Check Out Kasen Schamaun’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kasen Schamaun.

Kasen, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My curiosity in video began when I was a freshman in high school. Mountain Range had a pretty robust video program, especially for a high school, but most of the kids took the class for an “easy A”. I signed up in the hopes of making silly videos with my friends. So I started playing with cameras, and as it turns out, cameras are just toys and I really began to fall in love with them. As my interest in video grew, I started filming other things that interested me.

At the time I was 16, racing dirt bikes. So one weekend my teacher let me take a camera (it recorded on tape) for the weekend and I made my first motocross edit with my friends. After this, my passion for video really pivoted and I began to wonder if I could make money with this one day.

Through high school, I continued to film dirt bikes every weekend religiously. I was just a little track rat with a camera. Once I graduated high school, I still had no real plan but kept shooting as I went to Colorado Film School in Aurora. During this time I met a mountain biker who sometimes rode dirt bikes. We filmed a little edit together and he brought me over into the world of mountain biking video production.

With four friends and myself, we created a video series titled “Rooted MTB” which cataloged four mountain bike racers as they traveled and raced mountain bikes across mostly the U.S. with some trips to Canada, Mexico, and a couple of stints in Europe.

During these years, I really began to find my style and build connections in this industry I was hoping to become a part of. This is actually how I meant Wiley Kaupas. This was also just a whole new world to me. I was raised by 9 to 5 parents and the idea of a career traveling the world to make videos for the internet just didn’t register with them or myself really.

During film school, I worked part-time delivering and building custom jetted bathtubs at Hydro Massage in Aurora, but they would let me leave for any filming trip I came to them with. Finally in 2021, fresh off a pandemic and a graduation, I quit my job and started freelancing.

The start was slow, but over time, I made more connections and just tried to put my best foot forward. Now in 2024, I make a living doing what I love and I call myself a freelance commercial cinematographer who specializes in outdoor production. You can still boil that down to making silly videos with my friends haha.

Now I specialize in Outdoor production working with local and national companies to create whatever vision a company has. I’ve worked in apparel, outdoor recreation, golf, and other worlds.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I can’t complain about how I got here. I didn’t come from wealth, but my parents gave me every opportunity to go for what I thought was possible. My support network has always been so strong with friends and family letting me live in their house rent-free or even getting a small DSLR as my first camera for Christmas.

The barrier of entry for this career is quite expensive so people close to me let me prioritize my career goals and for that, I’ll always be grateful. In a career like this, your schedule and life are not as steady as a 9-5, so having people around who understand that I may have an entire month off or I may work every day for 30 days straight is invaluable.

At times a freelancing career can be really scary when work not coming in, but a lot of people don’t talk about how rewarding it is as well. When you work a salary job, it’s guaranteed money, which I hear is amazing haha, but within that guaranteed income is a smaller capacity to make even more than that. People often look at freelancing as an opportunity to lose big, but there’s enough to go around and I think it’s more likely to win big.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a freelance cinematographer, but I can wear a lot of different hats in production. My main specialty within cinematography is commercial work with an emphasis on outdoor sports. The projects I tend to shoot are cycling, or other sport related. Some of the brands I have worked with that.

A cyclist would have a better chance of knowing companies like Specialized Bicycles and Stanley (the viral cups). So often times a brand or someone approaches me with a loose idea for a video, and then it’s my job to actually capture the piece and make something interesting.

My specialty has always been doing a lot with a little. When you make these videos, authenticity is such a vital part of the piece, that a smaller operation that can bike into places with this equipment or film things in a more documentary-style way, or just be overall more efficient than a large set can actually help the piece a lot more than perfectly lighting every shot. Now there is a time and a place for everything obviously.

In general, I would say people just enjoy working with me, I like to think I’m good at my job and nice to work with. In the creative realm of work, ego can run pretty rampant, so just being cool calm, and collected while creating something a client likes is the number one way to keep income on the way.

I’m most proud of making a living doing what I love. A lot of people don’t get that opportunity and my life is not a dream but I feel like I haven’t worked in 3 years, so that’s an amazing feeling. I’ve traveled all over the U.S. and begun traveling the world. It feels like a cheat code to travel on someone else’s dime and experience things I never imagined as a kid growing up in Thornton.

I’ve been to places and seen things, I would have never thought possible. Whether it’s spending a month in France following an international mountain bike series or playing golf at Micheal Jordan’s exclusive Grove 23 golf club. The people I’ve met in this profession have to be some of the coolest humans in the world as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: kasenschamaun.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kasen_schamaun/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kasen-schamaun-93a7a8194/