Hello, my name is Dan.
I help brands tell their stories, a few seconds at a time.
MY STORY
My mother will tell you, unprompted and not proudly: from day one I've been an attention seeker. It might have something to do with being a middle child in a family of 8, but from getting kicked out of the elementary school student council for overcommitting to a bit, to spending way too much of my 20s trying to weasel my way in front of the camera in Hollywood, I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I've always gotten a thrill out of finding a way to hold the attention of a room.
Then, I stumbled upon creative marketing- a whole world running on an economy of attention, where the most precious commodity is seconds in the lens of someone's consciousness, and the greatest challenge is holding that attention even after those few seconds expire. And I thought that sounded like a lot of fun.
my philosophy
What is a Missile Man? The term comes from the early days of space exploration, when the greatest nation on earth spent countless resources strapping men to the top of rockets with more rudimentary technology than is contained in a modern graphing calculator, and launched them out of the atmosphere to, I guess, prove we are better than Russia or something?
In those days, the highest honor that could be bestowed on someone working at mission control was to be dubbed a "steely-eyed missile man", which is to say, someone who, when all the alarms are going off and the mission is at risk of complete failure, doesn't reach right for the abort button, but works the problem, under the highest pressure, and finds a solution that allows for the success of the mission. In the world of video production, something will always go wrong. And we've all been on the sets where panic sets in and people start losing their shit; it's not pretty. And I don't think it's necessary. If those chain-smoking NASA nerds could keep their cool while their 250 foot rocket with a couple of their pals on board may or may not explode in the next five seconds, I think we can too.
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I believe that fun work comes from people having fun working.
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I believe that the creative output of a team is far more interesting than my initial idea.
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I believe that the best creators embrace friction.
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I believe people should take pride in everything they do.