solo creative & storyteller
DOCUMENTARIES SOCIAL-MEDIA CONTENT
VIDEOGRAPHY WRITING CONSULTING
MY STORY
Let's be honest here - I'm a bit of an oddball: I'm a Brit living in California that bacame a dual citizen. I'm a former publisher that was put out of business by social media only to make it a speciality of mine. Today I'm a creative swiss army knife that can write scripts & storyboards all the way through to project proposals. I can shoot it all myself or with a team and then edit it into whatever you need; a clip, a reel a series or even a full length documentary film...
...yes, all by myself.
Not only that, but I can create social media channels across YouTube, Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram etc.
I can make all the artwork, write all the copy and even help build the audience so YOU can have the connection with YOUR audiences that were once only the perview of big businesses and bigger budgets.
I also train others to do what I do, so if you're a small business, you can DO IT YOURSELF!
WHAT SORT OF PROJECTS DO I WORK ON?
I take on just about anything from events to farms, supercar rallies to tattoo studios.
Food trucks? No problem. Specialty car garage? Easy peasy. Online business? I gotcha covered.
I'm a one stop shop for creativity, branding, storytelling and filmmaking. I film everything myself or with whatever team you might have already because I'm really nice and super easy to get on with. I can plan, direct and produce content about whatever your business does and edit it all into ads, reels, informercials and yes, of course documentaries.
I learnt to do all this by myself for a multitude of reasons I'll get into if you're interested (see below), but mainly because creating became my passion and it's what I love to do. No, I mean it.
Stories fascinate me, they've always fascinated me and I've been telling them for a LONG time across a couple of careers BEFORE I ever picked up a camera. I love to turn raw materials into what I can see in my mind because I see stories everywhere and if that's all you need to convince you to drop me a line, then I look forward to hearing from you...
...however, what sort of storyteller would I be if I didn't tell you my own?
This story begins when I was seven years old and I was first asked:
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
The question left me completely at a loss because I come from a pretty humble background and had become aware from a young age that my dreams of being a Formula One driver were stillborn as my parents couldn't afford a Kart and my dad wasn't interested in taking me racing every weekend. I cruised through school with a sense of forboding doom that I was going go end up doing something I hated, but still managed to make it to study Audio Engineering and found that fascinating and took on retail jobs to help pay my way through University. Sadly the final steps towards a career in that field required mind-numbing amounts of cash that I nor my family could afford - and so I settled for a career in retail or the restaraunt industry, neither which appealed that much, but at least people would always want food & clothes.
MY FIRST CAREER IN STORYTELLING:
SELLING STUFF TO PEOPLE
I worked in a wide range of unglamourous positions from McDonalds to Timberland & ended up selling Mobile phones at a crap chain of stores all over London. One of my skills I always picked things up very quickly and was given responsibilty above my pay grade, but rarely fair compensation for my efforts, and one day in my early 20's I'd simply had enough.
I answered an classified ad for a advertising sales executive working for a technical publisher. It was a fairly standard "smile & dial" operation smashing random stangers on a list I was given and reading them a script, but after 3 days of complete failure I decided to take a different approach.
I asked to take some of the highly technical journals I was selling on, home with me. Much to my surprise I understood quite a lot of it and asked to talk to some authors to find out who the relevant companies were to the content I was selling on.I told those I was selling too the story and closed my first sales which got the attention of management who recognized I 'understood' what I was selling on. They pulled me into editorial soon after.
MY SECOND CAREER IN STORYTELLING:
WRITING AND ARRANGING
That began a fifteen year career in publishing that took me all over the world and eventually led to me moving to the USA where I found an American wife and event co-founded a company based where I now live in Marin County. I built books, liased with incredibly smart people in tech, created websites and even niche social media platforms.
Across my career I published thousands of papers and articles, I even lectured in Beijing and became a US Government consultant for huge agencies with initials as names. I ghost wrote papers and articles in high end engineering and executives, created entire new projects out of thin air and thought I had a career that would last me a lifetime.
But lurking around the corner was the social media revolution and together with the rise of the Smartphone it decimated the Business to Business publishing industry I worked in which today looks rather like a horse & cart taking up space in a multistory parking lot.
%20July%202014.jpg?ts=1721615198)
My Co-founded company sank into an ocean of blogs & social posts never to be seen again. Before it was over, I tried to use all my knowledge to reboot the idea of technical publishing with an AI based 'content mobility' engine that tied viewers to ideas instead of publications. It was too little too late and my partners pulled out leaving me without a career, prospects, or any clue of what to do next...
MY THIRD CAREER IN STORYTELLING:
FILMMAKING & VIDEOGRAPHY
It is a very weird thing to wake up at the business end of your thirties with an extinct career, a contacts list of 15,000 pretty much useless connections, in a country not of your birth and with nothing to show for it all but a messy divorce and two dead startups. It was while contemplating my predicament that the phone rang. It was an old contact who needed help with a crowdfunding campaign at a company he'd invested in.
"No problem" I said - I could write everything, take all the pictures and build out a website pretty easily - but any good crowdfunding campaign needs a good video.
Luckily enough a chap I played football/soccer with worked with cameras and I knew enough about the technology field the campaign was about (neuromorphic chip technology) to arrange interviews and write a script. How hard could it be to learn to edit? I remember thinking - so I got to work.
So I watched some YouTube tutorials and made up the rest as I went along. However, what I wasn't prepared for was the impact editing had on me. In my very first session I completely lost myself to the work. I came out of my first 'creative daze' at 4am on a Tuesday wondering; just what the hell was I doing working at such an insane hour? That's when it hit me: It was the FIRST thing I'd done in my life that DIDN'T feel like 'work' and DIDN'T feel like pushing a boulder up a mountain and then something ELSE hit me:
At long last I KNEW what "I wanted to be when I grew up"
I wanted to make my own documentaries and I WANTED IT BAD.
The trouble is I was broke because losing a company tends to cost a lot of cash and I had zero contacts - so I started again, as a freelancer and build up my client base using my old sales skills, built up my marketing using my writing skills and started to make anything for anybody.
That was back in 2014 and I've been working in the field ever since then with my new dream to take my storytelling abilities to the big screen - while it still exists - but along the way I wanted to tell as many stories as I could from those with a 'big picture' to others on a smaller scale. I worked with anyone who needed me - and I'm proud to say I still do.
HOW I BECAME THE "DOCUMATTARIAN"
The reason I fell into the documentary world and 'real life' work is simple: The one consistant thing througout all my three careers has been my love of watching documentaries. It was a love given to me by my parents who ALWAYS had nature or travel doc's playing, well that was my mum, my dad preferred historical documentaries but whatever the topic they dominated the viewing time at home.
If I wanted to watch TV, I was generally watching a documentary on it. Since those early childhood experiences, I became a great lover of the format and to this day I regularly watch 2-3 a week and if we ever meet feel free to ask me for some recommendations.
The name orginated from my partner in time, Melissa, the person I've been with for the entirity of my third career. She once called me 'a documentalist' not knowing that was an actual thing and I'd orginally taken that as my 'personas' title - sadly MANY companies had already grabbed it for their own businesses but in commiseration she told me "well, you could always be the docuMATTarian" and the name stuck to me like a burr to a wooly sock.
It also happens to be a uniquely cheap URL, well apart from the chap that's cybersquatting on my old one 'THEdocumattarian.com' - I forgot to renew it a while back and some bloke just bought it and wanted $500 to buy it back when I was only paying $10 a year - so now it's simply documattarian.com with a double fisted, single finger salute to whoever that person is.
CONTINUED
EPILOGUE
So that is how this all came to be - after I learned to edit I learned to shoot. Then I couldn't find anyone to do the color work or fix the crappy audio that often comes in my line of work so I learned that too. Just like graphics & animation or music (I have an encylopedic knowledge of free music libraries), lighting and all the other stuff I can do. I learned it all out of pure passion but quite by surprise I've found a unique niche as a soloist.
I'm nowhere near as intimidating as a whole film crew and so I've found I can capture 'real' people & stories more authentically then the 'lights, camera, ACTION' approach. I can turn up, figure out how to best shoot an interview event, scene or product without much fuss and always FAR cheaper then a film crew, director, production team & editor; because it's just me.
I like to train others that are as passionate about telling stories as I am...so if you work with me, the chances are some of this will rub off on you too.
If you need help telling a story - any story, from an advert to an educational. A small group to a massive event, then drop me a line. I'll tell you how it can be shot with the resources you have, and what you can expect the results to be. Then we'll work out a plan and just make it happen, the way it should be...
...and if you like - I'll show you how to do it yourself.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading my story, but if you need help with telling your own then reach out and lets have a chinwag (AKA a chat). I'm just an email away.
Matt G. AKA the "Documattarian"
