In the last few month I decided to start my own business with my friend Vanessa. We're both interested in photography and film, well I say interested, extremely passionate is probably more fitting. We've known each other since school, went to different uni's and studied different subjects but still ended up back in Peterborough seeing each other quite a bit.

Now Peterborough doesn't have a great deal in terms of creative jobs, it's mainly made up of retail, restaurants and insurance companies. Yes if you do your research there are a couple of places you could work as a video editor, but as those jobs are so limited they are pretty hard to get.

Here's a little bit of background if you haven't read any of my previous posts:

I came out of uni, returned to Peterborough and fell into a massive rut. All I wanted was a job in film but with no means to move location I was stuck with bog standard jobs I didn't really want to be working. Over time I got back into filming, not as much as I would have liked but enough to realise this is what I want to do. I would mainly film when I went away, so holidays and festivals, they always make for interesting videos, but really it wasn't enough to satisfy my creative mind. I wanted to find someway of optimising my time between shifts in the most depressing, mind destroying places I've ever worked.

My dad is quite the entrepreneur and approached me one day with doing the social media/marketing work for one of his businesses, which turned into being the marketing assistant for multiple businesses and somehow along the way we dragged Vanessa in. We would work together on content planning and writing, all those social media must do's, product photography and editing and a little bit of website designing. We found that we actually worked well together but that wasn't going to be the greatest test of our friendship or what we could do side by side.

This summer my cousin and his fiancé approached me to film their wedding. I hadn't done such a large project like that since I was at uni so was immediately terrified but extremely excited to film something so amazing. This was going to be my first wedding, the fact I had never filmed one before or seeing one being filmed before really got at me. I did my research, I talked with my cousin and his fiancé to find out what they wanted but still I had this little voice in the back of my head that I wasn't going to be able to do this.

I knew I had to do it and I knew I was going to have to overcome the fear of messing it up, it was only the biggest day of their lives, no biggy ehh?

The task of filming a wedding, let alone a family members wedding is a tough one and a lot for one person, so I asked to bring Vanessa along to help. I knew we worked well together and this was going to be the day of truth. On the hottest day of the year and my birthday I had my best friend by my side doing what we love and as stressful as it was I wouldn't have changed that day at all. It taught us that it doesn't matter how organised you are things can still go wrong but most importantly we learnt that we could actually do this.

From filming the wedding we were both approached by various people to film adverts, promotional videos etc. I needed help on some projects so obviously went to Vanessa to be my number 2 and vice versa. It wasn't until we jokingly said one day we should work together that we actually thought it wasn't that bad an idea and that is how our little company came into existence.

Twilight Visuals: a photography and videography company based in a small city in East Anglia, founded by two young women.

I am pretty proud to say the least and really excited for this new adventure.

    - Hannah x