Every so often you get a moment to step back and actually explain how you got here, instead of just being in the middle of it. That’s what happened this month when Voyage Ohio Magazine featured our co-founder Brian Shaffer as part of their Local Stories series, and reading it back made us appreciate our own history a little more than we usually take the time to.

Two Daytonians, thirty-some years, one studio

The short version most people around town already know: Brian and Sarah met in high school back in 1988. The longer version, the one the interview actually gets into, is that they spent the next few decades on almost completely different paths before either of them had any plan to work together. Sarah built her eye in news photography, shooting for the Springfield News-Sun and the Dayton Daily News, the kind of environment that teaches you to get the shot right the first time because there isn’t a second take on a breaking story. Brian’s road ran through the tech world and then out to the West Coast, where he spent years in independent video production before eventually finding his way back to Ohio. WeDoVids came out of that convergence in 2018, and honestly, it’s hard to imagine either of those skill sets on their own building what we’ve built together.

Trial by fire, then a pandemic

We got our start shooting news for all four local Dayton television stations, which is about as fast a way as there is to learn how to deliver under pressure. That same instinct got tested again in a very different way in 2020, when nonprofits across our community suddenly lost the in-person fundraising events they depended on. We pivoted to livestreaming and virtual event production to help them keep reaching their donors, because that’s genuinely the kind of work we want to be doing when it matters most, not just when it’s convenient

Still growing, still local

The interview also touches on something we don’t always say out loud: this business has changed shape over the years in ways that go beyond just adding services. Brian and Sarah’s own working relationship has evolved, and so has how the studio operates day to day, but the creative partnership and the standards behind the work haven’t moved an inch. We’ve also grown a little beyond pure production in recent years, building some of our own tools out of problems we ran into on real client jobs, and there’s more of that ahead. But the camera work, the client relationships, and the Dayton roots are still exactly what this studio is built on.

If you want the full conversation, Brian gets into a lot more, including where he thinks AI actually fits into video and photography work over the next decade. Read the complete interview at Voyage Ohio Magazine.

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Read the full interview

This only covers a few pieces of a much longer conversation. For the complete interview, including more on WeDoVids’ day-to-day work and Brian’s full thinking on where the industry is headed, read it directly at Voyage Ohio Magazine.