Photographed by Madison Lawlor
[Nick Martini](http://nickmartini/) is making moves in the world of advertisement and entertainment. The founder of [Stept Studios](https://www.steptstudios.com/directors) had an unlikely start in Boulder, Colorado as a professional skier, making short format ski and skateboard movies. The little home videos quickly garnered the attention of athletic brands, such as Under Armour and North Face, who helped to kickstart the brand now known as Stept.
Martini has made a dent in various advertisement landscapes with brands such as Nike, Levi’s, Oakley, Audi, Adidas, and New Balance. The key to his success is authenticity and storytelling through his works. Mixing together commercial and documentary genres, Martini has also brought in influential entertainment figures such as directors Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai, and filmmaker Ruel Smith.
_Flaunt_ had the opportunity to speak with the visual juggernaut who shows no signs of slowing down.
**So you're back in LA and you're just finally in your studios again and settling into this year….**
Yeah. It was obviously a weird year for everybody. I think we were rather fortunate when everything shut down. For the first couple weeks, everyone just froze, and the world was in mayhem and turmoil, and then pretty quickly, we were able to figure out ways to continue to work with most of our clients. We're actually lucky enough to have grown pretty significantly over the past year. So, all things considered, at this stage of the world, we feel super lucky. But we're also really excited to start getting back to some normal work again, so we're bringing everybody back to the office in the next 60 days. We have some people trickling in, even this week. There's usually 50 of us here, or a little more, and right now, there's three of us coming in, which is cool. By the end of the summer, the whole team will be back together, which will be really exciting.
**Now you have established your studio and you have a large cache of clients, let's go back to the very beginning. How did you get into filmmaking?**
Yeah, it's sort of a bizarre origin story, honestly. I never went to film school or anything like that. I went to college in Boulder, Colorado, and at the time, myself, my brother, and one other friend Cam Riley, who are now the three partners at Stept. We're all skiing professionally towards the end of high school, early college, or competing and skiing in ski movies and traveling around the mountains. Along the way, from growing up together, we would always film everything. We just made ski and skateboard movies and always had a camera in our hands. Once we were in college, and a bunch of athletic brands were sort of involved in the snow world, they started supporting some of our filmmaking efforts pretty early.
In early college, Under Armour and The North Face started helping us produce films and helped fund film projects we had. Then over the years, like most action sports people, I got a huge string of injuries, tore ACLs in my left knee, and I couldn't really ski or skateboard, or almost walk for that matter, for a little bit. I ended up spending a lot more of my time behind the camera rather than in front and doing sports, and really fell in love with the filmmaking process.
In early college and throughout school, I was lucky enough to spend a little bit of the year going to school and then the rest of the year traveling and making films with my brother and Cam. By the time we wrapped up school, Stept was sort of a pseudo-established micro side project of ours. More like a small business hobby type deal.
As soon as we finished school, a lot of those same brands would support our film projects, started offering us commercial production opportunities, which was sort of the catalyst for our migration from Boulder down to LA at the end of school. There's also a transition from making action sports, ski, skateboard type stuff to working more, with the same brands, in traditional athletics.
I think one of our first projects down here was a basketball project with Steph Curry, who no one had heard of at the time, eight, nine years ago, when he first signed up Under Armour. That was our foray into working with the bigger athletic brands with celebrity athletes. That was our real start on bigger production, bigger commercials, which then, over the past six or seven years, snowballed from the three of us working in film production to now, like I said, almost like 50 of us in LA, working in not only film production, but we also now work as a creative agency, post production house, and we have a camera rental company. Every year, it's just snowballed into a different world and expanded outside of the athletic space and automotive and fashion and music and documentary, and our hands get in a lot of different little pots. So it's been a cool evolution from just sort of born as hobbyist filmmakers for fun as kids into now a career and a business.
**So where did the name Stept come from?**
Great question. I don't have a good origin story. I just thought it sounded cool back in the day, and it's sort of like the non-phonetic spelling has sort of inspired some of our other side projects and divisions, like now our post production side of our business is called LOCKT editorial. Our camera rental company is called Vault. It also sounds the same.
**When you're first given a job, what is your creative process for creating a story out of that product?**
It's super interesting, because right now we work in two different capacities in commercial production, we have a creative division here. So we work, we dream up concepts from scratch. We also work for a lot of the big ad agencies where they may have a concept sort of developed, and they come to us for execution, and how to elevate it alongside a director and take the seed of an idea that already exists and build off that.
I think, potentially, the more interesting side is when we get hit up with our creative division to start from scratch is our favorite type of work. That's for a lot of our long standing brand partners, like the Nikes and Oakleys of the world, and like Crown Royal, Smirnoff. When those guys come to us, they typically are really starting from scratch, where they have a product launch, like, “Hey, we're launching a new Nike shoe this fall. It's with a bunch of NFL celebrity talent. What would it look like to do a campaign around this?” It usually starts with this some big idea or manifesto of, like, what are we really trying to say here? Who are we trying to talk to? Once that's established, then we get a lot more into the nuts and bolts of who's going to be in it, where we're going to shoot it? What are they going to be doing? That's where the real fun part starts.
Once we have that north star, where we're headed, and then our creative team here gets together all from a bunch of different perspectives, from creative direction, art direction, copyright, a commercial director, or photographer, depending on whether it's photo or video, all start to get in a room and start collaborating, brainstorming. What would be something that's really eye catching, something that maybe the audience hasn't seen before, something we know they're going to be interested in?
Once that idea internally sort of comes to fruition, that's what we're putting together with some sort of presentation to get in front of the brand, and then get feedback and sort of work alongside them to create a vision that everyone's excited about. Then where our real expertise comes in, is going out and executing and bringing that idea to life, both through our production department going out in the field and shooting all over the world, and also the post-production side of our business, which has become an ever growing focus of ours.
Across editorial and visual effects and CGI and sound design and color work—we all do it under one roof here at our studio. Which is actually unique, especially in the commercial production space, we're usually working with several different companies to execute a high end TV commercial, we're actually offering all those services under one roof. So a lot of the partners, like Oakley, are doing their new big television campaign. That work happens from the seed of the idea all the way to final delivery to the TV network, all under one roof here. Which is a new school disruptive approach compared to the very traditional approach, which is hiring an ad agency, hiring a production company, hiring a post production, hiring a finishing color house. We've sort of connected all of that ecosystem in one place, which a lot of the brands we work with are really attracted to.
**So when you're going out to film something, you have all these moving components in the final image, you've got sound, you've got visual effects, you have all these things to think about? What do you think is the most important thing to accurately capture the essence of a brand like to you? What do you think is the secret sauce?**
It's tough because it's like, obviously, that perfect melody of all the above. I think we've found that having a really strong, creative perspective that understands the voice of the brand is super important. That process, at least on set, is really driven by the director or the photographer, whether it's photo or video. So when we get a creative approach signed off on Nike, the next step is then doing a director search and going through a ton of different filmmakers to find that person who has the right portfolio, who has a perspective on the particular project the brand's excited about.
I think that sort of leader throughout production becomes the glue that holds all of those components together—shepherds that vision from the client. Somebody who's an expert at working with cinematographers, and sound designers and colorists and producers, how to even bring a vision to life.
So much of the work we do right now is visual effects driven, that really takes expert people to even understand how to execute something. If you want the music video or the commercial of the guy on the moon, doing a headstand, dancers, and whatever it is—just the fundamentals of how to execute that become extremely intricate. So it's just finding those leaders that have that creative vision that also have a really deep understanding of how all the different departments work.
**What has been the most fulfilling project you worked on this far?**
I would say most recently, we helped relaunch the Ford Bronco last year, which was for the brand itself, one of their biggest launches for the past decade. The Bronco hadn't been rereleased for the past 25 years. Alongside the brand that tasked Disney with sort of managing the launch, and Jimmy Chin as the creative director for the launch, he's like this prolific Oscar-winning outdoorsman filmmaker, who we work closely with.
So there's a cool combination of like a couple of ad agencies and Disney and Ford alongside us as a group of filmmakers helping shoot a series of commercials that helped to relaunch the vehicle, which in the marketing world was like a huge moment last year. So even to be able to participate was a huge win for us and then also executional, it was really the first big commercial production we had heard of that went back to work during COVID. This was very early on in COVID, to execute something like this, I think, you know, six months into the quarantine people started working and like getting back into it. This was like three months in when the world was like a wild west where people weren't leaving their house.
And we had to orchestrate a commercial set with like 100 people on it and we're traveling around the world, and Disney had all these like new COVID testing protocols they had never even experimented with. On-site testing wasn't even a thing at that point, which is now just like the norm. No one really had the infrastructure in place to do that. So a long time, being like a cool creative project and a huge moment for Ford, it was a really interesting production challenge for our whole team to figure out how to even pull off the production in this crazy pandemic that no one is familiar with. Then figure out how to edit the whole thing too when we don't have a post-production facility that's open for like a huge campaign to use. It was as much of a creatively fulfilling project as it was just like a logistical problem solving thing that I think we're pretty proud of.
**So, in the last like, nine years, now you feel a little bit established in your space, was there ever a particular moment of hardship for you? Maybe like when you were first starting out when you were like, “Oh, crap, is this really like the right way that I should be going?”**
I would say COVID was one of those challenges, but I think that's sort of like what anyone would say, so maybe steer away from that was probably for everyone, not us specifically. But aside from that, I think our biggest hurdle, at least early on which we still struggle with, is figuring out a way to maintain creativity and culture amongst rapid growth.
I think, like anybody in a creative role, we want to sit down and come up with ideas and make badass work. But very quickly, as you grow a business, that's how you start. Once there's 20 people, 30 people, for you all, you really need to start focusing more on managing people and logistics, more so than doing anything creative. That, like any artist or creative, is a struggle, as well as like, when you want your fingerprint creatively on the work that's coming out of the studio, it's been a huge challenge for us to find people to come into the organization to really align with us and share the same vision to maintain the integrity of the creative endeavors we're tackling. So for like the confluence of personal management, as well as human resources, like finding like-minded creatives to collaborate with and bring into the sort of the home team. That's been like, the biggest hurdle of balancing creativity with business for lack of a better descriptor.
We grew super quick. We went from three of us to fifty of us in like five or six years. So every year, we're doubling our team and the amount of projects we're doing. So that's been the biggest thing for us, focusing super hard through growth and maintaining the creative vision, which is still a challenge we're facing today, because we're continuing to grow. The daily thing is, how do we get the best creative minds in here that also line up with our vision really well.
**I wanted to bring a little bit more attention back to Vault Rentals and LOCKT.**
For us, like I said, there's so many intermediaries in the creative and production world that we realized, as we grew, we're losing a lot of creative control. Post-production is a great example, where we go out and shoot a commercial for a week. We're really proud of it, and it'll get shipped off to a post-production company in Chicago with an ad agency, and we weren't able to participate really, in sort of pulling that all together and creating what our original vision was. Then you'd see it spit out the other end of that machine as something very different than what we planned on. So that goes for the whole process of production to be more logistical in terms like what equipment we have access to, what we can afford, how quickly we can get things.
So that was another piece of the process. We really wanted to slowly take ownership over, figure out a way that we could have oversight of the whole ecosystem of our jobs. So like as we continue to grow, that's still a priority of ours identify those spaces that we feel like have an impact on the end product is seeing how we can potentially grow the business to participate in those or have meaningful partnerships and LOCKT on the editorial side of things, and Vault on like the equipment studios and logistics side of things, were two moves and we're really excited about the we think we're strategic to like have our oversight over the entire process and make sure whatever comes out on the other end is something we're all really proud of.
**So this is more of a question for you and your creative process. Have you been consuming anything recently? Whether it's books, music, or other media?**
Yeah, this is probably gonna sound really shallow but honestly, I think I'm getting more obsessed with Instagram. I have refocused my use of the app from trying to get away from using it as social media recreationally, which I think is just like killing everyone's souls, and using it as a way to see creative work and other creative inspiration.
I've really channeled the use of this thing to only following creatives, directors, and editors who really inspire me and using them more, instead of Vimeo or YouTube or like different art blogs. It's really my source for creative inspiration where I get to see all these amazing artists from around the world, whether they're photographers or painters or filmmakers, all in this feed. I've been super mindful of transitioning my use of social media, having a really good frame of inspiration, which I'm stoked on.
When I open my phone, people are making cool shit. It half inspires and half makes you feel like you got to work harder. That's like my main source of creativity, which I think when it's done the right way, transitions away from being obsessed with your phone getting sucked into a dark hole into being something that's like, actually fairly productive and inspiring.
**How do you think creative spaces have changed in the last year?**
I think it's isolated a lot of creatives some ways in a very productive way, where it's given a lot of people the space to focus on writing their first feature film, or creating that big project, they never had the time to tackle, or they’ve just had so many distractions, they couldn't.
So I've noticed an elevated sense of focus through isolation, but also, unfortunately, a lack of collaboration. And thank God for Zoom and everything that's given us some connectivity again, but I can tell you that I'm at least personally really excited to get groups back together in person and sit down with an editor or with a creative director and workshop ideas, like draw something on paper, which I missed so badly. I think, in some ways, it's giving people the time and focus to elevate their ideas, but in other ways, the isolation can be a burden. I think when we left, everyone needed to fight and adapt, and it just happened, I think what's going to be interesting now is, when everyone comes back together, I think we're probably going to see almost more change, I would imagine in the next few months, about how people work creatively. Even internally here, I think there's a lot of different perspectives on what the right way moving forward to work is. This summer, there's gonna be a lot of changes at companies, we're all working remotely in a really harmonious way. It's going to be a divide of people who think differently, who want to work differently. That's probably going to cause some turmoil, but hopefully invent some other cool ways to work. I think we invented a lot of cool shit over COVID, like how to get creative stuff done, and I think we're probably going to see that happen again, when the groups divide.
**What are the next steps for you and Stept Studios? Do you have any upcoming projects that you're really excited about?**
I would say our current big initiative is moving more into entertainment alongside our advertising efforts. So we're really prioritizing some film and TV projects and a lot more longer form work. Also looking at and bringing our brand partners into the entertainment world alongside of us, which so many of them want to do. When you look at “What does a Nike Netflix show look like?”
I think that we're going to see a lot of that in the next five years, and we're hoping to be on the forefront of that, and a handful of exciting projects that, in the next year, we are going to be able to talk about. For us, the push into the entertainment world, and not leaving the ad world either. Which not many creative agencies and studios and ad studios are doing right now. That's exciting for us, trying to see if we can play on the other side of town.
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