Stephen Montoya
A husband-and-wife team of filmmakers are already in the throes of several projects with their new production company, which for all intense and purposes was created out of thin air. In fact, this is the basis for their new company’s name, Something From Nothing Productions. The creative team that makes up the newly formed home-based business consists of behind-the-scenes film vets Kelsie Key and Brey Browne. Both Key and Browne have over a decade of filming experience between them, which includes everything from taking coffee orders all the way up to being an assistant director on a set. Throughout their careers both Key and Browne have amassed a plethora of production knowledge. So much so, the duo decided to go all in on a new business venture in February of this year.
“We really work well together,” Key says. “Not only are we in a relationship, but we really have something here between us creatively.” After talking with the duo in their home office located on the far west side of Fort Worth, Key and Browne are all smiles as they reminisce about how they first met, which as many would guess happened behind the scenes of a TV show they were both working on.
The way Key retells it, she didn’t really get a good look at Browne’s face given they met during the height of the pandemic while working on the Hulu/Freeform show “Cruel Summer.”
“We were doing COVID tests like five times a week,” she says. “It was really intense. So, we literally met while wearing masks and everything, the only thing we could see was just all eyes. Obviously, we got to know each other, fell in love and continued after that show to work on several commercials together.”
Something From Nothing Productions
Key would eventually get a position working for the Dallas-based nonprofit organization EarthX as their production manager and creative director in charge of its annual film festival. Along the way, after striking it up with Browne, Key would hire him to help create graphics, videos, and to do some editing.
“We'd go through these campaigns and our ability to just communicate with one another was uncanny,” Browne says. “I could understand what was in her head. She could understand what I was doing with the edit or with the graphic design, and it all just meshed perfectly.”
After tying the knot and blending a family, the bond between these two would only strengthen after the couple found out that their 11 -year-old son Liam was picked to start as a tight end for the Aledo Bearcat football team.
“We' were amped about it. It's like he's been working so hard, he finally gets his opportunity to start on the football team,” Browne says.
To chronicle this North Texas rite of passage, Browne began to shoot his son’s practices and games as collateral for an end-of-season highlight reel.
“He's making all these awesome plays; he's getting to live his dream. And then throughout the season I started to film more and more and more,” Browne says.
But Key and Browne’s son wouldn’t be the only player getting a close up. After watching some of the coaches talk to the team during practices, Browne says he had a vision to chronicle the whole team, interviews and all.
“I had to go get a new lens,” he says. “I wanted to get closeups at all of these games. And then by the end of the season I'm like, ‘oh, we just filmed a documentary.’”
Something From Nothing Productions
After showing the short 23-minute film titled “Bearcats: We’re Still Here” to the coaches and player’s parents, both Key and Browne felt like they had inadvertently created a film they could festival and get behind.
“We just got notification, last week or so, that we were going to premiere this doc at the Dallas International Film Festival, which is pretty cool considering it was just literally the two of us who filmed and edited the piece,” Browne says. “We had no crew and no budget.”
Building off of this momentum, Browne and Key began the process of looking into creating their very own business out of — you guessed it — nothing.
Now the duo is in full swing working on projects like the postproduction for a psychological horror film for a client out of Nigeria for example. Besides video production and editing and design services, Something From Nothing also offers its clients social media and marketing consulting. This sundry of services has proven key given the recent filming boom that’s entered Cowtown in the last few years.
“I love it here so much, and I especially love to see the production side of things growing here,” Key says. “We feel very grateful and fortunate. Obviously, we're still getting started, and there's so much that we're excited to do together that will be ours. I mean, that's the big difference is we've worked on all this stuff, but at the end of the day, these projects weren't our projects. I'm just excited to see kind of how we can try new things and really just find our feet as we're going. And it's really exciting to do it together.”
