Two Tellys, One Family
One of the four members of this year’s Telly Award-winning team is PRS Guitars’ senior videographer, Andrew Dorbin, the second Telly winner in his family.
More than 25 years ago, his mother, Amy Blades Steward, won one for her public relations work with Shore Health Systems at Easton Memorial Hospital in Easton, Maryland. She’s now semi-retired and has run her own writing and communications business for over 20 years.
“As a kid, I remember seeing that golden Telly trophy sitting on her desk and thinking it was the coolest thing. My brother and I loved to dress up and act out our own stories growing up, and I remember grabbing that trophy and mock accepting the award to an invisible audience. Mom was cool enough not to care that we touched it.”
When he called to tell her about this year’s win, she was the one who reminded him.
Tell us about your organization. How big is your team? Where are you based? What is your organization’s specialty in the film and video space?
PRS Guitars is a leading manufacturer of high-quality instruments in Stevensville, Maryland and has provided some of the world’s most renowned musicians with instruments since 1985. The PRS team of highly skilled craftspeople design and build a wide variety of musical instruments and gear for worldwide distribution, including electric and acoustic guitars as well as boutique-style guitar amplifiers and effects pedals. The PRS SE Series complements the Maryland-made PRS line by offering highly approachable and more affordable electric and acoustic guitars. David Grissom, Jimmy Herring, Mark Holcomb, Myles Kennedy, Mark Lettieri, John Mayer, Orianthi, Carlos Santana, Ed Sheeran, Rhonda Smith, Mark Tremonti and Keith Urban are among the artists currently playing PRS instruments and/or amplifiers.
PRS Guitars Info: www.prsguitars.com
This award-winning documentary was created by our internal video production team and supervisors in the marketing department; a total of four people at the time of production.
Why do you do what you do? Was there a transformative moment that solidified your career choice, your org’s success, or your commitment to storytelling?
Each person on the team would answer this a little differently, but there are also a couple things that tie us all together. First of all, whether our background is in film, video, screenwriting, marketing, or English, we all love personally creating something. Secondly, as artists ourselves, we love seeing new art come into the world. By nature, PRS Guitars is an attractive and welcoming place for creatives. The company is built around the artform of guitar making, and the purpose of our products is to help musicians create their own art: music. That passion is what drives our success both individually and as a team.
At PRS Guitars, we think of ourselves as guitar makers – not a “brand.” It follows that we see our marketing first and foremost as storytelling. It is our job to take the culture, people, processes, and products that exist in our “four walls” and present them to the players around the world. Again, I am sure that each member of the team would have a different personal moment, but we can agree that the environment itself keeps us fueled.
Tell us about your Telly Award winning piece. What’s the story behind it?
The Legacy of Ted McCarty: Vintage Guitar Icon is a short documentary film produced by PRS Guitars that explores the life and legacy of Ted McCarty, one of the most important figures in the world of guitar manufacturing and design.
Through interviews and archival footage, this film highlights Ted McCarty’s groundbreaking innovations and his pivotal mentorship of Paul Reed Smith. Showcasing the deep bond between these two visionaries, this documentary reveals how McCarty’s influence continues to guide the direction of PRS Guitars and inspire the company’s ongoing commitment to craftsmanship and innovation.
Can you share a behind the scenes story or fun fact about the making of your piece?
{Michael} When I first started at PRS Guitars – just over 3 years ago – one of the first tasks I was given was to organize the footage of the 1997 Ted McCarty/David Grissom/Paul Reed Smith content that PRS had recently digitized. Upon completion, when mentioning this, a co-worker joked “so you’ve only just now finished your first project?”
What was your biggest challenge during production and how did you solve it?
The biggest challenge of this piece was to take a very broad idea about a somewhat well-trodden story and make it meaningful and entertaining. The impetus of this piece was to “officially” document the story of Paul Reed Smith learning of Ted McCarty and the impact that relationship had on PRS and, ultimately, the guitar industry as a whole. While Paul has shared that story in countless interviews, PRS did not have its own quality documentation of the history.
With that goal, footage with Ted from 1997, and an interview we filmed with Paul at his home, we got to work making a bigger piece – something we thought would be 20-30 minutes at most. Wanting to make the piece feel larger than just “Paul shares his memories about Ted,” we sought to feature more voices – first, Sue Davis, Ted’s daughter, and then a number of PRS employees whose careers intersected with the time Ted was present at PRS. With each interview, we learned something new to follow up with in another interview. We concluded with a second interview with Paul – to close the loop on things we learned, and finally with PRS Guitars CEO Jack Higginbotham to tie the narrative together once we had a sense of the overall story we were telling. This helped us find the shape of the piece: generational mentorship.
Growing that original concept into a larger piece that explores the emotional impact Ted had on the lives graced and how the tutelage Paul received from him is echoed in the relationship Paul has with many of the people who work here presently is incredibly rewarding. Everyone we talked to was so excited to share their experiences; to share them all in one piece means a lot.
What are you most proud of about this piece? What is the most memorable response you got from this work?
We are proud that we were able to create an engaging, coherent narrative with the pieces we were able to excavate and generate. Ted’s life was not thoroughly documented by himself or others. He privately recorded an audio memoir of sorts in the year before he passed, which we include snippets of in the piece, but aside from that and a small handful of video interviews, there was little in the way of photos or videos of the man, particularly outside of his life at Gibson, which is not the primary focus of the piece.
The most memorable responses to us were from our industry peers and coworkers. The core of the piece was not only the history Ted left behind, but the impact he had on people’s hearts and the paths they went down as a result. Sharing that history and seeing the response from people like the video from musician and content creator Mary Spender responding to the piece validated that the story we were telling was important to people beyond our walls. Similarly, many of the PRS employees we interviewed expressed the concept of “Paul is my Ted McCarty.” In our second interview with Paul, we brought this up to him, which made him pause and respond “I didn’t know that. People never tell me that sort of stuff to my face.” It felt moving to deliver that to him.
You won a Telly Award for this piece. Why is recognition important for you, your team or your work?
The Telly Award is validating because of the earnestness of this piece. Working in marketing, telling personal stories without an explicit aim to market a product can be rare. This piece helped express a key value of PRS Guitars – the respect for craftsmanship, for craftspeople, and a pure love for the history that laid the foundation for what we do. We released this documentary asking nothing of the audience other than their time and attention – it wasn’t to announce a product, it wasn’t to boost sales of an existing one.
Paul made a promise to Ted early on that he would “not be the forgotten man of the guitar industry.” To find ourselves in the position to be an agent of furthering that promise is extremely special. To have the work then be validated by awards and our audience makes us happy that the execution of that promise has been amplified. PRS has ensured that Ted will not be forgotten – as a pivotal figure in the guitar industry, but also as a human being, and to us, that is extraordinary.
