Community Focus: Anna Lee-Poli of Owl Eye Media

Anna Lee-Poli of Owl Eye Media, a full-service production company based in Santa Cruz, says one of her most rewarding projects almost didn’t happen. She and her team were filming at the Dream Inn, shooting a new-product video for the telecommunications equipment manufacturer Xerus.

“It was very stressful, because the end of the piece was completely dependent on getting a sunrise shot,” she recalls, “and we didn’t know whether we were going to get a sunrise. Some days it’s overcast; you don’t know.”

Actors had driven down from San Francisco. Owl Eye had hired hair and makeup artists. Money had been spent and work had been done and a fog bank could’ve thrown a wet blanket on everything.

“Looking back, it was probably the most fun shoot we’ve done here,” Lee-Poli recalls, “because it ended up being the most glorious sunrise. That combination of good luck and hard work came together.”

Lee-Poli and her business partner, Kerri Johnson, moved their company to Santa Cruz from Palo Alto a little more than a year ago. The two women met in New York, where Lee-Poli was freelancing in the sports-TV world after graduating from NYU with a masters in journalism and spending a year at the HBO news magazine Real Sports. Then Lee-Poli’s husband got a job in San Francisco, and since her parents lived in Santa Cruz, she decided that “maybe it was a good time to move out here,“ she says. “But there weren’t a ton of jobs. I also wanted to start a family, frankly, and I’ve always wanted to own my own company. Somehow, I convinced Kerri to come out here and, here we are!“

As often happens in these stories, the beauty of Santa Cruz worked its magic. “Kerri came for as visit and she fell in love with it,“ Lee-Poli says. “She actually moved here before I did!“

Beyond our little city’s beauty, the evolving community in Santa Cruz makes Lee-Poli very glad she made the move.

“The thing that’s most appealing to me is that it really feels like a community,” she says. “When we were over the hill, it just kind of felt like a big expanse of potential clients that we couldn't put a name or a face to.  My intuition says there's a group of people here that are trying to promote each other and trying to do something collectively.”

One year into being a full-time Santa Cruzan, Lee says the place is functioning like a healing balm in these troubled times.

“Rght now, sociopolitically, I feel like there are a lot of people who are alone—that we're kind of being driven apart,” she says. “And it's nice to feel that sense of community again; to look at the next guy and feel like: Okay, cool. You're on my team.”

 Joining the Santa Cruz Works team has bolstered Lee-Poli’s hopes that her adopted hometown, and the tech community that has emerged here, will continue to move in a virtuous direction.

“Just from even a practical perspective, they do a really good job of bringing people together and they work really hard at it,” she says, marveling at the fact that whenever she or Kerri Johnson write to Matthew Swinnerton or Doug Erickson, “the response is almost immediate.”

At the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership’s State of the Region event two weeks ago, Lee-Poli says, she was surprised at how many people she met had already heard about Owl Eye from Doug or Matthew.

“They seem to really care what happens to us,” she says, “which is nice because oftentimes, when you join an organization like this, it’s like ‘Here's the website; look it up.’”

Entrpreneurship and Growth

Lee-Poli says that while she has always sort of known that she wanted to start a company, when it finally came about it wasn’t exactly a calculated decision. Doing video production for hockey, boxing and other sporting events for ESPN and others had her traveling constantly. And working as a “mercenary“ did not allow her the creativity she wanted.

“As a freelancer, you're doing whatever they need you to do, which is fine, but this is better for me,” she says. “And you also don't know when the work is coming—I wanted something more predictable. I don’t want to say I was forced into it, but this was the only option I could see, given my skill set. I couldn’t think of how to work a 9-to-5.”

Lee-Poli says she anticipates that Owl-Eye Media will grow from the current two-person team to hire camera-operators, graphic artists and other staffers rather than work with freelancers,  as the company does now. She says it is common in the industry for a company like hers to expand and contract depending on how many projects are in the works, which is why both she and her partner were freelancing until they started their company.

“We’ve been getting work from companies here and over the hill, especially tech companies,“ she says, “and we do see ourselves getting busy enough that we might just need people all the time!”