Josh Hester is the founder and executive producer of Storyteller Studios, a documentary-style video production company in Springfield, Illinois. He started the studio in 2013 to bring the tools of documentary filmmaking to brands and nonprofits, and the team of six has since produced more than 700 projects across 23 states. Their work has earned 15 Regional Emmy Awards and nominations and 29 Telly Awards. Josh holds a BA in Film and Video Production from Columbia College Chicago and an MA in Communication from the University of Illinois Springfield, and he has taught visual storytelling at the university level. He still believes the best line in any film is one nobody wrote down.
How many years have you been a judge?
5+
What are your responsibilities in your current role and what do you love most about your job?
I own the company, so my job is the business side. I take the first call with every client, figure out with them what the project should accomplish, write the proposal, and then hand it to the production team. Chris, Kevin, Payton, and Eli make the films. Lydia keeps them on schedule and on budget. I stay out of the way.
What I love most is that first conversation. Somebody calls because they need a video, and by the end of the call we’ve usually found the real reason they called, which is almost never just a video. That’s the part I’d do for free.
What inspired you to pursue your career path?
Before Storyteller, I spent time documenting mission work and human rights projects, then worked in healthcare communications. Those two jobs taught me the same lesson from opposite directions. The mission work showed me that an ordinary person telling a true story can move people more than any amount of polish. Healthcare showed me how badly organizations need help saying complicated things clearly. I started the company in 2013 because nobody in my part of the Midwest was doing both at once, making documentary films for the businesses and nonprofits down the street.
What was your first job in the industry? What did it teach you?
My first job was assistant to the assistant at an audio post-production studio in Chicago. I met producers from all over the country and got to watch how they worked, which was an education in itself. My boss treated his team like dirt, and that was an education too. I learned exactly how I didn’t want to run a room. I also figured out that if I worked hard enough to get into a producer’s chair, I could actually make something happen instead of watching other people do it.
What do you look for to determine excellence in video?
Whether I believe the person on screen. Beautiful photography is table stakes now, so the thing that separates good from excellent is whether the people in the film sound like themselves or like a script. I watch for the moment where someone stops performing and says something true, and then I watch whether the editor was smart enough to leave it in. The second thing I look for is restraint. I believe our ultimate job as filmmakers and storytellers is to serve the story in front of us. When we do our job well, we should be invisible. Transparent. So there is nothing between the story and the viewer.
What initiatives or projects are you working on now that excite you?
We just premiered a short film about a family-owned auto repair shop whose founder is retiring after 32 years. The shop rented out a drive-in theater and their customers showed up to watch a documentary about their mechanic. I’ve made films that played at bigger venues. I’m not sure I’ve made one that mattered more to the people in it. I really love the little stuff.
Tell us about a moment of recognition that had an effect on you – whether personal or official? What does recognition mean to you and why is it important in our industry?
After we made a film for the Illinois Innocence Project about a man who spent decades in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, the legal director told us the film let people “imagine the unimaginable.” That’s a lawyer saying our work did something her briefs couldn’t. Official recognition matters too, and I’d be lying if I said the first Emmy didn’t mean a lot. But what it mostly does is tell a nervous client that the people they’re about to trust with their story have been trusted before. In an industry where anyone with a phone can call themselves a filmmaker, that’s worth something.
Do you have any specific practices you lean on to spark creativity?
Curiosity, mostly, and I try to protect it. The best interviews I’ve ever sat in on happened because somebody on our team asked a question they actually wanted the answer to, not one from the list. So I read a lot of history, I ask people at dinner parties what they do all day, and I try to walk into every discovery call assuming the client knows something I don’t. They always do. If I catch myself thinking I already know what a story is before we’ve filmed it, that’s the signal I’ve stopped being curious, and the film will be worse for it.
In your experience, what is a significant change you are seeing happen in the video, television, and/or film industry, and what insight can you share about how to navigate it?
The barrier to making something that looks professional is gone. Anyone with a phone and an afternoon can produce footage that would have needed a crew ten years ago, and AI is about to make that even more true. So the craft of the image is no longer the thing clients pay for. What they can’t get from a phone or a prompt is a real person telling the truth on camera, and a team that knows how to get them there. My advice is to stop competing on polish. Compete on the interview, on the story, on the thing that can’t be generated. That’s where we’ve placed our bets.
What excites you about judging for the Telly Awards?
Seeing what people are making outside my own bubble. We work in the Midwest, mostly for nonprofits and family businesses, and it’s easy to assume everyone is solving the same problems we are. Judging puts a hundred different answers in front of me from people I’ll never meet, and every year a few of them make me rethink something we do. I also like that the Telly Awards reward work made for a real client with a real goal. That’s the kind of work I’ve spent my career on, and I want to see it recognized.
