Rising Stars: Meet Brent Kennedy

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brent Kennedy.

Hi Brent, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up in the Kansas City area. My interest in video/film production started when I was ten years old. I would use my dad’s old SVHS video camera to make stupid videos with my friends. Then I got my first edit software and it was like the code had been cracked and I was hooked. Editing was something I did off and on throughout my teen years for friends’ graduations, weddings, and the like.

I subscribed to Video Maker Magazine and would spend hours drooling over cameras that I had no way to afford. Also in my teen years, I got into an after-school theater program where I met others who loved things like acting and directing. When the group would put on their plays, we would always have a videographer come tape them named Mike Varel. He was a super nice guy who realized I was interested in video when he caught me staring at one of his cameras one day, as it was the first time, I had seen one of the cameras from the magazine in real life.

He kind of became an inspiration/mentor to me and would let me mess with his cameras and even taught a class on video production that I took. When I was around 16, I met a friend through the theater group who had the same little cheap camera as me, and the same desire to make films. He had written several script ideas, and we tried to make each of them. We learned many ways how not to make films. Each time we tried though we got a little better. I also started at my local community college that year. They didn’t have a film/video program so I went with my second love of computers and programming. I enjoyed doing programming but always kept my love of film/video on the side. I would spend hours in the computer lab running through tutorials on After Effects, or other editing software in between my programming homework.

I graduated High School at 17 and went full speed ahead on the programming track at my college. When I turned 18, I got an internship with Brad Nall, a local video producer who made local commercials and such. He took me out on some of his shoots and that was the first taste I had of an actual professional environment. One of the first shoots we did was a local auto dealer commercial. He told me to hold a gel over one of the tungsten hot lights. Not wanting to fail on my first shoot I held it there until my sweater sleeve started to smoke from the heat. When I asked if I could move to keep from bursting into flame he was like “Well yeah stupid!”. I loved that guy.

When I turned 19, my mom had another baby. My father had been flying back and forth to Texas every week for work and they decided they could not do that with the new baby, so we packed up and moved to San Antonio. It was hard leaving everything and everyone I had known and the next year was spent trying to figure out what I was going to do. I was one class away from an associate’s degree in Computer Information Systems when we left and I was devastated. My dad had been trying to help me figure out my next steps, and on the way down to San Antonio we had gone through Waco Texas, and seen Baylor University. He scheduled a visit for us that year to go and see if it would be a good fit for me. I went for a campus visit where I got to stay with the Computer Science Department, and sit in on some classes, and hang out with the students. They were nice guys, and the department seemed good. I was already way ahead of most of them programming skill-wise, but on paper, it would be a good fit. I could not shake the “This isn’t for me” feeling though.

Two days into the visit I was walking around campus with my dad and broke down. I just told him I could not do this. The computer department wasn’t for me. I was so afraid of having wasted all that time on a degree that I wasn’t going to continue. My dad looked at me very supportive and said “Well you don’t have to keep doing that! They have a Video Production department here. Let’s go look at that.” We walked over to the communications building and happened to run into one of the main professors who gave me a tour of the place. It was like a huge sigh of relief. I found it. I left that day confident that that was what I was supposed to do. I enrolled for the next semester in Baylor’s Film & Digital Media program. Baylor wanted more transfer students and was doing a special deal where you got a certain scholarship based on your GPA. Since I had been to my community college with a 3.94 GPA I qualified and that helped a lot going there.

I loved my time at Baylor. Most of the undergrad programs in film from big colleges are all theory and don’t help you much, because you can’t make anything until you get into grad school. Baylor’s program was different. It’s structured more like a grad program for all the students and everyone gets to work on actual projects and work their way up the production ladder as they advance. You get to rent equipment for your classes and when you get to be a junior or senior you can get special permission to rent the equipment for your projects. I also found that my time doing programming was not wasted as video equipment, and editing systems today are all digital. Having an understanding of all the technical details gave me a leg up.

Eventually, I took field production where your main project in the class is to develop and film a 15-minute short film. They even give you a small budget if you need it. My friends and I made a western and it turned out quite well. We won best cinematography in the department’s film festival held on campus each year, and right after I graduated my professor submitted it into the Dallas International Film Festival’s college category. It got selected as part of their Texas College Showcase, where they show the best work from Texas Colleges. Seeing my work in an actual theater in front of an audience was amazing. I graduated from Baylor in 3 years Magna Cum Laude.

Unfortunately, this was at the beginning of 2012 and the economy was still kind of struggling. I spent the next few years trying to find a job and could not find anything at all. Dominos would not even hire me. I had a few contacts from college that would do 1-2 big shoots per year and that gave me just enough money to survive. I spent every day just applying for jobs for 2 years. Then finally I got a job doing corporate video where this large company would fly us around the world to all their events making trailers for the event, and doing interviews. We also sold videos as part of the research packages they did, and this is where I honed my color correction skills. We would make about 30 videos a week cutting together various clips from many different sources and it was my job to make them all match and make sure the quality of the edit was up to par. I stayed in that job for two years.

My parents in the meantime had moved out here to Colorado to be with my siblings while they attended school. Their local church had announced that they were going on a large TV station and they needed a video guy to help them make it happen. They called me, and I applied as I had been missing being close to my family. The pastor of the church called me the same day and I was moving up to Colorado a month later. I stayed there and worked at the church modernizing and streamlining their workflow for TV for 4 years. In that time, we took them from barely making 1 show per week to making daily shows and building out their studios.

During my time there I also got connected with other videographers and people around town and started buying my equipment and working freelance on the side. Eventually, I had enough work that I was ready to strike out on my own with our company Light Brush Media in 2020 right as the pandemic hit. Initially, I was scared that I had tried to start my business then, but quickly realized that, while everything else was losing business, the video was the perfect thing to go into during a lockdown.

Everyone needed live-streaming and studio consulting, and it gave me a good launch to my business. I now have a partner that I work with, all kinds of cameras, lights, and other equipment, as well as our truck. We have done commercials, live events, and films, as well as several of our short films as passion projects. I’ve gotten to teach video production at some local schools and pay forward what many have invested in me. We plan to keep growing and building the business, and eventually move into films and entertainment.

We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It has not always been smooth, but it has always worked out. Leaving my first college with no idea what I would do was hard, and then changing degrees was very difficult, but all of it worked out to be better than what I had planned. After college looking for a job for 2 years and getting nothing was very disheartening, especially because I had done so well in school it seemed.

In this industry, it feels like sometimes you kind of have to kick your way in the door, but if you can stick with it and get good at it while you do, it can pay off. Building our current business is one of the hardest things I’ve done. Being good at doing the work is not enough to make a business, so currently I’m learning how to be a salesman as well, which I am not naturally gifted at.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
At Light Brush Media, we specialize in producing high-quality video projects for our clients that achieve the results they are looking for. We are a goal-oriented production company. Anyone can make you a video, we like to work with our clients to learn about what they need and design projects that will help them attain those goals. We are a more high-end style production company. We aren’t the “one guy with a couple of DSLRs and a small light kit” that a lot of companies are.

We specialize in larger productions and handling more logistics so we can punch well above our weight with the quality of our videos. One of the things I am most proud of is that the same theater group that I met that first real videographer in has a branch here in town, and I have gotten to film their plays for them. So, in a way, I have gotten to realize a small dream that he helped inspire all those years ago.

Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I am still a theater nerd at heart and do swing dance classes for kids with my wife on the side. We also participate in and try out for local community theater shows for fun when we have the time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://lightbrushmedia.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/light.brush.media/#
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LightBrushMediaLLC
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-kennedy-bb730965/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCon_mOJA8hSFvauxeE9Pv7A