Left: me trying to look professional while covered in dust; right: my trusty Bonneville T120, Bonnie, who is technically our chief operating officer.
If you’ve been following my journey, you know I have a bit of a habit of pointing Bonnie’s front wheel toward lines on a map, getting stuck in ridiculous weather, and chasing down local stories.
Well, I’ve decided to turn this passion into something official. I already have my own company for my freelancing work, but within that business, I’ve just launched a brand-new venture. Let’s call it a video production house, or a content house cause in 2023 video is no longer all for the horizontal screens.
The goal isn’t just to travel for the sake of racking up miles, and it’s definitely not about chasing “exotic” or “special” destinations just because they look wild on a map. The ultimate goal is to find deep, raw human stories and bring them to life.
You don’t need to cross the entire planet to find something incredible to share. If you want an idea of the vibe I’m aiming for, it’s a unique mix of a few things that heavily inspire me:
- Wildlens by Abrar & Itchy Boots: For that rugged, solo motorcycle overlanding grit.
- Reizen Waes: A massive Belgian travel show where Tom Waes takes an adventurous, deeply curious approach to unusual or isolated places.
- Bald and Bankrupt: The absolute master of wandering into completely ordinary, overlooked places and uncovering brilliant human interactions.
That is exactly what I want to do. I want to show the genuine hospitality of people in a tiny, forgotten village in Belarus, but I also want to find and share the fascinating, hidden stories right in Schelle for example, a municipality near Antwerp where I live. Stories are everywhere; you just have to go looking for them.
But looking forward at this massive plan, I realized this isn’t just a sudden whim. This is actually the culmination of a dream I’ve been building toward my entire life.
Why This Is My Dream (And How I Got Here)
Making videos is something I have absolutely loved doing for as long as I can remember. It all started when I was 13 years old and got my hands on a home video camera. My younger sister and I would spend hours making these little movies at home. I still vividly remember making one movie all about going to the park, and another where we shot a complete parody of Idool (the talent hunt show here in Belgium and the Netherlands). It was incredibly fun, and even back then, I was totally obsessed with experimenting with different camera angles, trying out framing, and adding background music to nail the mood.
As I got older, that obsession shifted into photography. When I was 21, I bought what was a nice camera at the time: a Nikon D5100. I used it to dive into party photography, and even tho I got frustrated often with how it performed in low light situations with my shitty lenses I bought with money from my student job, I absolutely loved it. A friend of mine (who is also called Jelle) and I teamed up under the name “Those Two.” Within the Mechelen region in Flanders, we actually became the absolute go-to photographers for student parties and nightlife events.
That evolved into another project. Together with a friend, I created a music website called backstagetour.co. We scored press accreditations and started interviewing bands and artists. We actually shot some great video sessions with EDM artists like Feint and Fox Stevenson that are still up on YouTube today. We also landed an interview with The Noisettes, who became pretty huge and recently went viral on TikTok. We even almost interviewed Simple Minds, but the lead singer caught a cold at the last second and didn’t want to take any chances, so it was canceled at the absolute final minute.
Naturally, we hit the festival circuit to take photos and videos, which brought its own share of hard lessons. At the Linkerwoofer festival, Daan took the stage and was clearly having an incredibly pissed-off day. In the middle of the set, he completely trashed and smashed his guitar right on stage. I had the camera pointed right at him and caught the whole thing!
…Except when I got home, I realized I had accidentally left the camera in manual focus, and the entire shot was blurry as fuck. It was devastating because it became a massive news story in the Belgian media the next day. If I had caught it cleanly and put it on YouTube, I could have partnered with the biggest newspapers to embed it in their articles. A brutal lesson, but one that taught me to always, always double-check my settings.
Every single one of these steps, from the blurry festival footage to the late-night editing sessions, has been leading to this production house.
Or as Steve Jobs one said:
🍏 You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
The Strategy: The Google Street View Loop
Since this is a legitimate branch of my business, I needed a real marketing engine. I’ve come up with a business plan loop that connects my love for exploring local history and forgotten spots with a way to naturally grow a YouTube audience.
When looking at maps of remote villages, hidden monuments, or old historical markers, I noticed that so many of them completely lack proper Google Street View coverage. That is where our marketing strategy comes in:
- The Blueprint: I travel to these undocumented or forgotten spots on Bonnie, packing a high-quality 360-degree camera alongside my cinematic gear. I’ll probably go for the Insta360 x3.
- The Upload: I map out these areas and upload them to Google Maps as official “blue lines.”
- The Hook: Curios history lovers, researchers, and locals search for these unique locations on Google Maps every day. When they drop the Street View pegman to explore, they will see our crisp, 360-degree footage.
- The Conversion: Embedded in that Street View footage will be a clean, subtle watermark directing them to our YouTube channel.
If someone is curious enough to virtually walk through a forgotten corner of the map, they are exactly the kind of person who will want to watch a cinematic movie showing the real story, the local characters, and the journey of how we got there.
The Next Horizon
This production house is about stepping up the cinematography, taking the technical lessons I’ve learned over the years, and finding the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary.
The gear is packed, the business structure is ready, and we are hunting for stories; whether they are thousands of kilometers away or right down the street from my front door.
The next time you hear from me, the journey officially begins. Hit subscribe, and let’s see where the stories take us.
