The Story Behind the Name: How Fishing Bloopers Became a Production Company

People ask about the name almost every time. It is a fair question. "Fishing Bloopers Media" is not what you would pick out of a branding exercise if you were trying to sound like a video production company.

But the name is the honest answer to how this business actually started, and the story explains more about how we work than a mission statement would.

It started as a fishing page

Before there was a production company, there was a page called Fishing Bloopers. The premise was in the title: fishing does not go the way it does in the magazines. Lines snap. Nets miss. People fall in. The good stuff is the stuff that goes wrong, because that is the part everybody recognizes.

It was not a business plan. It was a page about something I actually cared about, posted consistently, for an audience that turned out to be much larger than I expected.

And then it did something I did not expect either. It taught me the craft.

What a content page teaches you that a client job cannot

Here is the thing about running your own content page: the feedback loop is brutally fast and completely honest.

When you make a video for a client, you find out whether the client liked it. That is one person's opinion, filtered through politeness and whatever they were expecting when they hired you. It is useful, but it is not information about whether the video worked.

When you post to your own page, you find out whether ten thousand strangers kept watching past second three. Nobody is being polite. The retention graph does not care how long the edit took or how good the shot looked on the monitor. It tells you, frame by frame, exactly where people left.

I posted through that loop for a long time. What it drills into you is unglamorous and specific:

• The first second is not part of the video. It is the entire negotiation for whether there will be a video.

• A beautiful shot that does not advance the story is a place where people leave.

• Audio failure loses an audience faster than image failure. People will forgive a soft shot. They will not forgive not being able to hear.

• Real beats polished, consistently, and it is not close.

• Consistency outperforms brilliance. The page that posts every week beats the page that posts a masterpiece every quarter.

None of that is theory I read somewhere. It is what the numbers on my own page told me, repeatedly, usually by punishing me for ignoring it. I wrote more about the specifics in what running a fishing page taught me about the algorithm.

The part where it became a business

The turn came when people started asking. Not "how do I grow a page" — business owners asking whether I could do for their company what the page was doing for itself.

That was the moment the two halves of my background collided in a way that made sense.

I grew up around Alpine Camera and Repair. Cameras were not a thing I discovered as an adult with a credit card; they were furniture. I spent years in the camera industry and years in the jewelry industry, which sounds like a non sequitur and is actually the best training in lighting a reflective object that money cannot buy. Along the way I worked on the media side of things and learned how content actually gets delivered at scale — television, radio, print, digital — and what it takes to hit a deadline when someone else's money is on the line.

Separately, I had spent years learning what makes a person stop scrolling.

Most production companies have the first half. A lot of social media people have the second. The businesses I was talking to needed both, and almost nobody in this market was offering both in the same conversation.

So Fishing Bloopers Media became a company. We kept the name.

Why keep a name like that?

Three reasons, and only one of them is sentimental.

It is honest about what we believe. The whole premise of the original page was that the unpolished, real, slightly-gone-wrong moment is the one people actually connect with. That is not a quirk of fishing content. It is true of nearly every brand video ever made. The testimonial where the customer laughs and loses their place is worth ten of the ones where they nail the script. We build around that on purpose, and the name keeps us honest about it.

It filters correctly. A company looking for the most corporate-sounding vendor in the Inland Northwest is not going to call us, and that is a good outcome for both of us. The clients who lean in when they hear the name are the ones who want something that sounds like a human being.

It is memorable in a market full of forgettable names. Search "video production Coeur d'Alene" and count how many results are a surname followed by "Productions" or a compound word involving "lens," "frame" or "vision." Nobody forgets Fishing Bloopers.

What the company actually does now

Two Instagram accounts still run. Fishing Bloopers is the original content page — it still posts, it still does its job, and it is still the best R&D department we have. Fishing Bloopers Media is the company: brand films, commercial work, real estate, events, product photography, drone, and the social content that comes off of all of it.

The client roster runs across a lot of industries — contractors, restaurants, clinics, manufacturers, nonprofits, real estate, resorts. What connects them is not the sector. It is that they had something real to say and needed help saying it in a way that people would actually watch.

We are based in Coeur d'Alene and work throughout North Idaho and the Inland Northwest: Post Falls, Hayden, Rathdrum, Sandpoint, the Silver Valley, Spokane and the Spokane Valley.

The thing I am actually in this for

I like people's stories. That sounds like something you put on an about page, so let me be more specific about what I mean.

Almost every business owner I sit down with in this region has a better story than the one on their website. There is a reason they started. There is a moment where it nearly did not work. There is a customer whose problem they solved in a way nobody else would have. And then the website says "we are committed to quality and customer service," which is what every one of their competitors also says.

The job is getting the real version out of them and onto a screen in a way that a stranger will sit through. That is a craft problem — lighting, sound, editing, knowing when to cut — and it is also a human problem, which is the part I actually enjoy. You cannot get the good take out of someone who is tense. Most of what makes a good interview happen occurs before the camera is rolling.

The other half of it, honestly, is the math. I like the analytics side of this in a way that is probably not normal. Watching retention curves, testing hooks, figuring out why one cut of the same footage does three times the reach of another — that is a genuinely interesting puzzle, and it is the part most production companies hand off to someone else or ignore entirely. We do not, because the page taught us not to.

Grew up here, left, came back

I grew up in this area, moved away for a while, and came back. That last part matters more than it sounds.

Coming back after time away, you see the place with two sets of eyes at once. You know where the light lands on Tubbs Hill in October because you grew up walking it. You also see clearly how remarkable this region looks to someone encountering it for the first time, because you spent years somewhere else and remembered it.

That double vision is useful when your job is showing North Idaho to people — buyers, recruits, customers, tourists — who have never been here. It is also why the history side of this blog exists. A place is easier to film well when you understand what it used to look like. Start with the photographic history of Coeur d'Alene if that is your thing.

If you are thinking about working together

The first conversation is free and it is not a pitch. It is me asking what you are actually trying to accomplish, because roughly a third of the time the honest answer is that video is not the first thing you need, and I would rather tell you that than sell you a film.

When it is the right tool, here is what you get: someone who knows the gear, knows this region, and has spent years learning — with his own audience, at his own expense — what makes a person keep watching.

Call (509) 319-0563, or reach out here. And if you want the rest of the background, here is what makes us different and here is what a shoot day actually looks like.