Today we’d like to introduce you to Tiffany Toney.
Tiffany, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I went to college for Broadcast Journalism and worked at a news station for about six months before realizing that I was too emotional for hard news. For months, I came home crying after seeing & hearing bad news all day long..I questioned how I could’ve been so wrong about my career choice. Shortly after, I was offered a professional softball contract to play for a team in Switzerland, which gave me a year to do some soul searching. During this time, I realized that storytelling & filmmaking was my passion. When my softball contract ended, I bought a one-way ticket to LA and never looked back.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I was terrified to move from DC, but I went anyway. The first two years of my LA experience were filled with homeless encounters and endless nights of sleeping on cold floors and dusty couches. I remember living in a youth hostel and being locked in a room by a heroine addict who had broken into the facility to steal money from the cash register. I expected LA to be a challenge but never did I expect to be a real live hostage. At the three-year mark in Los Angeles, I realized that I had hit rock bottom. I had fallen into a deep depression, my career was going nowhere, my life was in a fog. I had completely forgotten who I was…but this was the perfect opportunity for me to re-discover myself. Through the obstacles and the hardships, I was lead to write and publish a book on healing and self-love that was named an Amazon bestseller!
My book opened doors for me that I never expected and my mentor (Award-Winning Director R.L. Scott) really encouraged me to take my writing talents on-screen, so I wrote and produced a web series with him and Chyna McCoy and our synergy working on this project made it clear that our life paths crossed for a reason. We formed a production company and we are now working on a few big budget films and I am in rooms that I never thought I would be in….I am thankful for the broken roads that lead me to my tribe. It was a long time coming….eight years of trials, but I am so thankful that I never gave up and that I have team and a family who believe in me and always encourage me to be my best self! My advice to anyone who wants to make their passion their career is to always trust your inner voice, focus on loving those who love you back, and NEVER EVER dim your own light!
Shadow Motion Pictures – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Shadow Motion Pictures is the parent company to several entities that align with production, content creation, and filmmaking. SMP’s mission is to showcase women, minorities and diverse groups of people as characters of strength, depth, and intellect while providing a safe space for their stories to be told through the world of cinematic arts. We produce feature films and streaming content and our subscription-based streaming app (SMP TV) will launch late 2020.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
So far, my most proud moment was winning a conference softball championship with my father as my coach and immediately after, was seeing how proud he was after seeing me on the BIG Screen for the first time in the feature film Lazarus. I look forward to elevating spiritually, intellectually, and financially in a way that gives my family and loved ones, the life that they’ve always fought so hard to give to me.
Contact Info:
- Website: SMPTVNOW.COM
- Email: [email protected]
Image Credit:
James Black of Moten Photography @James_M_Black
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