Today we’d like to introduce you to Dmitri Yakovlev.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Dmitri. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
It all started when I was 7 yrs. old when I picked up a home camera and started recording home videos of my Mom. The giant VHS camera was professional grade and had a pretty big lens on it; so, I think it made me appreciate videography from an early age. Eventually I was making skate videos with my friends and editing them to show my family and the videos would even get me extra-credit in class (when it was allowed).
When I was 14 I finally got my hands on professional photo and video editing software; which is when I fell in love with manipulating images and being able to tell a different kind of story; eventually wanting to do this as a career.
My skills landed me a job in some big wedding video companies; one of them being Fred Fox. Being the youngest employee there and editing technical animated photo montages, I was happy and successful, but I wanted more. Amongst many creative projects (including an indie feature film) I learned the skills of pre-production/set-production and I produced my first 2 music videos when I was 19 and they both landed on MTV(2008); which was everything I wanted at the time.
From there on out I just wanted to get really good at what this industry has to offer, so I studied: I took college classes on psychology, sociology and creative writing and did hundreds of online courses and tutorials on photoshopping, video editing, VFX/special effects, 2D and 3D animation. While I wasn’t learning, I had fun doing outdoor activities like rock climbing and creating personal projects: videos and photography. While still studying I decided to work in the family business (a large corporation in home-care); which is where I found my joy in playing a team role in helping a corporation headed for “business growth”. I learned many important skills in advertising/marketing, HR and project management. But being this busy with work and family started to stir my heart and eventually started tugging me back to filmmaking/video-production.
Starting a video business happened by accident actually; I wanted to just be a freelance
artist with creative photography and videos. But my connections and recently acquired business skills led me to creating commercials and helping other businesses grow with upgraded media quality and branding. Today, my wife and I work together with our clients on script-writing and production and we have been honored to work with some really awesome companies and large clients and are expanding nationally; we are very excited with this growth.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Waiting out the time until word spread was a struggle as usual but I was also conflicted on what I wanted the company to be. “Imagination to Capture” wasn’t even a video business at first; it was more of an entertainment company that produced awesome whimsical images/videos and offered those same services to clients and their children. I needed an arena to show off my talents and my wife was just getting into the character entertainment world of “princessing” and cosplay. Therefore, it was originally named for “capturing” images and “imaginative” character entertainment (which quickly became “Imagination Princess Parties” [my wife’s company]).
After that, I was left with a finalizing step of on what services we were specializing in. Through some trial, error and “killing off your babies” we went from being commercial photography, to adding graphic design, then branding, then video and also VFX that’s when “princess parties” left and that helped me figure out that there needs to be [one] that we do (not 15); so, in a sense I started over again with website, social media pages redesigns, slight rebranding, spreading awareness and we became simply “video production”. This instantly helped us get noticed and we picked up a few basic productions.
As time went on and our productions grew larger in size, value and technical expertise; I started to promote and add some of those pieces on to our company description; such as strategy/script-writing, animation… This was a humbling experience that helped me slow the heck down, narrow down my market and seize opportunities.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Imagination to Capture story. Tell us more about the business.
Imagination to Capture is a creative partner for all your high-quality video creation needs. We are story-tellers and pros in tailoring a custom and accurate script for your product, brand or event. For you, we endeavor a truly unique look. Mainly our joy comes from helping you actually get something out of the video you spent money on to get you more traffic and more leads; but of course we like to have fun while doing so with really awesome and attractive videos.
Here’s what we do:
Full-Service Advertising and Commercial Video Production | Post Production
Research, Analysis & Development
Storyboarding | Script Writing
Audio/Voice-Over | Sound Design | SFX
Animation | Motion Graphics
VFX | CGI | 3D
We constantly educate ourselves and stay in the loop; it keeps us on our toes to not cookie cut our productions and to shoot and edit every video uniquely based on the content and the end delivery; whether it be for Facebook or a website background video.
Not every project has a budget to expand their basic video into a researched and perfectly tailored video but when the opportunity is there, it shows in the results and that’s what we’ve been seeing and the feedback we’ve been getting from our clients. Which brings us so much joy and makes our jobs more meaningful.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I wouldn’t change anything because every step I have made brought me to where I am today.
Pricing:
- We work with your budget: Our Prices start at $1,000 and range as far as the production value requires based on budgets and creative needs.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://imaginationtocapture.com
- Phone: 2248361977
- Email: hello@imaginationtocapture.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imaginationtocapture/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/imaginationtocapture
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/imagination-to-capture-wauconda
- Other: https://vimeo.com/imaginationtocapture | http://imaginationtocapture.com/video-services
Getting in touch: VoyageChicago is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
