Evan G. Schmidt
Strategic communications and production. Short films when there's time.
Strategic communications and production. Short films when there's time.
Introduction
For most of the last decade I have been doing one thing in a lot of different forms: taking work that is hard to explain and making it clear enough that people care about it.
That has meant a state wildlife agency explaining disease testing to hunters, a university marketing office, ongoing marketing for client businesses, and narrative short films I wrote and directed.
Architects have a phrase for what a building owes you: commodity, firmness and delight. Most business communication manages the first, sometimes the second, and rarely thinks about the third.
Education
I hold a B.A. in Media and Journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I specialized in Public Relations. I still work the way that training taught: figure out what needs explaining before figuring out how to shoot it.
Practice
Strategic communications for professional service firms
The work is two jobs done by the same person: deciding what should be made, and making it well. You deal with me directly, from the first conversation until the finished piece is in use.
Scope
Interviews, explainer and educational video, and the service pages that carry them.
Project documentation, photography and aerial capture, and case studies built from work you have already done.
Ongoing publishing, email and project updates, on a rhythm your team can sustain.
Suited to architecture, engineering and design firms and other professional practices. Most engagements begin with one defined project.
Institutional work
Public agencies and universities, where the material has to be accurate before it can be anything else.
Videographer & Producer · 2022–2023
Educational video for a statewide public audience. The material had to stay accurate through subject-matter review and still make sense to someone with no background in it.
Multi-day field shoots across the state, mountains to coast, capturing wildlife in whatever terrain and weather the day supplied. Documentary-style hunting and fishing content, event coverage, and ambient nature footage built to be reused.
One episode built from archival footage combined with new shoots.
Recommended and oversaw roughly $35,000 in camera and production gear that reset what the agency could make in house. The videographer role became a permanent position during my time there.
Video Production Specialist · 2021–2022
Embedded in the Office of Marketing and Communications, fielding requests from academic programs school-wide. Testimonials, faculty interviews and event content, made to move enrollment.
Commercial work
Private clients, where the work has to keep running month after month and somebody has to own whether it does.
Retained single-point marketing partner for two luxury real estate teams, as their sole outside marketer. Strategy, production, web, email and social, on a monthly cadence, with one person carrying the context forward instead of a rotating cast of vendors.
Marketing materials for dozens of multi-million-dollar listings across those clients, including print advertising produced for a paid placement in the Wall Street Journal.
For one top-producing luxury team, 100 or more social and vlog-style videos over a multi-year retainer, generating hundreds of thousands of organic views across Instagram, Facebook and Nextdoor. Not one campaign. A body of work that kept building on itself.
A WordPress to IDX migration with custom listing pages, and an email program run in Mailchimp to a list of more than 2,000 subscribers.
The part I do myself. Architectural and commercial exteriors, resort and destination work across the southeastern US, and aerial capture under an FAA Part 107 certificate. All of it shot on site.
Freelance camera operator on fishing segments that aired on the Outdoor Channel, shot on early-morning field calls. Different discipline from client work: no second take, and the light does not wait.
Nonprofit work
Our Lady of the Mountains Catholic Church
Produced, shot and edited a video announcing plans for a new church building, walking through the proposed architecture with the pastor. See the project
Veterans History Museum of the Carolinas
Camera and drone operator on the museum’s capital campaign video, 2019. Aerial coverage of the building and grounds, shot to give a small institution the sense of scale a fundraising ask needs.
Independent film
Film, mostly before the client work. It is where I learned most of what I know about shooting.
Still from The Podcast. Written, shot and cut inside 48 hours, with a kite as the required prop. Credited as Evan G. Schmidt. Full credits on IMDb
Timeline
The same work, in the order it happened.
Contact
Much of the work on this page was made with other people.