Our Little Company
Hey! Zac here, one of the partners of Mitchell Mitchell Films — I’m here to kick off our blog with a little bit of my story and a little bit of the story of our company.
I grew up in Austin, TX, dreaming big dreams of storytelling and writing in the hillcountry. For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be an author or an English teacher. I spent most of 4th and 5th grade writing a series of comics called “The Adventures of Skippy”, which chronicled the historically epic, swashbuckling tales of a young leopard gecko who found himself on the set of major blockbusters like Star Wars and E.T., Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Dirty Harry.
During this time, I had first started playing around with cameras; my dad was a commercial advertising photographer with a one-in-a-million eye, and I passed countless holiday and weekend afternoons in his darkroom learning how to develop film or poring over portraits he had taken of Toru Tanaka, a famous sumo wrestler, Hakeem Abdul Jabbar, and the likes of Peter O’Toole, Robert Mitchum, Bob Hope, etc. I would also get together with a buddy of mine, Nigel, and film him skateboarding on an old camcorder and then run the footage backward to make it look like he was doing impossible stunts.
In middle school, I met my now-partner, Cody Mitchell. Together, we took our camcorder hijinks to another level — filming goofy shorts together, and just generally having fun with cameras around Austin. Cody and I graduated from high school together in 2010, and decided that instead of taking a traditional route to college, we both wanted to take a gap year and travel a bit. The two of us spent some time apart, exploring the UK and New Zealand and Fiji, respectively, and then met up to take a trip together through western Europe.
Enter Mick Westerman. We met Mick, our third partner, at a rooftop bar in a hostel in Athens. It didn’t take long for us to hit it off, and he ended up ditching his travel companions and hanging out with us on planes, trains, and buses through Greece and Italy.
After parting ways with Mick in Italy, we kept in touch with him; Cody and I both started our freshman year of college — myself at Kenyon college in Ohio, and Cody at St. Edwards University in Austin. It didn’t take long after our trip for Mick to be convinced to move down from Sioux Falls, South Dakota to Austin. I had switched my major to film after initially wanting to pursue writing with an English major, and the summer after our junior year we met in Austin with a script for a western short I had written called “The Reckoning”, hired actors, and put together our first legit production as a team.
Soon after Cody and I graduated from college, the three of us parted ways once more when I moved to LA to take a job working for a talent agency. I wanted to push myself in a new way and explore a different side of the industry that I had become enamored with, and I wanted to make as many connections as I could in Los Angeles for whatever it is I ended up doing. Turns out, what I would end up doing is this.
Cody and Mick started work on their first feature film, which is set to start the festival circuit this year, shortly before they formed the LLC for our company, Mitchell Mitchell Films, in Austin in 2017. Not long after that they landed their first big account shooting an ad campaign for a truck outfitting company in Georgia. Soon after they formed the LLC, desperate to be back on the creative side of the camera, I moved from LA to Denver, with the two of them and Cody’s cousin, Grant, close behind me, and we set up shop here as a four man team. Since then we have produced and directed commercials for companies large and small — from small female-run apparel startups to larger commercial companies like Trek. We’ve delved more into the documentary world with several shorts we produced with Red Bull, Lifetime Fitness, SRAM, and we’ve started producing a web series with a professional mountain biker.
2020 was a weird year for us — the first quarter was the busiest we had ever seen our little company, but when the pandemic started things slowed way, way down. That being said, we can’t wait to start 2021 and we’re excited to see what adventures this year has in store for us. Through all of this, the one thing that has rang truest for me — whether it was as a child, in college, in LA or in Denver in the mess that was 2020— is that I love storytelling. I would do anything to be able to tell stories, and I count myself lucky that I’m in a career now that I can do that. It hasn’t always been easy, and I’ve certainly taken a lot of risks, but at the end of the day I can wake up in the morning and be STOKED about what I’m doing, because it’s what I love.
Z