Today we’d like to introduce you to Patrick Maciel.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up in a tiny town in upstate New York called Potsdam. Trying to find things to do was always a bit of a challenge, we would skateboard a lot and try to make little skate videos, which was my first introduction to cameras and editing software. We would use my buddy’s GoPro and Windows Movie Maker and the videos were just awful, but it was some of the most fun we had growing up. Eventually my friend convinced me to take a photography class with him and we would just shoot the most random things to get the assignments over with until one time we emailed our local college and convinced them to give these two 16 year olds media passes for a Waka Flocka concert and submitted those photos for our class and we both ended up winning awards through Scholastic for our shots. From that point on, I was obsessed with photography. For my senior year of high school one of our graduation requirements was to do a job shadow so my mom introduced me to a professor she worked with named Zac Miller who had a 10+ year career in filmmaking. I went on a couple of shoots with him and watched his process and fell in love with making videos again. I went to college for communication, media, and design and started doing some work with my school’s television station and ESPN. That eventually transformed into doing some video production content for my school’s hockey teams. I would borrow a camera from my school every time I needed to shoot something until eventually I saved up enough money to buy my own camera. That’s when my friend introduced me to one of the players’ brothers, Ryan Winn, because he was doing some video work down in Nashville. He asked me to move down with him to do it full time, so I moved down here and we just started making stuff.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
One of the biggest struggles I had in the beginning, and still deal with today, is just believing in myself. It’s hard to go to someone and ask for a lot of money for a piece of work you created. There’s always that voice in the back of my head saying, “There’s no way anyone would want to pay for your work.” You just have to ignore it and know you’re worth it.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My main focus over the last year has been in video production, anything from directing to editing. I’ve still kept up with photography, doing shoots when I’m asked or just for fun. When I first moved down to Nashville, Ryan and I’s main focus was building Winning Productions USA to become a business that we were both proud of. We had mainly just been taking gigs creating social media content because the demand was high and we had a background with the work, but I wouldn’t say it was our biggest strength. I continued to shoot concerts because it’s something I really enjoy doing, but I started doing a bit of documentation work with some businesses, and I really enjoyed that. I would follow around someone in the company and just document the building of the business. That gave me a lot of experience with storytelling, and I think that’s where I stand out.
So maybe we end on discussing what matters most to you and why?
Just create. Work fast. There’s a quote I like, and I can’t find where I heard it, but I have it written in my notes as a reminder to just create: “When you create at a sickeningly high output, only then can you afford to make the kind of mistakes that lead to epiphanies.”
Contact Info:
- Website: https://patrickmaciel.studio/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickhmaciel/
