Travel Couple Filming Adventure -- Introduceyourself

Howdy out there Steemit world!

We’re Jacob & Brandi, a husband and wife duo working together full-time to create travel, wedding, and real estate videos. Having been best friends all throughout college, we married about 3.5 years ago and life has been darn good. We landed here by way of @chrissymchavez, my dear friend and lovely ex-co-worker in the hospitality industry (she’s got an awesome eye btw, shooting mostly B+W photos — definitely check her out!). Thanks for getting us involved Chrissy!

@chrissymchavez on the left, me (Brandi) on the right at Freetail Brewery. Miss that girl! She's left us to be with her girlfriend in Hawaii, so you can't really blame her :)

We moved to San Antonio, Texas from Austin earlier this year and we LOVE it. We adore Austin, but it’s gotten a bit crammed for our taste as of recent years, and we can actually afford to live downtown in SA (a huge plus for a walkable lifestyle!).

Jacob’s passion for making videos started way back in grade school, and he’s been making them ever since. He studied film in school, and after college started his own wedding videography business, living off ramen and Schlitz. His craft has come quite a long way since then (www.somethingcleverfilm.com), and I’m grateful to have been able to leave the hospitality industry to support him in this dream!

Jacob filming at REBarCamp, a real estate conference in Nashville, TN

We’re obsessed with travel, cultures, kindness, coffee, music, and movies (and while we’re at it, HOORAY for the Oxford comma!). These things make the world go ‘round.

Travel: While Jacob is our videographer, I do most of the travel planning (I always did want to be a travel agent!). Our most recent “big” trip was to Croatia where we did about a week or so road-tripping and another week sailing the islands of the Dalmatian coast. We left a huge piece of our hearts there and intend on moving there some day to retrieve it! We’ll be posting about this journey shortly, so stay tuned!

Jacob & me at Plitvice National Park in Croatia

Drone shot of us with friends sailing the islands of Croatia

Jacob floating in the Adriatic

Gotta give a huge shout out to all of our nomadic friends who’ve contributed their travel footage for us to edit! Often travelers film their trips and it ends up on a memory card lost at the bottom of a junk drawer; we frequently provide our jet-setting friends with a GoPro to encourage filming (and because, of course we want to see their journey too!), and in turn we get to produce a condensed, watchable video for them to enjoy for a lifetime. If any of you steemers (?) out there would like us to do the same for your footage, please let us know! We’ll post some of the most recent ones soon, but feel free to check out http://www.nomadic-gear.com for now.

Fellow nomads Ramon, Annemarie, & Talia with us in the Azores, Portugal

Cultures: The point of travel for us is not simply to see the Eiffel Tower or the Tower of Pisa. Don’t get me wrong, seeing the sights is great, but for us, traveling is really about befriending the locals and experiencing their way of life, eating their food, shopping their markets, and understanding and appreciating their history and culture.

Marching with Catalan friends in Barcelona on La Diada 2012

Marching with Catalan friends in Barcelona on La Diada 2012

Kindness: Why not? One of the first things I noticed when I started checking out Steemit was all the kind words and positivity that abounds in this community. How refreshing! Other platforms are like cesspools for trolls hiding behind their keyboards, but here even just the words you see on the screen make you feel like there’s a real, decent person behind them. The hospitality industry showed me just how horrible people can be to one another, people who don’t even know each other, over nothing. Why not uplift each other instead?

Coffee: We require multiple cups of coffee/espresso/cold brew each day. Thus, we cherish a solid, cozy coffee shop and the people behind them. Jacob is very much a cold brew kind of guy, while I typically prefer a cortado. This habit can get pretty expensive, so we’ve adapted a simple method to make cold brew at home, more on that to come in a future post!

Working at Commonwealth Coffeehouse in San Antonio, TX, one of our favorite local spots

Jacob in the backyard at Commonwealth Coffeehouse, San Antonio, TX

Looking up outside at Commonwealth Coffeehouse, San Antonio, TX

Music: Is my life. While silence can be nice, my ears definitely prefer tunes. I grew up on older country music up into the late 90s, and truly detested the direction it took from there. A current playlist would be made up of Pond, The Shins, Kurt Vile, MGMT (ahh how great is their new stuff?!), Real Estate, The National, Alt-J, Car Seat Headrest, DIIV, Grimes, etc. And while those are some of my faves, that’s certainly not where it ends. Jacob’s taste lies more in the hip-hop genre with some Neil Young and classic rock sprinkled in. No doubt you’ll be seeing future concert/album posts from us here!

Movies: Jacob being the videographer of course has a tremendous affection for movies. He loves a good spaghetti western and follows film-makers Danny Boyle and the Coen Bros. He also deeply admires the cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki, the man behind the lens in The Revenant and Y Tu Mamá También, and thinks he should be more widely lauded for his work.

In 2014 Jacob and his brother shot their first feature film, Why Lie? Beer, Woman, Chicken Wings, which they wrote, directed, filmed, edited, and funded themselves (see that here - IMDB link). They had the pleasure of working with Roger Guenveur Smith on the project, who’s been a part of many Spike Lee Joints. The film went on to be nominated for Best Director and Best Actress in the Austin Revolution Film Festival. They continue to share ideas and create short comedy sketches together (see those here https://www.youtube.com/circusokay).

Movie poster for "Why Lie?"

Jacob has pulled me into his loves for westerns as well, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford being my favorite. But my taste is really all over the place, with a love for foreign films, the horror/thriller genre, and anything that makes me cry. La Vita è Bella, House of 1000 Corpses, and Still Alice — all great. Then there’s Inglorious Basterds and Hot Rod that get me as well. So, ya know, a little bit of everything.

Honorable mention — Non-fiction: I prefer to save the fiction for my movies, and the non-fiction for my books. Most recently read “Walkable City” by the brilliant Jeff Speck and highly recommend it, especially to city planners, council members, etc. or those looking to sway those who could enhance their downtowns in making them more walkable, and in turn, livable. We’re huge on walking and walk everywhere we can. Our nation is built around the car, but it should be built around the people! We’ve spent way too much on wasted infrastructure that could have been dedicated to pedestrians and built a thriving community around it. Omg I’m ranting. <Steps off soapbox>

Aaaanyway, we’re thrilled to join the Steemit community and can’t wait to check out everyone else’s awesome content! Hit us up if you’d like to connect!

(Side note: while this post is mostly comprised of photos, our future content will primarily be video.)

We’re pumped about getting our stuff up on Steemit, but in the mean time you can check us out here:
Our travel page/blog: http://www.nomadic-gear.com - We’re hoping to one day start selling used travel gear, but for now it’s the home to our travel videos/blog
YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/nomadicgear - Excited about getting stuff up on Dtube!
Instagram (travel): http://www.instagram.com/nomadicgear
Instagram (weddings): http://www.instagram.com/somethingcleverweddings