I’d like to share a personal story about travel, photography, life and a wonderful online education company called CreativeLive. If you haven’t heard of CreativeLive, they are an online education company offering free live online classes taught by the leaders in the photography, videography, business and creative fields.
CreativeLive has recently produced a short documentary about my journey as a photographer and owner of a women’s tour company from where my career began to now.
The production of this video began in September last year when CreativeLive decided to put together a short film on my career and the the community and education that CreativeLive has brought me. They followed my journey from the mountains of Pakistan, to the high-octane Arab Spring on Tahrir Square, to my homebase of Seattle, WA. After many meetings, phone calls, discussions, planning, preparing and plenty of shoots and interviews – 7 months later this amazing video was produced by the incredible team at CreativeLive. I want to give a big shout out especially to Kathy Ramos, Jake Rossilli (who directed, shot and edited the video), Melissa Jackson, and the entire CreativeLive team.
Read through this article for a little behind the scenes story on how this video came to be and the big impact CreativeLive has had on my career.
Cairo 2012 – The Collision of CreativeLive and a Revolution
My journey with CreativeLive started in early 2012. I was living on Tahrir Square, working as a tour manager and completing a personal photography project to document the Egypt Arab Spring Street Art (called War on Walls, http://waronwalls.com). With tens of thousands of protesters just outside my window on the Square, life was both exciting, interesting and unpredictable. It was tough to find community and connect with other photographers. A friend shared the link to this new online photography education company called CreativeLive. It was free to watch live and they had a robust online community of photographers participating in their classes. Plus they were located in my hometown of Seattle! I watched my first CreativeLive course and the rest was history. I would be out managing tours or photographing during the day and watching the CreativeLive classes into the wee hours of the morning. Theses classes gave me a sense of community that I was struggling to find being in Egypt during a time of so much upheaval.
Seattle 2017
I continued to use CreativeLive to learn what I needed to learn to grow my craft an build my business – from Cairo, to Jordan, to Melbourne and back to Seattle. It has been a big part of my photography and videography journey from student to working professional. Fast-forward to 2017 and life has come full circle with my journey as a photographer, videographer and running ArchaeoAdventures Women’s Tours being featured as a short film in CreativeLive.
Running a women’s tour company and multimedia storytelling company (Genevieve Hathaway productions), over the past few years I was so busy creating, sharing, building, traveling and helping women travel that I didn’t always have the perspective on how much ground I had covered. For me personally, this video has been just that – a chance to see where it all began (in the mountains of Pakistan), and how the twists and turns of my life lead me to build ArchaeoAdventures and Genevieve Hathaway Productions. I share how the events of the Arab Spring and my time traveling across the Middle East and North Africa inspired me to help women travelers travel smart and savvy both in this region, as well as want to put women tourism professionals to work and connect women across cultures. And my love for storytelling and breaking down barrier with images. And then eventually taking these skills to the Seattle Opera and helping them change perspectives and tell their stories.
Producing a video for the Seattle Opera. (Snapshot from the CreativeLive video. Credit: Jake Rossilli)
This has been over 7 months in the making and I’m so excited to now be able to share it. From Pakistan to Cairo to Seattle, it’s surreal (in a good way) to see my journey unfold in the powerful video they produced. I had such a blast putting this together with the amazing folks at CreativeLive. CreativeLive has been such a strong and important force in my life – from giving me a sense of community when I was living in Cairo during the Arab Spring, to teaching me so much about the business of being a business owner, to helping me grow as a photographer and videographer through their amazing classes. It’s such a joy to be in this small way a part of their great work and mission; and to share the impact they have had in my life. I’m so proud of how this video came out and I hope you enjoy it.
And if you know of someone who will we inspired by this video to chase their own dreams, please share it with them.
