshow-style competition where we cast two families and built a series of challenges that let them learn by competing against each other. We still love that we took something as ordinary as using a remote and gave it the energy of a real game show.
Forged in the fire of nearly a decade of learning things the hard way, soldiering through the difficult times, and mining nuggets of knowledge along the way, Grey Sky emerged with a fortitude and portfolio that turned the tides. Around 2008, everything started to click, and the floodgates opened. We started getting more projects, our reputation grew, and we began building the kind of client relationships that would define us. Suddenly, after years of trying to “figure it all out,” we were working with clients in healthcare, food and beverage, entertainment, and finance. One week we’d be shooting in a corporate boardroom, the next in a factory or in a studio, or out in the middle of nowhere capturing a story. Sometimes across the country, sometimes across the world.
Since then, we’ve continuously expanded our reach, making videos for a wide array of audiences and purposes. We’ve worked with brands like HTC, Propel, Entenmann’s, and Ashley Furniture, and organizations like Weill-Cornell Medicine, Berkeley College, and Prudential Financial. We’ve gone on to do projects focused on learning and development, internal communications, testimonials, podcasts, and more. And we’ve never lost our sense of fun or stopped making films just for the joy of it. We still produce a Grey Sky holiday short film each year, and even have our new episodic scripted comedy, The Agency, our creative outlet for poking fun at ourselves and our own industry. And if we have any advice for other entrepreneurs out there, it’s to always, always, always find ways to come back to the reason why you decided to follow your dream in the first place, and inject as much levity into the day-to-day business of things as you can.
Where We Are Today
We didn’t stop and rest on our laurels after the big shift. Entrepreneurship is a long game. It’s not a one-and-done thing you learn how to do, then you know it, and you can just focus on other things. There’s the central core of the entrepreneurial endeavor—for us, doing what we love and being really good at it—and on top of that there’s everything else. Company structure, client relations, invoicing, bookkeeping, hiring, brand-building, marketing, networking…You have to work at it every day, to keep streamlining your operations, improving your tools and technology to uplevel product quality, going after bigger projects, growing your team, and building new skills as the world and markets change. One instrumental resource in sustained growth has been what you might call entrepreneurial support groups. An organization that continues to be a huge asset to our continued success and advancement is “On the Bus,” named after the famous business concept from Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. It’s a group of business owners that meets every month and acts as a board for one another. It provides a forum where we can bounce ideas off each other and share our successes & challenges so we can all benefit. This is just one form that our ongoing learning and development takes, in addition to a never-ending stream of business books, leadership talks, and more.
On that proverbial bus, a lot of everyday, universal business management tools were picked up. But one of the best outcomes of making this journey from the creative side of the spectrum all the way to the business side: we’ve been there, so we truly understand our clients. We know the endless balancing acts that smaller teams especially have to do. We know what it means to build a trusted brand, the importance of maintaining it, and the power of great content to help achieve that.
In Closing…
One more recent development for Grey Sky Films is creating a set of codified Value Propositions. We always knew what we had to offer, but we’d never sat and actually written them down. At first, this exercise felt kind of like being asked to describe your own personality traits. Some things are just harder to do from the inside, and we were definitely too close to this one to see everything clearly right away. But with some help from our business and marketing collaborators, we landed on a set that we feel pretty good about. In closing, and in honor of Grey Sky Films’ 26th birthday, we’re sharing those with you here. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us in the comments, and thanks for reading!
Strategy with Purpose | Every video needs a strategy behind it.
Who is your audience? What are your goals? What do you want your video to accomplish? You can come to us with all the answers, or simply “we need a video.” Both are perfectly acceptable places to start. From increasing brand awareness and engagement to supporting sales and driving ROI, your video needs to drive measurable business results. And with a forward-thinking 360° content ecosystem, your videos work harder for you across your organization, platforms and audiences.
Partners & Problem Solvers | A true partner makes your life easier.
You have a lot on your plate already, so let your production partner do the heavy lifting for you. That means digging in, asking the right questions, learning your business inside and out and helping you figure out the best way forward. Extensive pre-production, aka R&D, gets us to the heart of what you need, while our 25+ years of experience gives you a team that knows how to think on its feet and pivot at a moment’s notice. Think of us as an extension of your team, invested in a partnership that lasts well beyond one project.
Business Brains. Filmmaker Hearts. | Find a partner that understands business first, then video.
You have budgets to manage, stakeholders to align, audiences to reach and business goals to achieve. Your production partner should understand those entrepreneurial realities as well as the art of filmmaking. With depth of expertise in both crafts and across a wide array of industries, we bring real-world business acumen together with a filmmaker’s instinct for uncovering the ideas and stories hidden beneath the surface. The result is content built around your business, your audience and your goals, because we know even the coolest idea in the room still has to get past your CFO.
Quality Always | A budget does not determine a project’s importance.
Every project deserves cinematic thinking, whether it’s blockbuster-sized or not. Every Grey Sky Films production gets the same level of thoughtful planning, creativity, professionalism, and attention to detail. Call it Hollywood without the budget. Whatever the scope, we make the smartest use of the resources available, bringing big cinematic production value where it matters most. Bottom line? When the project scale changes, the production standards don’t.
Pushing Creative Boundaries Creative always serves the strategy.
You need work that rises above the noise, makes an impact and earns your audience’s attention. You want ad agency-level creative without the fuss. We push past the expected to find the idea that sets you apart, whether that means going big and bold or taking a more restrained approach. As much as we’d love to put slow-motion explosions behind your CEO, the best idea is always one that serves your goals. The result is polished, professional and anything but generic. We take the work seriously. Ourselves…not so much.
