Today we’d like to introduce you to Adam Bailey and James Treakle. Them and their team share their story with us below:
Adam and James are both originally from Indiana and became friends from working together at the same Boy Scout Camp – Ransburg Scout Reservation. Sometime in 2010, while both attending separate colleges, James invited Adam to collaborate on some short film projects, which turned into an ongoing creative collaboration. They formed and retitled several small “companies” and collaborated on various projects with other filmmakers in the region, including a student feature film that Adam directed.
After college, Adam moved to Austin, TX and made inroads with the filmmaker community there, making a career out of post-production and working on films like the sports comedy “Balls Out” (MGM) and the acclaimed documentary “Dealt”. His connections eventually lead him to be hired on at internet supergiant Rooster Teeth, with who he worked with from 2015-2018 before striking back out on his own as a freelancer for prominent media companies such as El Rey Network and GSD&M, who he still works with today.
James continued to make short films back in Indiana, including a whopping twelve films in twelve months and amassed a tight group of collaborators from the region. With twelve shorts under his belt, James went on to direct “Ezekiel’s Landing,” a feature-length sci-fi adventure that Adam produced. Eventually, James moved to Austin, TX as well and began his freelance career, also in post-production, before editing and co-producing the globe-trotting feature-length documentary “Juice: How Electricity Explains the World” and becoming the principal in-house editor for a local media company.
While progressing their individual careers, Adam and James continued to collaborate on various scripts and stories that they hoped to someday make. After both gaining extensive industry experience, Adam and James formed plans in early 2020 for what a joint production company would look like, plans that were put on hiatus once the 2020 pandemic hit full swing and left the video industry in shambles. Determined to make their dream work, however, they revisited their plan in late 2020 once it seemed like the industry might begin opening up and finally formed Markfinder Media in October. Since then, they have done a number of small commercials for local Austin businesses, political ads for several federal and state-level candidates across the United States, and have finished principal photography on a feature-length documentary that is now in post-production, “I Got Myself A Yard.”
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
The first year of any business is often the hardest, and for us, it was doubly so, thanks to COVID-19. In film and video production, in-person networking is the source of most new business, so finding clients and connecting with them virtually has been a challenge.
Also, as any filmmaker will tell you, for every project that gets made, there are dozens more that die on the vine. We’re constantly developing new ideas. It’s survival of the fittest script – or the luckiest, at least.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
We’re both really experienced and skilled at post-production, and both love it, which we think gives us an edge because we can really write and shoot with the end product in mind. Not only that, but the post can be seen as this highly technical thing that we think can trip some creatives up, but it’s second nature to us, which makes turnaround times in posts much faster while maintaining high quality.
We’re also really into sci-fi and big ideas and both love learning about the things that make people tick. So our stories tend to have these epic scopes that may end up getting told at a very small, personal level. For instance, “Ezekiel’s Landing” has a big sci-fi premise – aliens from a distant world are being drawn to Earth by some mysterious force while a cult of alien worshipers make deadly power plays – but is presented through the eyes of characters in small-town Indiana. Ultimately, Characters are what matter most to us, so when you get to set these fully realized characters (fictional or real) with this more epic sensibility, we think that gives viewers a really fun and memorable experience.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
Film production is inherently risky. It’s a massive puzzle, and you’re building it without the picture on the box. Storytelling requires you to make your best-informed guess, and sometimes you’re gonna get it wrong. So starting the business itself comes with a big risk. Right out of the gate, we weren’t sure exactly who our clients would be, so we just cold e-mailed dozens of local businesses until we got a hit. Our current documentary project was a bit risky at the start as well since we decided to stake production on whether or not we could raise money through Indiegogo to make it. We didn’t end up meeting our full goal, but we were able to leverage what we did raise to film the movie anyway and it has since drawn the attention of potential investors.
Our internal motto is “make better mistakes.” Mistakes are inevitable, and failure is okay. Keep making mistakes, just those errors a little bit better next time. That’s all that we can ask of ourselves as human beings and as creatives.
Contact Info:
- Email: contact@markfinder.media
- Website: www.markfinder.media
- Instagram: instagram.com/markfindermedia
- Facebook: facebook.com/markfindermedia
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/markfindermedia
