Meet Sean Fitzpatrick of TeamWork Team Studios

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sean Fitzpatrick.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Think of me as Willy Wonka meets Andy Warhol 2.0 with some PeeWee Herman and John Lennon, all in the body of Luke Skywalker. I was destined to learn grand piano at a top university located in a remote suburb of Chicago. There was a baby grand that the house came with and a monstrous upright my parents hauled in, and I found myself fascinated very early on (ages two-three) and eventually figuring out how to play three blind mice– inspired by a Fitzpatrick family favorite “The Three Stooges.”

Fortunately, my parents could afford to take me to music lessons at school they had met at and graduated from with Fine Arts Degrees, and thus my fate as an artist was sealed. But three years old was a little early, and they waited until I was more of an age to focus/listen and be in lessons with graduate students trying to pay their college bills. This was when I turned seven.

Essentially that meant I was seven years old and starting to try college. By nine, I had learned the basics and understood very well how the piano worked and grew impatient and wanted to learn jazz! I was starting to “compose” my own songs, and I was really wanting to have some say in the musical process besides just being hands for a page.

I also had just finished basic electricity and circuits in 4th grade and was beginning to be fascinated with inventions, how things came together to form and complete fully new other things. My parents remember this as the “lamp phase.” I would take their coffee cans (that were still metal at the time) and cut a hole in the bottom, feed a stripped plug through, attach one the many leftover light sockets in the mangled box of parts in the basement, and you have a Cafe light complete with colored lid!

LED bulbs were about ten years away, so I was using 60w incandescent, and my parents were convinced these or some other electrical Frankenstein would burn our century-old house and/or barns down. So there I was, learning the very beginnings of improvisation, which offered conversations on how the brain works and how to self-teach & memorize, and electric components as well as their interconnectivity, all starting age nine and going through 14.

Fast forward to high school– I had finished five self-published CD’s including a Christmas album (still strange and amazing), had been DJ for some school and town street dances, made a music video, was now part of the NIU CS Jazz Band, had begun scouts and now was becoming eagle scout via a benefit concert, and my Music Director of seven years John Feken had me entering everything he could find to ultimately win Composition Awards to performing in Honors State Jazz Bands and eventually attend a camp he discovered hosted by the Grammy Foundation. I thought he was nuts.

No one was going to want someone from the middle of nowhere and certainly not pay for my expenses regardless. I would submit everything including the music video, but I still thought he was nuts. Months later, I got a letter in the mail saying I was accepted AND the David Foster Foundation was paying for my expenses. I couldn’t believe it, legitimately thought I might die in a car or plane crash or anything to make sure I wouldn’t go. But nope… I made it there.

 

I learned audio engineering/songwriting/music industry knowledge from Grammy Award Winners. I learned so much that I became an unstoppable force and was running audio for Chicago skirt stages, Music Festivals, Recording Studios, so many shows in Waynes World! Aurora Illinois!, theater productions and more DJing, and the list goes on.

That was an amazing time in my life, I had multiple studios/stages at my fingertips, I had a base of 30 some private music students with my Fox Valley YMCA Music Program, but wanted to go back to LA. 2011, I moved to Los Angeles. Before Snapchat became a model for startups, musicians had been doing house businesses for a century, and that is what we did…

This birthed TeamWork Team Studios, a name invented by my cousin and I at ages four & seven still tried and true, and thus my long stay in LA. I felt a little like Kermit in the Muppet Movie, pulling together close friends to make a dream happen, but ultimately even though that group would disband the studio and dream would prevail and become what it has today.

My first two jobs were opening a Starbucks, then trekking to Marina del Rey to be engineer running Saturday events as well as ongoing media, audio, video, graphics, web, and post-production for a group of TED talkers and big-wigs of the west with VC’s to celebrities to about to be’ers etc.

It was the perfect introduction for me to LA, even down to the end a year later when they screwed me and “fired” me! I laugh now as I’ve seen the same or worse continually since then, and I was finally understanding what LA and Hollywood life truly was, hearing echoes of some fearful relatives and friends at home.

This transitioned me into Beverly Hills at a full-on Digitized Agency, fulfilling video editing for UCLA initially to then work my way to CCO (Chief Creative Officer) and Part Owner. Not too shabby going from lowly unappreciated engineer to Don Draper in two years, and I now was accumulating startups and accounts.

Sadly, only a year later, I would find again that my partners had brought this venture to an end. With my unemployment checks, I began the full production house studio never to look back. It was a hit. There were all kinds coming in for work: film, audio, recording, post-production, performances; it was proof and validation that my ridiculous dream was also successful.

One of the big steps into fully defining the studio was my co-founding District2.co with founder Cassie Betts, a web directory and software solution for indie fashion designers to factories. This got me into fashion and tech 100% where I had merely just had interest and desire to join those worlds.

District2 is part of the SAM Precelerator in Santa Monica which houses a wide range of startups including one founder & friend Jude Belanger. Over the next years of losing the different houses through hardship, dealing with financial struggle finally hitting LA is hard as when I left Chicago, and the difficulty of the housing debacle while witnessing the corruption alongside, I found myself alone.

I had experienced big gain, true loss, and although I had people that cared for me I was ultimately in a place only I could deal with and get out of. I even was technically homeless for a while. But I knew this was temporary. I had put my trust in the wrong people before, so as dis-positioned as I now was, I knew it was about their shortcomings and not my successful dream which could be completely revived through one well-placed conversation.

Those conversations happened for two years until finally, an old friend organization had found a need for a TeamWork Team Studios in their facility. Back from the fashion days, Cassie Betts had positioned herself with Vermont Slauson Economic Development Center (VSEDC.org) and strong ties with the COO & CEO and was now an Accounts and Project Manager with coding under her belt and wanting to continue an old startup of ours Made In South LA (MISLA.org).

When she initially founded it, I was teaching Social Media courses to a class of students that were then paid to work after their training, and it was a huge exciting success and proof but lacked in longevity due to bad partners. Now she could plug in MISLA into VSEDC to make a whole program of classes for a new incubator; I had a curriculum to use and sell, and I had all the necessary stuff for a commercial studio. And that brings us to now.

TeamWork Team Studios is proudly housed in a facility and ready for clients, I have more fields in the arts than I’ve ever been able to cover before, and I’m actually needing to hire! We just finished two successful web coding courses that I loaded onto a Linux USB drive environment with open-source technology across the Crenshaw District and a close-by academy of LAUSD.

I just finished producing a cooking show that is now waiting for green light status, and another big film project to release sometime next year. Programs start up again next year, my studio doors open again with bigger possibilities, and my dream is once again alive.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
There’s no such thing! You can pave a road or make a smooth road (if you can afford it), but that’s just gonna teach you the wrong lessons and nothing about traveling real roads. My biggest difficulty has been others and their trust, trust in themselves and then making radical passion-driven choices seem ridiculous or unreliable. Without self-trust, you can’t work with others to create something new, and that has been the case in every failure I’ve been part of.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about TeamWork Team Studios – what should we know?
I founded TeamWork Team Studios in 2011, and it’s grown exponentially every year. The portfolio ranges from Chicago-land to Los Angeles and a few NY clients. We’ve graced the airwaves of NBC and FOX, Good Morning LA, and Time Warner Cable. You might have come to the LA Drone Expo I executive produced at USC’s Sports Arena.

You’ve definitely heard of iHeart radio, and they know us. From low-profile to celebrity status, we execute good solid works and ideas that create valuable art, historical and archival reference, and solid portfolio to be a family with. You can think of us as an under-the-radar CBS or NBC Universal, where if you have a budget for your big crazy idea then we can do it!

Can be a million dollar film to a million dollar piece of furniture, and anything in between. We use passion and resonance to fuel our business decisions because we know the difference between conventional business and business in Art.

What has been the proudest moment of your career so far?
Which career?? Ha, I’m mostly joking… It’s always been towards founding TeamWork Team Studios but some proud moments include winning IMEA Composition Awards, attending Grammy Camp 06/07, doing sound for and then fist bumping Paul (Noel Paul Stookey) of Peter Paul & Mary, seeing my vision for electronic band “Creature” (@creaturetheband) come alive in music videos and shows, and now joining forces with this economic development center to be part of the facility and future programming.

Pricing:

• $20 Initial Meeting & Consultation (30 min.) – You pitch us, we judge you.
• $2000 Music Video – VEVO Quality Video including Filming & Post Production with no set/prop construction
• $120/hr Event Production & Executive Producing – You hire as event EP so your event is amazing & successful

Contact Info:

• Address: 6019 S. Western Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90047
• Phone: 323. 391. 4732
• Email: [email protected]

Image Credit:
TWT Studios, Tanissia Sprull

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