 Welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rebedium. We are continuing our ongoing series of interviewing other YouTube creators, other filmmakers, other photographers. I'm very happy to have Sean Tucker here today live from London to talk to me a little bit about, you know, his photography, his filmmaking, his channel and, you know, all things Sean Tucker. Thanks for, thanks for making the time, Sean. You're very welcome. So I wanted to start with asking what first motivated you to pick up a camera? What was the, you know, what was the spark that made you not necessarily want to be a professional photographer, but, you know, wanted to capture an image? Well, I was probably about seven or eight years old, actually. My dad had left home and my mom had remarried and I was sort of part of this family that I didn't feel much a part of. So, you know, there's a new child on the way. I was going to get a sibling, but they felt like a unit and my brother and I sort of felt on the side of things were on the out. So we went down to the seaside one day. I remember it was just a little holiday here in the UK and we were, we were by the beach and I had a little point and shoot camera, like one of them with the little zip zip wind on and I kind of snuck up on this seagull and I managed to get quite close. Even though I had a wide angle, I managed to get quite close and snap the shot. And when we took it to get developed and, you know, there are a bunch of other photos in there, but that one photograph, my mom looked over my shoulder. She went, that's, that's a great photograph. Maybe you should be a photographer and it's one of those weird things where it wasn't a conscious choice at that point and I wouldn't be a photographer for years and years after that, but it sunk in somewhere and I think getting that little bit of affirmation when I was really, really small was, was quite a big deal. Yeah. I mean, and then I went on and did other things. You know, I had whole other careers before I came back around to photography and I was working for, I was working for the church back in South Africa. I used to be a pastor and the church didn't pay very well, so to make ends meet and to pay the bills on the side, I decided to start filming and I did video work. So I ran like little youth camps and on these camps, which was like development camps for teenagers, this was like back when survival was big. So early 2000s and I had a little, a little handy can with a flip out screen, you know, the DV tapes and everything and I would not only just run these camps, but also because we need to make a bit of money to keep the camps going, I'd shoot the, the camp and we did it in like a survivor style. So we split them in tribes and they had to build their own shelters and do challenges in the day and everything and at the end I'd, I'd cut together like a one hour survivor episode of their camp with them, with, you know, you did it in like iMovie or something or you did it in the, in the camera with like back and forth kind of recording. No, it was, it was a iMovie. It was something like iMovie. I don't think it was at that time because I was on PC. So it would have been some, some cheap version. I remember, I can't remember, you know, it might have been pinnacle back in the day, one of the early pinnacle studios and, and I cut this thing together and they could buy these little DVDs, which was like a survivor episode and that was, you know, I hadn't been doing photography at all, but I sort of came back to video and started to film and edit for things and that's kind of where I, that was the entry point back in, was on the side of another career to do something to make a bit of extra money. You know, you have a channel on YouTube that I'll link to of course in the description if people haven't heard of it. I'm sure they have. It's, you know, kind of really breaking out and becoming super popular and it's, it has a, your channel has a much different tone to, I would say the vast majority of not just photography YouTube channels, but YouTube channels in general where you, you know, you, you speak very much from the heart. You're very sincere. You're very genuine. You don't do a lot of videos. You do, you know, one every couple of weeks maybe kind of what was the, the process of arriving at that voice? Is it something that came very naturally? Is it something you decided you'd do no matter how it was received? Because, you know, as someone who's on YouTube it is hard enough just to put your face out there without putting your, you know, your heart and your, you know, heart and your sleeve out there. It comes a lot out of what I did before. So for the whole way through my 20s, I, like I said, I was a pastor in churches and a lot of the reason that I got involved there was because I got a real kick out of speaking to especially young people. So I was sort of in charge of 35 year olds and under and speaking to them and getting them to sort of push themselves and better their lives somehow. So that was, there's always been that part in me and I did a lot of training to get as good as I could at that, to be a decent storyteller and to communicate well. And then I was eventually fired from the church for being a heretic. So, you know, as you do, there was just stuff I was saying that they, they weren't happy with. It was definitely time to move on anyway. And I was really sad at that point that I'd lost my context to do this thing, which I kind of fallen in love with doing and it took a long time to come back around. But then I sort of sunk myself into full time photography and filmmaking and did some full-time jobs for companies for a few years and tried to do a bit of freelancing. And this thing was always in the back of my mind, like I wonder if I could bring that skill set out again and do it in a different form because I really do find it super fulfilling. And it was about, I think it was January 2015 that I was, at the time I was working for a company, my full-time day job was shooting large products for an e-commerce company in London here. And that meant that I was running the studio shooting like sofas and dining sets and like big products on set and having to get through a lot in a day. And because I've been doing that for four years, I kind of knew how to do it now. You know, I had a system that worked well and that I could push through a lot of stuff in a day and I thought, maybe the start of a YouTube channel because I felt like I should try something there. I wasn't really sure what, but maybe it could be teaching that stuff. So I did three videos in January 2015 and I put that out there and it did all right. It got passed around a lot because I kind of watched it back and felt very cold. It just felt like a tutorial that there's a lot of tutorials. It wasn't anything different really to what was being done, even though it filled a specific niche with product photography. So I left it. Like I abandoned the whole channel idea and then in May 2016 I was taking a break from the job and taking a week off and going to Wales to Snowdonia to shoot, just to shoot landscapes for myself, just for fun, just to do something totally different because I felt like this kind of heavy product load and very technical studio photography. I was falling out of love with photography. It was becoming a job and I needed to do something about that. And yeah, I mean, that's a really fascinating thing of, you know, like you get into something because you like it or I feel a calling for it, but then at the same time it becomes the thing that you do every day and it's no longer a calling. It's now, it's a, you know, it's an occupation and you know, how do you how do you stay motivated with what you do? Yeah, and it was, I chose landscapes specifically because I'm not very good at them. So it's not my thing. Like I don't know, I kind of know technically how to do it from watching other photographers do it, but I have no experience in it. So I'm no good at it. And I felt like it would be a good challenge because I was thinking at the time, like how, how, how in love you are with photography at the start when you don't really understand stuff and you're discovering things. And I thought I needed to do something to jumpstart it. So jump into an area of photography that I didn't understand and would need to jumpstart myself again and have all those discoveries. And then almost as a last minute thing, I decided I'd film it and just shoot a vlog. And, and I was there for four days, five days. And the first, I mean, the first day I just totally chickened out. I didn't film anything. I mean, I, I, like everyone, I just hate filming myself. I thought I can't bring myself to do this. So I didn't film anything on the first day. I ended up filming B-roll the whole of the second day because I still couldn't get the guts to sit in front of a camera. And then I filmed one little tutorial thing on a hillside another day. And then it came to the very last day and I got some B-roll and this one little tutorial. I thought, okay, let me just film stuff. And if I don't use it, I don't use it. And I sat, I went to three areas that were really, really close to this little hut I was staying next to the river. And I shot three segments talking about, you know, the fact that I needed to do this to jumpstart photography. Exactly the stuff I've just been saying, you know, fall back in love with photography and try different things that you're not good at. And then even driving home, I thought I haven't really got a video here. I'm not really going to bother. And then I kind of taught myself into pulling it all up on a computer and throwing it in a timeline. And I realized, actually, I might have something. It's too long. It's 17 minutes. It's, it's a bit waffly and self-indulgent and slow-paced. And I thought, I don't really care because I like it for what it is. And it is what I feel. Like it's as vulnerable as I can be on camera. And it is what I think. So I put it online. And that video did really, really well and got passed around a lot. And the important thing for me at that point was I cared about it like it felt closer to what I used to do in talking to people and trying to inspire them to do things that push themselves and better themselves and the rest of it. So that was like the genesis of the channel. And then I just made a deal. I kind of said that I would do one a month. And I knew, you know, if I was going to take YouTube seriously, that's not what you do. You have to put a lot out. You have to put at least one or two a week so that you can build an audience and put as many hooks out there as possible in your videos to draw in as many subscribers as possible. I just thought like, I think I would end up. I don't, I don't have an interesting thing to say every week. Definitely not more than once a week. So if I did that, I would end up taking a little bit of content and stretching it over a bunch of videos and it would start to feel very thin. I want to talk a little bit about the future of your channel. You know, what are your ambitions as far as your work? You know, both photography and film, would you like to do larger pieces? If so, you know, what, what, you know, what kind of themes would they be? Where would they be distributed? Where would the, because, you know, you've really started to build quite a sizable community around your brand, which is, you know, a really noxious sort of consumer speak. But, you know, build a community around the work that you do. Now, where would you like to take that? I mean, long term goal for me is to move into narrative more and more. So, and that's for stills and for video really. So I've got a few projects in mind. And this is for personal work. And obviously it would go into the channel in that I would talk about this work and I'd share the lessons I'm learning along the way. But I would love to do more storytelling visually. So, I mean, I have in my head and I still don't know how I'm going to make it happen. But some kind of team that could get together because I realized this is work I couldn't really pull off on my own. But a team that could go away and that we could shoot stills. We could shoot portraits. We could shoot environmental shots of a place. We could film interviews of a place and we could sort of produce a documentary that could also run with a photo story and tell important stories. And and again, like, I mean, I've got I've got ideas for my own personal work in terms of stories I'd like to tell. And I'm still trying to work out the logistics about how to do that. But definitely being part of something bigger that goes out and tell stories that need telling and it really I haven't even got such a narrow idea of what that should be. But yeah, it's definitely it's definitely narrative. That's what I want to move towards because so much of the work before has been very unnarrative and I do love storytelling. So it's been, you know, product photography or or portraits. But a lot of the portraits that I've done previously have been very kind of, you know, models and actors and that kind of stuff. And I'm less and less interested in that and more interested in in finding interesting people to photograph who have a story and their portrait even gives some of that across. Last couple of questions. If you could and I'm sure you will go anywhere where would you? Where would you love really love to photograph and film? Oh, gosh. I've got a list. I really want to do Mongolia. I'd love to head out there. I've got some kind of I've got a fascination with Scandinavia. So I'd love to get up into sort of the northern reaches of Sweden and Norway and places like that to go and check things out there as well. Just I mean landscapes and people sort of become really interesting in that part of the world. Gosh, where else? I've got a thing for Chile. Chile's been on my list for ages as well. Just for landscapes there. It looks absolutely stunning. So so that would be amazing as well. Yeah. But I mean, funny enough that the big project that I've kind of got in mind that I want to work on is in the UK. It's right here. It's just that this is where the story that I want to tell it. So again, like there's there's places I'd love to see to see places that I might not have the story worked out there yet. And then there's stories I need to be shooting at home and hopefully, you know, they all flesh out into something in the long run. Thank you so much for making the time. Please take out Sean's channel if you haven't already. He makes really wonderful videos. Takes really wonderful photographs. I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down and talk with us today. And hopefully we can do it again. Sometime in the future when you're you've found that story. You've created that that that film and you're getting it out into the world. Thanks, mate. Yeah, this has been great. Cheers.