About Alpine Media
How Alpine Media started
I'm DeJuan Jordan and I run Alpine Media Co. out of Petoskey, Michigan. At 23 I was broke, living back at my mother's house, and I had not liked a single job I had ever held. The one thing I could sit with for hours was editing music for friends. That turned out to be the whole answer.
I got as far as orientation at Full Sail University in Florida before I found out what a semester there cost. I decided not to take on that kind of debt and came home to Petoskey to look for another way in.
I found it in WOCTEP, a scholarship program run by the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians that paid for certificates and was open to anyone, Indigenous or not. I took New Media and Graphic Design at North Central Michigan College, opened Premiere Pro for the first time, and never really looked up again.
Then came several years of working a full-time job all week and building this one at night. A ten thousand dollar loan went straight into equipment. Weekends went to weddings, music videos and livestreamed MMA. I said no to a lot of things.
In 2020, with everything else shut down, I stopped splitting my time. The first call was the SoL of Lost Tamarack festival in Wolverine, which needed to reach an audience that could not leave the house. We streamed it out of a barn that had only had internet for a few months, with several camera operators and a sound engineer running audio, and as far as I know it was the first festival in Northern Michigan carried live at that quality. Blissfest drove out on the second day to see what was going on. The phone has not really stopped since.
Blissfest, Earthwork Harvest Gathering, Michigan Food and Farming Systems, the Water is Life Festival, the Detroit Youth Choir, Detroit Public TV, and a long list of Northern Michigan businesses, schools and nonprofits who call back every year.
Livestreaming is a smaller part of the work these days. Covid was what had everyone watching from home, and once people could be in the room again the demand for it settled back down. We still stream whenever someone needs it, but a given week is more likely to hold a school performance, a YouTube channel we are helping someone build from nothing, or a day spent following one person through their work.
What people tend to mention afterward is how the thing got made. You are in it with us rather than waiting two weeks for a file to show up. You watch it come together, you pick up what to ask for, and what you end up with is closer to what you had in your head.
These days I am hiring and teaching other videographers, in a town that was not hiring videographers at all when I started. That part I did not see coming.
Want to work together?
Tell us the date, the venue and what you need to come out of it. We'll put together options, usually within a day.