Hi and hello!
My name is Peter and I'm a 34 year old filmmaker from pretty city Amsterdam. I'm a boyfriend and a father of a one year old boy. I love them...I love a lot of things in life.. I'm what they say a positive guy, trying to live life to the fullest. So I can sometimes even love my failures, even though they also hurt. I know what your thinking, but yeah, like I said, a positive guy ;-)
Above all I love to create, and that is what I've been doing all my life. It's an addiction which can't be controlled, I MUST create something or else I get unhappy. Yeah even positive guys sometimes do get sad.
So in my life I've been doing just that. Creating music, writing and most of all creating film. One of my big hassles in creating is that I never really fitted in the corporate culture of a big company. Some people are good at it, but it just wasn't for me. It went to slow, I was to stubborn, or I became bored. The problem here being: You need other people if you want to do great work, so I had to find another way...
A few years ago I founded my own film company and with hard work it became a reasonable succes. At first I loved the fact that I was living my dream. I was filming for big brands, with professional crews and I was making a good living. But after a short time in this bubble, I started to feel an itch. A little voice in my head, repeating over and over again... Is this what you want to do with your life? It this really it? Was this what you dreamt of when you were a little boy? Will your son be proud when he grows up?
And then it happened, I got bored and unhappy.. I knew right away that was the end of dreamland. I had to change something and it had to be genuine. The reason I wanted to be a filmmaker at first was that I wanted to make content that would inspire, teach or touch people (or at least entertain them), and now I was here selling washing powder. I felt I was wasting my talent and not contributing to this world. So I decided there and then that that had to change and that I was gonna follow that dream.
At about the same time I had my first virtual reality film experience and I was blown away. This was just the thing I needed to make a clean break, start over and create the company I always wanted. Virtual Reality is all about experiences and this was my change to give the world some amazing ones.
That may of 2015 I asked my friend to join me in the company and to work on this VR thing with me. Not even a month later we we're in Uganda filming mountain gorilla's. To be clear we we're filming for free, doing the project just because we wanted too and it felt liberating!
On that trip a magic moment happened when a young mountain gorilla grabbed the camera and started filming himself. We instantly knew we had filmed something very special, as there are only 800 mountain gorilla's left in this world, this was the first 360 recording of one, and it was making a selfie :-)
It inspired us to name the new company VR Gorilla. Now one year later we have done quite a few projects. We went to Iraq to make a VR documentary of Syrian refugees, we filmed on a Formula one car, we filmed a Siberian tiger etc, we traveled to Mexico, It was amazing, but most important of all, we stayed true to our ideals, are we giving back?, do people actually care to see what we are making?
A big part of our strategy is finding our own audience so we can make the things we really want. This means a lot of our projects we do because we want to make them, we put them on Facebook and Youtube for free, even though its costing us quite a bit of money to make.
But for us getting our films out there is more important than worrying about that money, However it is not a sustainable business model. This is why I love the idea of steemit, which empowers the makers. If this idea gets bigger, we as creatives would be a whole less dependent of the advertising industry and a lot more truly great content would be made. I love the fact that it is already up and running and it s(t)eems to work. Good work guys, this could just be the platform to make our(and many others makers) dreams come true! I'll leave you guys with a 360/VR tour of Amsterdam and a minute in a cage with a full-grown Siberian Tiger. Enjoy! And see you next time :-).
