Get To Know Leaf & Limb: Meet Tessa

At Leaf & Limb, we care just as much about educating people on good tree care as we do about actually providing it. To do that effectively, we rely on the talented eye of Tessa Williams. Over the past 10 years, she has been the videographer, producer, director, and creative force behind all the professional and engaging videos our readers love and look forward to. She is our visual storyteller.

Nora: Hi, Tessa. Go ahead and introduce yourself however you want.

Tessa: I am Tessa Williams. I’m the Media Director here at Leaf & Limb. My job is to help facilitate any media production the company needs. This includes making many training videos, educational videos, and videos explaining what the company does and our services. I also create videos that inform people about how to better care for their trees, document work we’ve completed, or showcase test projects we’re trying out.

Why Leaf & Limb?

It’s rare to find a regular job in my industry, but I was doing video work at a dance competition company. I didn’t like it that much. There was a job listing for Media Director at Leaf & Limb on Craigslist, and I applied, but I never heard back. So I found the address and showed up at the office one day, but no one was there. There was nothing inside—just a blank office with a Leaf & Limb sign on the front. I thought, oh well, I guess that was a fake company that doesn’t exist, and I went on about my business.

And then three months later, I was laid off from my dance company job. The very next day, Basil called and said, ‘Hi, I’m from Leaf & Limb.’ Are you still interested in the Media Director position? I replied, it just so happens I AM! What I didn’t know was that the week before my visit, they had moved the office to the location we’re at now, and they hadn’t updated their website yet. I’ve been here ever since.

What types of projects did you work on when you first started?

The first thing I did was take a series of photos following Cedric’s crew doing a bunch of pruning. I just followed the crew around all day to document what their job was like so that we could put those photos on the website. The first series of videos I made was on how to use and how to maintain the stump grinder. After we created several of those training videos, I made a more entertaining one where I used fancy music behind a lot of slow-motion footage of the stump grinder.

What motivated you to pursue a career in videography professionally?

I was fortunate enough to go to a high school that had an in-depth video program. In my freshman year, I had to choose between computer science and video production. And I chose video production because that sounded a lot more fun. And I ended up having a lot more fun making videos. And I loved it so much that I applied to be in Video 2, which was a class that was hard to get into because everyone wanted to be in it. But I made the cut, and so I actually had about four years of video production education in high school before I went to college. In college, I had four more years of video production training, as well as film history, communication, public speaking, audio engineering, lighting, and all kinds of stuff. But it definitely started with my freshman year of high school with Video Production 101. So I was making videos for 8 years before I was even finished school.

Who or what are your influences?

My mentor was Brian Martin. I guess still is Brian Martin. He’s the video teacher at Broughton High School. He’s the one who taught me a love of film and an appreciation of visual storytelling. Without him, I don’t think I would be doing video production. I’ve had the fortune of being asked to come back and teach the odd class about lighting or interviews.

I found what I was passionate about.

What about videography are you passionate about? What’s the passion? Try to describe that to me a bit.

I think it comes from my love of stories. I think everybody likes stories. We’re all entertained by stories. We all tell stories. We all think about our lives as a story. Storytelling is one of the real forms of magic that photography and audio recording provide a unique medium, and all of that is smart words to say, “I like movies”. Movies make me feel and touch me in a way that other art does not. I am very passionate about that medium of storytelling because I understand movies more than I understand novels or radio shows or what have you. And so when in high school I learned what the different shots did, why we did things in this way or another way, and how to talk in this language of visual storytelling, it made me appreciate it even more.

Movie maker or documentarian?

I would argue those are the same thing. My passion is stories. But if I had to choose, I would choose to be a documentarian over a Hollywood filmmaker.

Can you think of a documentary you’d like to make now?

I think I’m still on that search. I’ve done a few in the past, one of which was about a church’s organist who had been there for many decades. I did a series of interviews with her, the congregation, and her friends and family to document what the music meant to that community and how having her in that position changed the culture of the church over time. Little stories like these are worth telling.

I’ve been practicing sword fighting since I took stage combat. Recently, I was involved with the Triangle Sword Guild for about a year and a half. I had to stop due to medical reasons, but I plan to get back to it. I guess I also have a passion for swords and sword fighting.