18 Years, 30 Countries: Matt Mantyla’s Journey to Dir. of Media Content for Cincinnati FC

On this episode of the ZoomPod, a creator's journey starts as a third grader with a love of cameras. It has stops at North Canton Hoover High School's Video Production program and Ohio University, which led to a move to New York City for an internship with the Miss Universe Organization. 

18 years and 30 countries later, Matt Mantyla's production career field of dreams beckoned, and he's now producing media content for Cincinnati FC!

His secret to success? I'll let him explain...

Matt's Bonafides:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmantyla7/

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Transcript

TMac 0:05

Hello and welcome to another edition of the Zoom with our feet podcast. With me, your host, T Mack, professional photographer, videographer, and teacher. On this edition of the Zoom Pod, New York-based producer Matt Mentella talks about his media creators' journey from high school to an internship at the Miss Universe organization to his current dream job producing marketing content for Major League Baseball. It's baseball season. Our guest speaker is in the photo lab. Let's talk to a pro. Matt Mantella, welcome to the Zoom with our feet podcast. How are you?

SPEAKER_01 0:55

T Mac, it is great to be here. Thank you for having me. I am doing great.

TMac 1:00

What did we learn at Hoover? I'm interested to ask my ex-students what they learned in our program.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yeah, for sure. Um, I'll even go back a little bit further. I think like my journey with video production probably started in third grade. I met a very close friend of mine. His name's Derek. Um, and Derek had an analog camera. And when we would like hang out after school, we would like make all these little home movies, you know, and we didn't have editing software or anything. So we'd like rewind over our bad takes, and we had a great time doing it. And then after a while, through you know, middle school and then getting into high school, one of us got a digital camera, the other one got a laptop. So now we're like shooting and editing in iMovie and burning DVDs of our content. Um, and then it just so happened that Hoover had, you know, one of the best video production programs in the state, if not the country. And that is where I really learned kind of like all of the basics um shooting, lighting, editing, sound, broadcast, journalism, um, broadcasting the news every day. It was um, it was a really awesome education and kind of like the wide gamut of skills that that like the industry has. Um, and it's like the what we learned there still serves me today. Like I come across a lot of people and they they are very specialized in one area, and I think that's okay. Um, but like as a producer in the industry, I think it's been helpful to me to be able to know a little bit at least about everything. And having that in my back pocket has been super valuable.

TMac 2:51

From Hoover, where'd you go?

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yeah, from Hoover, I went to Ohio University. I ultimately studied communications. Um, but a story there that that might be relatable for young people watching is when I was getting ready to graduate, the big question from friends and family was like, Oh, you wanna like you want to do video production as a career? You want to like try to do this? Are you gonna be able to do that? Like, are there careers where you can make money doing this? Like, is this really realistic? Like, wouldn't you rather be like an accountant or like a lawyer or a doctor or something? And it got to me a little bit. So actually, when I applied to OU, I applied to the business school and I got into the business school and I was going to do something pretty generic like business administration or what have you. Um, and I really like went back and forth with it. And I think I actually switched to the communications school over the summer, and then I switched back to business, and I remember I went to college orientation, having already switched twice, and I sat down in the room with all of the other business kids, and I remember whoever was hosting the orientation was like, Does anybody in here think that they need to be somewhere else? Does anybody think they're in the wrong place? And I raised my hand and I was like, I need to be with the media arts and studies people. So they took me over there. Um, so I majored in communications in the School of Media Arts and Studies. I focused very heavily on video production, got involved with as many extra curriculars and like student-run film programs as I possibly could while I was there, in addition to like the classes. Um, had I was very fortunate to meet a lot of people when I was at OU, which led to a really awesome internship. Um crazy internship, by the way. Um, and it was with the Miss Universe Organization in New York. So I was a junior at OU. And actually, Nicole Little, who is also a Hoover High School video production alumni, was an intern. She also went to OU. She was an intern with the Miss Universe organization. And I remember she put a word in for me because she knew me through Hoover video production. And that like that connection, I can draw like a straight line through my entire career from that one connection. It's crazy.

TMac 5:29

Um and the less and the lesson is it's never too early to have a network or start a network or have in Hoover's case, we always told you you're gonna have a built-in network.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

It's true. It's true. It it's very, very important. And like even, you know, earlier I mentioned meeting a friend in third grade that I came up making videos with. That connection has, you know, I can draw a straight line from that connection. So I do think networking is like paramount in like in terms of keys to success, it's at the very, very top in any industry. Um, but I go to do this Miss Universe internship, I meet some people. Ultimately, I finished my degree at OU my senior year. I moved back in with my parents after college, uh, trying to figure out what I'm going to do. Um, a family friend offered me a contract gig making videos at Altman Hospital. I saved up some money, and I remember thinking, um, I don't know what I'm gonna do after this ends. And at the time, my cousin was living in Chicago, and he had this idea that we could put together our own little boutique production company doing uh corporate video and social media in Chicago. Um, so from that gig with Altman, I saved up enough money to last me like six months in Chicago, and I took the risk. I moved out there with him, and the first week I was there, we got a permalant permalance contract with the Chicago Sky to do kind of all of their social promotional commercial work for that whole year. So I'm in Chicago, we're doing a bunch of um WNBA work, we're also doing various corporate video productions, talking heads. And my boss from Miss Universe ended up at this tech startup and offered me a job there, which at the time was an opportunity I felt like I couldn't turn down. So that's what brought me to New York, still here now. Um, at that company, we were licensing a technology to linear broadcasters. So it was all of the all of the big uh broadcasters, Viacom, Turner, NBC, CBS. We were with regional sports networks, all the way down to like local TV stations. So I'm in and out of TV trucks and control rooms and uh server centers and installing hardware and working with the producers at the networks to integrate the software we were licensing to them, which basically allowed producers to put real-time polls and games as lower thirds on their broadcasts. So, for example, we were on Sports Center and they would bring up this graphic with their graphics engine that would say who should start today, player A or player B. And you could go to ESBN.com slash vote, cast your vote on the phone, and all the vote data would go to the cloud and then feed into the graphics engine, which would then come into the lower third on the frame. So we did like voting and polling, but then we also did like bar trivia. So if you've ever if you've ever been at a bar with like those old school uh keyboards where you can like do like the multiple choice trivia, we did that with like syndicated modern family. Um did a bunch of work with Disney Channel doing like gamified shows, so kind of making old TV new again. Um, so I did that for a while, and after a while, uh I decided I wanted to get back into content creation. So I applied for a job at Major League Baseball, which is where I'm at now. I'm the director of production in MLB's creative studio, which is in the marketing department.

TMac 9:28

We'll get to that in a minute. Yep. Let me get let me let me get this one in. So so at three or four or five years old, you're a media mogul.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

I don't know, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. The we still have some of those tapes. I don't know if I would say we were moguls back then.

TMac 9:45

Who influenced you?

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Man, it was my friends at the time. It was really my friends. There wasn't there wasn't really anyone around me that was doing media, you know, growing up in in northeast Ohio. This was before smartphones, nobody was a content creator, that type of thing didn't exist. But the technology of the camera interested me for some reason. And then when I found out that you could take the video that you shot on the camera and put it in the computer and manipulate it on like a consumer computer, that's when I really got interested and passionate about visual storytelling.

TMac 10:24

And that was VHS days. You're I don't want to date you, but right? You started out on, or was it more of a high eight? Yeah, it was a high eight.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

It was a high eight that we shot on. My parents did have a VHS camera though that they did like all of our childhood home movies on.

TMac 10:40

So before we talk about the Major League Baseball gig, we got to talk about how you got the Major League Baseball gig, because I think it's just badass. So where did the idea come from? And explain what you did because there's a lesson in there. Uh you know, so I I'm pretty sure it was sort of a standard notification of how you found out about the job, but what you did from that point is really, I think, informative for folks now if they think about it.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

Yeah. Yeah. So if we want to talk about influences, more recent influences in my life, like five, six, seven, the past five, six, seven years. Um, I've been heavily influenced by Casey Neistat, who they call the godfather of YouTube. Um, if you haven't seen him before, highly rem highly recommend checking him out. He is a master storyteller. He just does a great job, I think, on the YouTube platform of making extremely engaging videos, telling great stories with like very little budget. Some of his stuff is high budget, but he's able to like take a cell phone and just make something incredible. And like that's why I really appreciate his work. He likes to say that perfection is the enemy of good, or perfection is the enemy of good enough. And I love that mantra because it allows him to put out a ton of work, and I guess as a content creator, that's what you want to do. But inspired by his style of filmmaking and content creation, I made a video resume because I was applying for jobs at the time. It wasn't specifically for Major League Baseball. I set it out a lot of different places, but I figured, you know, video jobs are extremely competitive, and video jobs at bigger companies like Major League Baseball are extremely competitive. And I wanted to figure out a way to separate myself from the crowd, you know, and I think that applies probably to like, again, any profession. But I decided, you know, I'm applying to video-based jobs. I should show what I can do when I apply. So I dug into my family archive, all those VHS tapes we were just talking about, the eight millimeter tapes we were using. I sent them to a company and had them all digitized, and then um ultimately just kind of like told the story of my life in three minutes, including all of my qualifications for the type of positions that I was applying for at the time. And um I applied to MLB. And the funny thing about that is I almost didn't see them reply to me. I got um, I got a reply from an automated service uh called HireView, which basically allowed you to do a virtual interview. It's like a screening before you actually interview with someone. And I thought it was junk mail, and I and I deleted it. I actually put it in my archive. And a few minutes went by and I was like, wait a minute, what was that? And I went and I looked, and sure enough, it was like an invitation to to interview. And here I am.

TMac 14:06

Came this close after all that work. Yeah. So did they mention it?

SPEAKER_01 14:14

I remember I went in for my first interview, and I remember uh I sat down at the interview, and one of the other folks that was in the interview room, we didn't know each other, but he graduated from Ohio University the same year I did. And we had a bunch of shared connections, and I was like, This is looking pretty good, I hope. Um it was one of those serendipitous moments. Um, but I remember on my way out of the interview, I was feeling pretty good about it, and um the person two levels up from the person that hired me walked by and she was like, Oh, loved your video resume. So it was apparent to me in that moment that not only had the hiring manager seen it, but it had made its way up a little bit as well.

TMac 15:05

It's a piece of work, man.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Appreciate it.

TMac 15:09

Well, so original and so well uh so well done from a story standpoint, uh, and nobody knows that those were studios that you had a little side gig renting out in the background.

SPEAKER_01 15:25

All back to those connections, by the way, the the studio too.

TMac 15:30

And back to those connections, back to the network. What is the official title and what is your role?

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Yeah, when I first got hired, the official role was I think it was called YouTube Video Producer. But at the time, MLB was building out a slate of original content for YouTube. So we worked on a bunch of different series specifically for YouTube that focused on, you know, um showcasing our players and players' personalities, who are they off the field? Like we know who they are on the field, but who are they off the field and how are they relatable? So we did that in a bunch of different ways, and they're still online. You can go and check them out. Um, we did shows like we would go to the stadium and interview players about the different things that they keep in their lockers, right? Like a locker is like a very personal space for a player, and they would come out and they'd be like, you know, I have uh this is my glove. A lot of them are like customized, they talk about the customization. Um, one player showed off his Rolex watch that he keeps in his locker and it's missing a diamond because his daughter got a hold of it and knocked the diamond off, never to be seen again again, of course. So you start to get into all these cool little stories. So the next time you're watching those players play, you know a little bit more about them. Um, so that was like that was the primary um portion of my role. And we also worked on like brand campaigns, like opening day campaigns. We would be on the ground producing commercial spots and just kind of um serving the greater creative needs of the league.

TMac 17:15

Is it a producer gig, would you say?

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Yeah, yeah. So it's uh there are a lot of different functions of what I do now. So it's evolved over time, but essentially, like sometimes we'll produce things internally, like that show that we we did with um players showing off what they keep in their lockers. The role there is just like playing the liaison, building like the team. So who's gonna shoot it? What does sound look like? Who is editing this? What's the timeline? What budget do we have to produce this? Getting in touch with the clubs, making the asks of the players, working with our different platform editors on YouTube and social to make sure that we get the full piece out on YouTube and MLB TV and MLB.com, but then also getting social pieces out on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, all that good stuff uh that drives back to the hero piece.

TMac 18:19

What is the turnaround time for that kind of stuff? Do you have multiple layers and multiple projects going on at once?

SPEAKER_01 18:27

Yeah, yeah. It's uh a bit of a juggling act sometimes. There are there are always multiple things happening at various stages of the production process. I can tell you, I've worked on projects that have taken, you know, six to eight months to put together. I've worked on a project two weeks ago at spring training that we shot on a Saturday and released the following Friday. And there were, you know, three separate YouTube videos and maybe 10 different social pieces that went out on all different platforms. So it can be pretty intense sometimes. We like to say we move at the speed of sport because our sport happens in real time, right? And we want to we want to give people um content that's happening in real time.

TMac 19:11

And the flag is about ready to drop for 160 some games, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:16

It is, yes. It actually technically dropped today. We played the first regular season game uh in Korea. It was the Dodgers and the Padres, uh part of our World Tour initiative.

TMac 19:31

That's crazy for uh just uh just to get your mind around that and and the game is so popular around the world, I just think um that's a long time overdue. Is that the right uh phrase?

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Um I think we've been doing the World Tour stuff for a while now. Um and candidly, I'm gonna have to check this to make sure this is accurate. I think we're doing games in London, Mexico City. There was a DR series that happened in spring training earlier this year. Yeah, there was the Korea series, and then we're also doing a game that we're calling the Rickwood Game in Birmingham, Alabama in June. And that one is a tribute to the Negro Leagues. Rickwood Field was a Negro League stadium, and we have done some light renovation on the stadium. It's the oldest ballpark in the country. Uh, Willie Mays played there. Um, a ton of Negro Leagues legends played there, a bunch of Major League legends played there. Um, so now we're gonna kind of bring MLB and uh professional baseball back to Rickwood. We're really excited about that one too.

TMac 20:48

How much travel is involved?

SPEAKER_01 20:51

Um, I don't travel too much, to be honest with you. There are other roles. I I can tell you that our content team travels quite a bit. Um, there are some folks that have some serious delta mileage and uh and and Marriott nights banked up. Um but not too much for me. Uh I was at spring training for about a week and a half, a couple weeks ago. Um, I might travel two, three times a year, maybe now.

TMac 21:21

Wow. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Yeah, yeah. It feels like a it feels like a good amount. And it's the fun part of the job, right? Like going out, that's at least it's one of the things that I love the most about being in content in general. There's always a new story to be told somewhere, and going and uncovering those and meeting new people and seeing a new place is one of the things that I love the most about it. And I think the first time I realized that was during my internship with Miss Universe. I think like since then, I had never been out of the country. Country T Mac ever. And I remember I called uh my boss at the internship when I found out I got it. And he was like, Hey, do you have a passport? And I was like, No, I don't. Like, I'd been to Toronto, and that was before you needed a passport to go. And that was it. And he's like, Well, you better get one because the second week you're here, we're sending you to India. And I'm like, Whoa, like, what is what is this? So since then, I've been to like 30 different countries. I feel very, very fortunate to have been able to travel that much and see so many cool things and to tell so many cool stories. And yeah, that's I I think that's like one of the best things about what we do.

TMac 22:45

So this is like a still getting my head around the rule, it's like a like a coordinating producer kind of kind of picture in my head, and you are arranging with the different units and all of that. And are you managing both technical, logistical, editorial?

SPEAKER_01 23:09

So it it's it's not quite like that. I mean, there are a lot of people at Major League Baseball. It's a big organization, right? In the commissioner's office. So there are a lot of different producers, a lot of different departments, a lot of different people that kind of like make everything run. Our group in the creative studio, we are a small group of project managers, producers, and creatives. And I would say, like, with my group, the production arm, there's a lot of producer that happens. Like that's our title, you know, but there's also a lot of creative that goes into it. Um, the term creative producer gets thrown around a little bit. So we have some creative input depending on like the project that we're doing. And then it depends what the project is. Like I said, we've we've produced things internally, but we also work on projects, ad spots with external partners, creative agencies, production companies. And in that sense, when we're working with them, they take care of a lot of the production logistics, right? And then it's our job to align with the league. So, like to give you an example, if we're working with a production company externally and they're like, we want to shoot with this player, this player, and this player, and we want to do it at this ballpark, then it's up to us to make those connections internally. Like we have a whole team that deals with player engagement. We have a whole team that deals with club marketing. Um, and we make those connections, and then ultimately we can talk with the clubs and the players and their agents and try to see who's interested in being a part of what we're making. So it's really like just putting all of the different puzzle pieces together, and then it's also a lot of post-producing. So uh making sure that you know that whether we edit internally or whether it's an external production company or post house, we're taking those edits and running it up the flagpole to all the necessary stakeholders at MLB to make sure everyone's aligned and happy with what's going on.

TMac 25:16

And that is a true marketing type role.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

Yeah. Yeah, it's we are very much based in marketing. We're in in the marketing department. Um, but it it it's it's a lot of fun. We get to do a lot of different cool things. It's all based in baseball, but there's always a new story to tell. There are always new players to learn about, so it it always stays pretty fresh.

TMac 25:44

30 countries, dude. That's crazy. Good for you.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

30 countries, yeah.

TMac 25:51

What's next? What do you want to do?

SPEAKER_01 25:55

If you would have told 18-year-old Matt, who's getting ready to graduate from Hoover, that he was going to be working for Major League Baseball, doing video content, um, I would have been over the moon. That would have, that would have been the goal then. Like I remember thinking even as I was like going through college, like, what do I like, where do I want to like throw my weight? Where do I want to like try to go? And it was like at the at that time, it was like, I would love to make sports documentaries with ESPN, like working on 30 for 30s or or whatever. And because like that's what I was watching at the time. Um now I've I'm basically doing the same thing, but with the league. And I think that's been one of my favorite parts of this job. Um, I had an unbelievable trip last year where um I took a team to Prague to tell the story of the Czech national baseball team that qualified for the World Baseball Classic for the first time. And it was unbelievable. A member of the team, like these guys, the um the documentary is on YouTube, free to watch. It's called Behind the Flag, Czech Republic. And it's the story of their team. These guys, they they don't like play baseball as their sole job. Like their center fielder was a geometry teacher. Their pitcher is the marketing manager for the Czech national team. Another one of their pitchers is a firefighter, and their coach is a neurologist. So we went to Prague and we visited them at work and we interviewed them, and we kind of told this story about how they um qualified for the World Baseball Classic and ultimately made their way to Japan. And now these guys who work jobs just like everybody else and just play baseball for the love of the game are now going to Japan to face Shohei Otani, literally in the first round. Um, so it's like just this really beautiful story that really romanticizes baseball. And um, I like things like that, I think, are just really special. I think anybody can look at that story and just um really have appreciation for those guys.

TMac 28:11

It's a really awesome story. I watched it. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

It was fun, and we're still friends with those guys now. Um, some of the guys that we spent the week with out there, they come through New York, they come to the office, they send us Czech baseball cards in the mail, sign balls and stuff. Um, they're a good bunch. It was great working with them.

TMac 28:34

So I know from my time covering Major League Baseball that man, they are some funny dudes. Give me some give me some funny stories from your perspective. You're trying to um you're trying to do production, and some of these guys are just funny, funny guys. Give me some funny stories about working with ball players.

SPEAKER_01 29:06

Funny stories. I did like Adam White's story about running with King Gurphy Jr. with the steady cam on. That that was a good one. I don't I'm not gonna be able to beat that one, I don't think, if that's the if that's the benchmark.

TMac 29:18

It is. You know, I'm just thinking just getting them involved in you know production, they will find a way to create some comedy somehow. I mean, for years I was up on the roof of the bullpen in uh Progressive Field and uh before that, Jacobs Field, and it was right above the visiting bullpen. And I can't tell you how much crap got thrown at me or how many guys would toss a chair up and then come up there and spend four or five innings watching the game, and that would inevitably lead to someone saying, Hey, I could do that. Sure, go ahead, give it a shot.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

It it's been really awesome, to be honest with you. Like a lot of these guys are are really, really young and they're excited to like start building their brands and and get out there, and from that perspective, pretty much everyone that we've worked with has been incredible.

TMac 30:24

What is the most rewarding thing that you find working for a league, a world class sports league? What's the most rewarding thing?

SPEAKER_01 30:40

Yeah. Um, I like this one. I think a lot of people they go to work and they try to figure out, you know, like, am I having an impact? Um am I working for the right reasons? Is like is what is this product like changing the world or is it helping somebody? The one of like the things that I love about working for Major League Baseball is I am working every day to promote a sport that I loved so much growing up and had such a tight bond with my dad over. Like I grew up, he played in like a 30 and over Roy Hobbs League. I would go and watch him. He never missed a game of mine, hardly ever missed a practice. He kept the scorebook. Um, just like watching games with him, grew up a Guardians fan, still a Guardians fan, just like watching games with him, even bonding with my friends who are all Guardians fans. Um, it feels like this, uh at least to me, it feels like a noble thing to be pushing because I know that it's had such a positive impact on my life. Like even playing baseball myself, I feel like I learned a lot of things. I I learned about, you know, how to be a teammate, dedication, hard work, the importance of practice, those things. So I think like whether you're a fan of the sport or whether you're engaging with it, I think it's something positive for everyone.

TMac 32:23

Well said. Okay, this is the you're old enough for the pay for pay it forward question. What give me three things that you would tell the 18-year-old Matt. And I know I dealt with the 18-year-old Matt. Um what they would what what they should know, how they should behave, what they should be thinking about, that sort of thing. Give me three things that you would uh now tell the 18-year-old Matt.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

Yeah. So I have three for you, and I feel really good about them. Um I have a story to go with each, actually. So these these are my three keys to success. And again, I think this applies to pretty much anyone. And you people have probably heard all of these before, but these these are the big ones, I think. The first one is sustained hard work. I saw someone say recently, I would have just said hard work, but I saw somebody say recently that you can just work hard for a day and then like hang it up. Needs to be sustained hard work and sacrifice. I think that is key. I think that can mean a lot of different things. One like example of it in my life that I'll I'll go like the sacrifice route. So during my Miss Universe internship, which was in New York, we both know New York is incredibly expensive. I was a college student, I had no money, I had a ton of student debt, and you know, I knew my parents would help me out a little bit. I was fortunate enough in that regard, but I wasn't going to be able to afford a New York City rent. It just wasn't in the cards. Fortunately, the other intern had a grandmother that lived in Queens, in flushing Queens. That's way out there. All right. Our the Miss Universe office was at 56th and 6th. So I agree that I'm going to live with him virtually rent-free. And we get to this house, T Mac, and we walk in. And to this day, Karen and Steven, if you were watching, I'm so forever grateful because this was a springboard to my career. We go in the house, it's not wired for internet, it's not wired for cable. There are no bedrooms available. Jeff's grandma lives upstairs. And every time we meet her, we meet her for the first time. Unfortunately, she she didn't like leave her room at that point in life. She was she was there, she had a caretaker. Um, but she didn't really know we were there. Like she knew, but she didn't, she didn't always remember that we were there. Okay. So we go in, we set up air mattresses on the floor of the living room for six months. No internet, no cable. We had a hard drive that had every season of entourage on it. So that's what we did when we got home from work. To get to work, we had to walk 15 minutes to a bus that was 15 minutes. Then we'd get off, hop on the train. The train was an hour. So if you're counting the 30-minute increments, right at three, it's like an hour and a half. Pretty sure we had to transfer trains too, and then it was a 15-minute walk to the office. So we had an hour and 45 minute, hour and 45-minute commute to and from the office every single day. There and back. Five days a week. This was before hybrid, this was before Zoom. Nobody was working from home. It wasn't a thing that existed. And we did that for six or seven months. And it's kind of cool if you know anybody that lives in New York City. Nearly everybody has a New York City struggle story. Like it's hard to make it here. People have nightmare roommates, they crash on couches. Um, Casey Neistat, who I mentioned earlier, he actually has a video on his New York City struggle story, which is insane. Um, it's tough. It's tough to make it. Um, and I did that. And like we were talking about earlier, that's going to kind of lead me to key number two, which is networking. We were talking about it. As you're like working hard and sacrificing and showing your dedication, people around you are going to notice. And it's important that you make those connections because you never know who you meet is going to be able to help you out later. And you know, hopefully you pay that forward yourself too. I always try to, you know, try to hook up people in my network as well. Um, but you can draw the line. So, like the story here is like I told you, I met Derek in third grade, right? Derek and I made videos. That led me to you, T Mac. So you're here. Then I meet Nicole Little. Nicole Little leads to my New York City internship. I meet my boss there, and his name was Colin. I also meet my fellow intern Tom, who I founded Egg Studios with, which is my rental photo studio that I started in New York. Shot my video resume at Egg Studios, which got me my job at MLB. So it's like this little like butterfly effect type thing. Like you can draw the line, like it's a very real thing. And like, yes, I'm cherry picking a little bit, but it's really important. The people that you meet are a currency. You can you can meet people and things will happen. So never burning a bridge, I think, is very important, and always trying to put your best foot forward and do well by others is paramount. So that's number two. So that's networking. Number three is an appetite for risk taking. So I already told you the story about going to India, that my second week on uh on my Miss Universe internship. My real risk taking story has to do with photography equipment, which I think is appropriate. So I met my friend Tom at my Miss Universe internship. He was a fellow intern. Tom and I were friends for a long time. We worked together on a lot of things. Tom came to me with this idea to put together a rental photo studio in Brooklyn. There wasn't really anything else like it at the time. Tom was getting ready to go freelance photo, but he wanted a he wanted a partner so that he could have a studio that he could shoot out when he needed to, but that we could rent out to others when it wasn't being used. So we put this whole thing together. We like made a website on Squarespace. We found a booking software. We we rented the studio space, which was a it was a risk in its own right. Those those numbers were pretty scary back then. We had to do a year lease on this like big open lob space in Brooklyn. Um, and we did it. And we were like, okay, we gotta get people in the door, like we got to pay this rent every month. How are we going to do this? So we're like marketing on Instagram and stuff. But we had a friend that worked for an agency in Brooklyn, and they were going to shoot um a lookbook for a pretty prominent shoe brand at the studio. And we hadn't had a client yet. It was like week one or week two. So we had like some C stands, we had some cheap mono lights, we had some grip and rigging stuff, like um super clamps, A clamps, gaff tape, some softboxes and stuff. There wasn't like a whole bunch there. We had we had some seamless paper, we were not outfitted for a commercial shoot. So our friend comes to us, they're like, We're doing this shoot for this shoe brand. Um, can we come scout the space? And we're like, Yeah, sure. So they come and scout the space and it goes pretty well. And they're like, okay, we want to shoot here for a week. And we're like crunching the numbers in our head, and we're like, if they rent a full day every day this week, like we can pay the rent for a month. Like, this is gonna be amazing. So we're all excited about it. And then they're like, so we need to rent a bunch of equipment. Can you guys handle that for us? And we hadn't really considered that as a service, but then we were like, well, yes, we can. Like, and we can we can mark that up a little bit, and that's like that's gonna help us too. So they send us a gear list, and I don't remember all of what was on the gear list, but it was a massive gear list. So we go down the street to this rental house and we show them the list and we're like, Do you have this stuff? They're like, Yeah, we have it. We're like, great, we we need to rent it for this week. And they're like, Do you have a COI? And we're like, a CO what? They're like, Do you have a certificate of insurance? And we're like, no, we don't. So like we had we had like we had some insurance through uh an insurance company that was based in Florida, and we're like, we we called them about it. And I remember there was like a hurricane happening. We never got through to them, weren't able to do it. And in hindsight, there are a million different websites where you can go and just get like a COI for the week on whatever you need. Uh, but we didn't know that at the time. So we're like, what are we gonna do? And we like try leveling with the person behind the desk, and they're like, the only thing that you can do to get around the COI is if you put the full replacement value of all of the gear on a credit card. It was $50,000. And there were three of us in in this venture together, none of us had a credit limit that high. But we had enough credit cards between the three of us, may have had to have opened a few to go in, and we had them put all of the gear on our credit cards. And I was like, should we sleep in the studio to make sure no one steals this stuff? Because I don't know what we're gonna do if they do. Um no, but it like that was it, and I remember just being so scared, and ultimately everything worked out. The holds on our credit cards were removed, and we had a successful rental studio business in Brooklyn for about six years. COVID, COVID was tough on us, ultimately we had to close down, but that was like the first step, and that was like, you know, if you if you want to do great things, you kind of have to be willing to take risks because nothing easy is worth doing. Um, so those are my three things.

TMac 43:43

Crazy. Crazy. You know, and it can be something, you know, from a photographer's sense, it could be something where you reach out to a known person and you s and you say something like I I'm interested in doing something. What you know, w um could you look at my could you look at my photos? Hey, I shot some stuff. Um would you like to would you like to look at it? Yeah. I I had a previous guest uh say pretty much exactly that. And you know you you you have to extend beyond uh yourself or your comfort level. You clearly weren't comfortable. Uh and then you learned what a CLI is, uh and and off you went.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

Yeah. Yeah, I I think it's um it's important to get outside your comfort zone and take chances. Like you said, it could be as easy as like reaching out to someone on Instagram and saying, Hey, I want to make a video for your company, and you and like maybe that is an in, and then that's that's also networking, you know, and then you work hard doing that, and then you make something great, and it could lead to more things. So anytime you're able to like go and do what other people won't do, like I think as people we're naturally risk averse. We want to stay comfortable. The more you're able to get outside of your comfort zone, that's when the special stuff happens.

TMac 45:23

Matt Mentella, I can't thank you enough for being a part of the project, dude. You have I'm so proud of of your group and where they've uh and where they've uh uh gone off and the work that they're doing. And that is so funny that you bring up that conversation because if if I would have tried to talk to the 18-year-old Matt and said, You're gonna work at Major League Baseball, you would have laughed at me.

SPEAKER_01 45:53

Yeah, it's true. It's true. It's hard to see it there. But you know, yeah, if if you kind of like if you kind of have like a vision for where you want to go and you lean in that direction, I think, I think you can get there. It doesn't happen easy, but I would say my if there was a fourth thing that I would tell 18-year-old Matt, it would be persistence, like just not giving up and continuing to push in the direction that you want to go. Um I saw like a good I saw a good Seth Rogan interview where they they asked him about like how do actors become successful, and he's like, the only thing in common that my actor friends have is that none of them quit. That's it. You just keep pushing in that direction.

TMac 46:44

Good luck in everything you do. I'm so excited for you that you've um you've made it happen.

SPEAKER_01 46:51

Yeah, I I appreciate it. I appreciate it, T Mac. And um, yeah, it all started at it really all started at Hoover. So it's but it's also been cool to see alumni from that program go off and and do awesome things too. Um it's a special thing that you guys built there.

TMac 47:08

Thank you. See you soon.

SPEAKER_01 47:11

Sounds good. See you later.

TMac 47:19

Thanks again to Major League Baseball producer Matt Mentella. You can check out his fantastic segment on Czech Baseball on the MLB channel on YouTube. The Zoom with Our Feed Podcast is a production of TV Commando Media. The Zoom Pod theme is by November's and they're Funky Groove Cloud 10. Until next time, creators, if you're not building your network or working your network, you're not learning.