Tobias Lansberry is a video and marketing professional, musician, writer, artist, and creative analytic.
My Career as a Creative Professional
I’ve been working in creative marketing for over a decade now. 10 years experience brings a lot of victories, mistakes, lessons learned, and plenty of stories to tell.
But my story begins long before I was first paid to make a video. It began with a young boy, and a crazy dream.
The Dream
When I was young, I wanted to be a comic book artist, specifically for Marvel comics. I was obsessed with superheroes (Spiderman especially) but really the entire comic book mythos interested me: the interconnected storylines, the vast array of characters, the epic crossovers. I read the entire Marvel Encyclopedia from cover to cover – twice.
For my 10th Birthday, I received Scott McCloud’s Making Comics – a few years later, I had devoured Stan Lee’s How to Draw Comics and his larger more modern piece How to Make Comics. I did the 24 hour comic challenge twice, and drawing was something I did constantly.
I attempted to write, draw, ink, and produce my own comic books on several occasions – dreaming up complex storylines, heroic characters, daring plot twists. Whenever I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply: “I’m going to draw comics for Marvel.”
A New Dream
As the years went on (and I became a pretentious and cynical teenager), this dream began to feel juvenile to me. Comic books were kids stuff, and artists were always starving. If I wanted to have a real career, I would have to pick something else. I still drew constantly, but I set my sights on something else for “when I grew up”: Architecture.
It seemed a natural fit, because in addition to being a creative, I was also quite analytical. Math was my favorite subject in school – I loved understanding complex and abstract concepts, and the idea of thigs being calculable and fitting into neatly organized categories and equations was enticing to me.
So for the next few years, I focused on this as a goal: I studied architecture, began to learn calculus, took CLEP tests to get a jump start on college credits, and took the SAT. I began to scope out colleges, figuring out which one would be best to go to. Everything was coming together.
Side Quest: The Magic
Like many nerds in high school, I had a phase where I learned how to do card tricks. Except for me, that phase wasn’t just a phase.
I ended joining the local Magician’s guild, and even went “semi-pro” and did a few paid gigs over the years.
As it turned out, the technical properties of magic, and the storytelling that goes into creative marketing (which would soon become my chosen career path) have a lot of overlap.
My gap year turned career
My senior year of high school, my plans for my life changed drastically. As I neared graduation and was preparing to apply to colleges, I began to ask myself:
“Do I actually want to do architecture for the rest of my life?”
“Maybe” seemed like a weak answer as I prepared to figure out how I could do four years of school and two years of an apprenticeship. And so I took a gap year, with the intention of trying a few jobs just to see what I liked doing.
Coincidentally, one of my senior projects for high school was running a YouTube channel, something I found I enjoyed immensely. So I looked for entry level creative jobs at local companies; I found one, and then never looked back.
VIVO
I started my career doing product videography for a growing office supply company based in Goodfield IL – VIVO-US, whose claim to fame at the time was the #1 best selling monitor mount on Amazon.
I worked at VIVO for just over 3 years, wherein I helped triple the creative team in size, built the studio and video processes, and scale the video output from 2 videos a week to 5+ videos a week. But soon, it was time to move on…
VirtuSense Technologies
After that, I worked at VirtuSense, a healthcare AI startup that’s changing the paradigm of how healthcare works. The fast paced tech startup culture meshes well with my desire to learn as much as I could as fast as possible.
Here, I learned advanced 3D and VFX workflows, as well as honed a host of skills outside of video production: Project management, copywriting, marketing, asset management, content strategy, analytics, CMS automation, and more!
After 4 years there and helping to scale a creative team from 3 employees to 12, it was once again time to move on.
The Luxury Pergola
The last few years, I’ve worked at the Luxury Pergola. We’re a direct to consumer pergola kit manufacturing company that is American made and family owned and operated.
Here, I help to do just a little bit of everything: The overlap of marketing and content strategy, print design, manual creation, 3D assets, AI workflows, and of course, video production.
Living the Dream
In a way, I really am living out that same dream I had when I was young. No, I’m not drawing comics for marvel; But ultimately what I wanted to do, bu couldn’t articulate, was help to create, communicate, and tell powerful visual stories.
Everything I learned about comics and magic I still put into my work today. The mediums change, but the fundamentals of storytelling, attention, process, and creative problems solving never do.
Tobias Lansberry 