Talking to: Doesitfeelgood.com
Ben Davies and Sonia Wargacka are the founders of DoesItFeelGood.com, a global social impact video production collective based in Bristol. Recent film school graduates and travel enthusiasts, due to the pandemic they are currently grounded back in Bristol, and that is where I recently caught up with them, courtesy of a now well-known online meeting space.
As they told us, they are “the happy couple who subverted the genre of commercial video production”. They also hope that by telling us about their own experiences they can inspire young people working in the creative industries to carve out their own path, just like they have.
Sonia and Ben, 24 and 22, met in Bristol at film school. They were friends to start with, but after working together on film projects, in 2018 they became a couple. After graduating Sonia was offered work in Armenia for eight months, and rather than worrying about how they could keep their relationship alive during that time, they decided to take the decision out of fate’s hands and set up a company together which would allow them to jet off to see each other wherever in the world they were hired to be. 18 months later, they have been to 10 countries across 5 different continents, working with clients who do inspiring things to make the world a little better.
Ben and Sonia tell us about their initial reactions to Sonia’s new job in Armenia, which sowed the seeds for Doesitfeelgood.com.
Ben: ‘I think a lot of people would say “uhoh, I can’t cope with a long distance relationship”. To many people it seems too difficult to handle, but we took it as a creative challenge. We set up DoesItFeelGood.com as a way to see each other in a different country each time, doing videography jobs together. We turned all the feelings we had for each other into creating things and finding solutions to our problem, which was being apart for 8 months. As a result, we saw each other every month in a different place, which was great, and built a portfolio of social impact-related jobs.
Sonia: ‘I think a lot of people would think “if I am going to be away from my partner for 8 months, I’m not gonna go”. Often the biggest problem for long distance relationships is wanting to see each other, but not having the money to make it work. Luckily for us, we had a great network of people working all around the world in various leadership programmes. We realised it would be really fun to see if we could use this network as a way to make films and travel. And I think that was how it all started.
Ben: ‘We invented our own niche of social impact videography. We realised there are a lot of people out there in this world, who create inspiring, amazing projects to empower others. We have worked with female empowerment summits, young leadership organisations, minority groups… Basically anyone with ideas and passion to actually make it happen. These programs often are about international exchange, and have participants from many different countries. The people behind them work very hard on being the change they want to see in the world, often so hard that they struggle to describe what it is that they do to someone they just met.’
Sonia: ‘It means a lot to them to have someone who is happy to travel half way across the globe to come to their events, and show everything they do in a video reel that they can share with anybody: potential participants or donors, or just someone who is looking for inspiration. Video is the future of social media, as it shows you straight away whether the event has been a success, and whether the people had fun. It allows you to feel like you are a part of it, even when you’re at home. So this is what we do: we do social impact videography. It’s not something that really existed before, but we saw a great opportunity and we made it happen. The aim was to make people feel good, feel the energy, feel inspired, without even having to be there.
Ben: That’s where the company name came from. All these events are amazing, and people come out of them glowing with inspiration. They can’t sleep because they have got all of these ideas and they are so passionate, and empowered to do things. We come in and film it all, and depending on the project, we often have a video ready on the same day to share with others.
Sonia: In 2020 we all want things to be instant, so we can’t wait for a week or a month with the edit of a video as it is out of date then. For us it’s important to make videos about organisations that do good and feel good, so we want to bring those stories to the internet as quickly as possible.
Ben: When in film school, we thought the dream was to work on big TV shows and film sets. But when I started doing it, I’d come home after a 13-hour day and I’d think to myself “that was great, but what did I do that for?”. I got paid, and I did the work I enjoyed, but you need to feed the soul a bit. I think when we can turn up in a new country to do a job and see that our work has created actual joy, it means something. It's nice to share it back, and it is our way of just giving the good back to the world’.
Sonia: Also, we have been filmmakers for a while and we have seen within our circles how soul destroying it can be when you just take any job, even if you hate it, because you are an artist and you need to make the ends meet. So we are called DoesItFeelGood.com, because posing it as a question keeps us in constant check. Because if it doesn’t feel good, then we shouldn’t do it’.
Ben: ‘You see so many people out there, not only in the film industry, who do jobs they don’t want to do. They often don’t know how to change things, how to shift them around. I think with the challenge of Sonia going to Armenia we had the pressure to change things, first from an egocentric perspective of ‘we want to see each other’, but then also from the view of “what do we actually want to do?”. When we talk about Doesitfeelgood.com to other people in the film industry, we often hear them say ‘oh, I didn’t know you could do that, make films whilst travelling around the world and doing social impact stuff’. Yeah, we didn’t know either, but we have made it work’.
So Doesitfeelgood.com is a lot more than just social media marketing and documenting?
Ben: ‘I don’t think we ever use the word marketing when we talk to clients, mostly because it’s used so often no one knows what it means anymore. We also don’t do the actual distribution of the videos - we leave it to the people behind these exciting companies we work for. They do not need training in marketing, they know who they are trying to get, who they are pitching to, and they just need our product.’
Sonia: ‘When I hear the word “marketing”, I do not get excited at all. I think of office spaces, and we never work in those! We created a business that is disruptive in some ways, because we are personal, and we think the word “marketing” is the opposite. I think the fact that we are not yet another video marketing agency is our unique selling point. This is us, Sonia and Ben, a travelling film making couple, who go to different places to make videos that feel good. This is why we think people are attracted to us, because they like our story, they see the humans behind the idea, and not a big company’.
What do you envision happening next?
Sonia: I think it is very exciting to not know what is going to happen next!
Ben: We know we definitely don’t want to be the biggest film production company ever, hiring many other people, spending our lives in meetings.
Sonia: I was thinking about what our next milestone should be, because there is this impression you have got to have your goals set. And then I was like ‘no, no Sonia, calm down.’ First of all, have we had any goals now they would all be through the window because of the pandemic, and secondly this whole thing was set up because we were eager to get up, go and use what we had: our cameras and each other. Hoping for the best, expecting the worst, having a backup plan, but still trying. We don’t want to grow into a multi-million dollar company. I would hate that kind of responsibility!
Ben: I am very happy with where we are now and what we have achieved in the last year and a half. So I hope we stay grateful, and adjust to the current situation. With the COVID crisis we may need to get some extra jobs, find some ways of making ends meet, but so does everyone really’.
What would your advice be to a young person working in the creative industries who wants to set up their own business but is worried that they can’t?
Ben: ‘I think right now the most important thing is building relationships with people…. talking to people, building ideas, going to people and saying let’s try and do things’.
Sonia: ‘I disagree with that. I think the most important thing is to find and remember what it is YOU want to do and keep that voice in your head’. Sonia goes on to tell us about when they thought of the name Doesitfeelgood.com for the company: ‘I thought “that’s a great name” but for some people it’s really not. And that’s okay! We had people see it and be like “this is amazing, I want to work with you”. It’s not for everyone, but what matters is that it resonates with the people we want to work with.
She also tells us about her feelings after pitching the business idea to Ben’s parents, who were initially not impressed. ‘My advice is, work on empowering yourself to know when to tune in other people’s voices and when to switch them off completely. If we had followed the feeling we had after pitching it to someone who didn’t like it, we would never have travelled to 10 countries on 5 continents in a year and a half!’
So, it’s about having trust in your ideas, your audience and sticking with it?
Ben: It’s also about knowing your tribe and knowing your crowd.
Sonia: And it’s about having a lot of “why not!” kind of people around you, as opposed to the “why?” ones. Our “why not!” took us pretty far.
So, I think we can safely say, if you want set up an exciting, successful company that makes you feel good, listen to Sonia and Ben’s wise words; be empowered and have confidence in yourself, think creatively about what you can offer the world, don’t listen to the naysayers, know your market, and just do it.