Our First Blog

WELCOME

Hello, and welcome to our first blog post! Our goal in creating this is to keep everyone up-to-date on happenings with us, the film industry as a whole, and to provide a little entertainment for you. This first blog is about our backgrounds and how Corner Media came to be.

EARLY DAYS

Noah and I met during high school in Nashville back in 2011 when he was a sophomore, and I was a freshman. Fast forward two years, and Noah rejoined the football team. We were both offensive linemen, so we were around each other a lot. Unfortunately, injuries forced Noah to step away. He became one of the lead guys to film practice and games that would lead him to Western Kentucky University where he studied TV/Film Production. 

I was now a senior in high school and in the middle of my college search. Like most kids, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and where I wanted to do it, was not easy. Music had always been my passion, and I played bass in bands for the majority of high school. There was a time when I didn’t even want to go to college because I wanted to keep the band together to keep playing. Luckily, my parents knew what was best for me, and they helped me change my mind. I thought about doing audio engineering for school, but music is so personal to me that my worst fear was being stuck working on SOMEONE ELSE’S music for hours a day that I didn’t feel a single thing for. That would be a nightmare. I thought that video production was a good alternative, I did always enjoy using my parents’ camera to make horrible YouTube videos back in the day. Anyway, I found that Western Kentucky was a good school for what I wanted to do, and it was “relatively” affordable. I made my decision.

COLLEGE

In college, Noah and I had a lot of the same classes. We worked on a lot of projects together. This is where our collaboration and creativity first started. We would always work together on projects for classes we both had. Noah and I met our good buddy, Drew, in those classes, and the three of us would group up together as often as we could. Before Corner Media was even a sparkle in our eyes, the three of us would often joke about one day working on sets together. Sure enough, we hired Drew to help on a set back in October. I didn't even realize what had happened until after the filming was done. Not only were we working together, but it was OUR company. We laughed about it after the shoot.

Looking back, and I think many others would agree, college wasn’t something that was absolutely necessary for the field we wanted to get into. Film production is something you learn to do from hands-on applications. Sure, reading is absolutely necessary to keep learning, but you’re never going to get better at it until you get your hands on the tools and apply what you've learned. It took both of us until after college to figure this out. Obviously, I don’t regret going to college because it laid all the groundwork for what eventually became Corner Media, and we met some amazing people that were just as passionate about film work as we were. At the end of the day I'm extremely glad I went because it reinforced what we wanted to do for a career, and that was a great thing.

AFTER GRADUATION

Noah graduated a semester before me, and had success from internships and recommendations to land some Production Assistant (PA) jobs. Whenever they needed extra hands, Noah would recommend me to come help. We quickly learned that, in this field, the thing employers care most about is if you can DO THE JOB; not about having a diploma. Also, it would most likely be a few years before we could have any creative influence on the projects we worked on due to the experience required for those positions. We wanted to do this stuff now.

"LET'S DO THIS OURSELVES"

One day on a set Noah and I were working, one of our co-workers said he was trying to sell one of his old drones. Almost immediately, we had the same idea. “Let’s do this ourselves.” Never in my life up to this point did I think I would ever start my side hustle. I just didn’t think it was possible. At this moment on this set, it seemed like the best idea in the world. Instead of work consisting mainly of getting refreshments for the crew and doing nothing remotely close to “film production,” we could be our own bosses and do everything ourselves. That same day, we came up with the name Corner Media. It was a combination of both our last names; Cordell and Brunner.

At the time, all we had was this one drone and a couple GoPro cameras, and we thought it would be a great opportunity for us to get more hands-on experiences. At the beginning of 2020, our calendars looked like it would become a promising part-time job...cue the pandemic.

Covid time for us was a time when we buckled down and decided we could eventually make this a full time thing. We bought a lot of gear and worked on our craft. As 2020 was winding down, we were already set on doing this being full time. We found that we wanted to do work with more substance than a real estate video, so we adjusted the business plan and did a lot more learning and began to execute on what we had been tirelessly trying to master during the lockdown.

TODAY

Today, this has become our full-time job. We've worked with many great local businesses in Nashville, and we’ve been lucky to not have a bad client. I have legitimately liked every client we’ve met. The quest for learning never stops, and the industry is constantly changing. We still have a lot to learn, but it’s comforting to know that we're making progress every week in innovating our company and work. 

We hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about us and our company, and we hope to see you in the next one. Stay safe out there!

Till next time,

Corner Media