Origin
Hello and welcome to Alpenglow Forever Films, I’m so glad you are here!
My name is Matthew Stott and I’m here to introduce Alpenglow Forever Films and to provide some history of where I came from and what my goal for this company is.
I was born in Los Angeles but my family relocated to Providence Utah when I was about 8. I married Becca (my high school sweetheart) and we have been living in Wellsville ever since. Together we have four children.
I love being outdoors and especially being up in the mountains. My hobbies include, mountain biking, snowmobiling, white water kayaking and plain old backpacking and camping!
Becca and I currently love touring the country on our motorcycle. We have a goal to ride to every National Park in America. We pull a trailer behind our bike that is full of “glamping” gear so no matter where we end up, we can be comfortable.
In 2013 I started doing freelance photography while working a full time career in Quality Control and Engineering Document Control. I spent those first few years mainly volunteering just to gain experience. I was doing family portraits and some product photography, but long exposure light painting was (and still is) my passion when it comes to photography.
Videography however was starting to become more and more intriguing to me and I began looking for opportunities to do video. Again it was a lot of volunteer work filming everything from beauty pageants to MMA fights. I began learning all aspects of recording video including making time-lapse videos of clouds and trying to find unique angles and mounting options to place my cameras on.
In 2014 I filmed my first 2 wedding videos. I didn’t really know much about wedding videos so I did these for free. As I started planning for them I realized that there are actually a lot of similarities between beauty pageants/MMA fights and weddings…. minus the aggression and blood of course! Detailing that is probably better saved for another blog post, but I’ll just say for these events, you better have your head on a swivel or you will miss those moments that need to be captured. The lighting for these events is also very extreme, so you better know how to make rapid camera changes in instant as well.
In 2020 I started a more earnest effort to build up my own business and actually start to try and make a little money, or at least break even. I legally changed the name to Matthew Stott Visuals LLC and the thought was to focus more on wedding videography but at the same time keep doing corporate videos and photography going as well. As I started to combine the wedding content with the other stuff, I started to feel like that wasn’t a good fit for me.
Coming into 2022 I realized that another big thing holding me back was my full time career, and at that time I knew that if I was going to be able to grow my business that I would need to make some drastic changes. It was about 2 years in the making, but in September of 2022, I made the decision to finally walk away from the full time career.
I was able to find some work filming for an online company making Amazon ads, but also a few opportunities came up for wedding videography. It became clear to me at this point that from a marketing point of view, I really needed a brand name that exclusively catered to wedding films. Going forward, Matthew Stott Visuals will be where my photography and non wedding videography will live.
When I started thinking about what my new brand name would be, I knew it had to somehow be related to mountains. Alpenglow is a word I’ve been aware of for many years. It’s basic definition is “an optical phenomenon that appears as a horizontal reddish glow near the horizon opposite to the sun when it is just below the horizon.” But there is a bit of mystique about whether that rosy glow is coming from direct sunlight, or refracted and reflected light. The more I thought about that definition the more I knew it would be absolutely perfect for my new brand! The last problem I had was that Alpenglow Films was already taken so I couldn’t use it. I started throwing in words that would be a natural fit to tie in “weddings” to Alpenglow films and “forever” always came up, but I was trying to land on something different. With those words sitting in my head I began to visualize this logo using the letters AFF. I drew up a few versions on paper and knew it would look just like the rugged mountain ranges that I love. Add in a rosy glow to purple gradient across the peaks of the mountains, and Alpenglow Forever Films was born!
Thank you so much again for stopping by! I’d love to have you follow along this journey I’m on. I can’t wait to see what 2023 brings!!!
