Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Garcia Topete.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
When I was a kid growing up in Mexico, I wanted to go into politics to improve the world. I soon realized that the best way to actually foster change would be to tell inspiring stories, so at age twelve I turned to my existing passions, cinema, and writing, in order to inspire people to improve the world. I started making my own short films, writing short stories, essays and plays for a nationally acclaimed theater troupe, and working as a writer-director for a children’s TV show on cable, all during high school and a gap year I took after it. My storytelling led me to win a few awards and to eventually become a McDermott Scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas, where I met not only my dear friends and business partners Jacob Wurzer and Elizabeth Ann Stewart but also my beloved wife, Grace.
After college and leveraging my experience working at the Dallas International Film Festival since its 2008 edition, Jacob and I started our media production company, Nowadays Orange Productions, and made the company’s first feature film in 2012 in Dallas, Texas. A few months later Elizabeth joined us to expand our portfolio of projects, and we’ve been making film, television, and even video game and mobile app projects since then–using any format/media suitable for inspiring stories worth telling to the world. Our current projects include “Our Americas”, a docu-series about the historical and cultural connections of the American countries, and “The Realty”, a first-of-its-kind, fully bilingual-dual-language (Spanish-English) comedy series about Latino real estate available on YouTube; the latter will be playing at a few television and film festivals around the country in the upcoming months.
We had the privilege of working on that project alongside our friends Raul Arriaga, star Latino real estate personality, and Vicente Moctezuma, a prolific local actor-producer. I’m also currently pursuing a doctorate in Arts, Technology & Emerging Communication (ATEC) at UT Dallas doing research on how to train people today in the skills needed for the jobs of tomorrow, taking my experience in film and media as a model of how to apprentice people in a variety of expertise experiences.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It hasn’t been easy. The media industry is tough, hyper-competitive, and volatile–projects can fail overnight, even as fast as within an hour. We’ve had at least a couple of big movie projects fall through days before filming simply because a single meeting went wrong with a potential key collaborator. We’ve also had our names taken off successful projects because someone else involved didn’t want to share the credit publicly. But it’s all the nature of the industry. It takes more than resilience–one has to be anti-fragile, actually thriving in skill and motivation thanks to all the rejections, failures, betrayals, and challenges.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Nowadays Orange Productions – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Nowadays Orange Productions is a media company aiming to make the world better through storytelling. Aside from a reputation for high-quality content and well-managed budgets, each of our formats has garnered recognition for a particular characteristic: our narrative fiction content for its humor, complex characters, and touches of magical realism/sci-fi; our documentary content for its thorough research and innovative storytelling techniques; our video games for their educational/instructional substance; our mobile apps for their social innovation slant; and our communication/consulting strategies for humor as well, inclusion, and transdisciplinary approaches. We’re not just making up stories and putting out content–we’re trying to make the world a better story through all of them.
So, what’s next? Any big plans?
Short-term future involves placing the second season of “The Realty” and all of the “Our Americas” docu-series with one of the major VOD platforms after negotiations this summer, as well as the production of a new travel show for a cable network by the end of this year. There are also some plans for a new language-learning app, a couple of feature films, and expanding our consulting services by 2021.
Contact Info:
- Address: 17762 Preston Rd, Ste 202, Dallas, TX, 75252
- Website: www.nowadaysorange.com
- Phone: 214-810-6761
- Email: info@nowadaysorange.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/ajgartop
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alex.topetealex.topete
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/nowadaysorange
- Other: TheRealty.tv
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
