Kevin Tostado of Tostie Productions
About Kevin
He graduated in 2007 as part of the Olin’s first class. He currently lives in San Diego with his wife and cat. His cat likes knocking over microphones and looks really soft and fluffy. He was an R2 while at Olin for a couple of years, and knew pretty much everyone who was at Olin while he was at Olin. He took part in lots of clubs and organizations such as CoRE, SAC, BDE, and theater.
Kevin currently owns Toastie Productions, which is an independent film studio based in San Diego, CA. Kevin and the rest of Toastie Productions are currently working with Ibhayi Media to create a follow-up documentary about the microbreweries of San Diego.
Production of Yellow Lights
The early days of Olin
Kevin was a member of Olin’s very first graduating class, so every single class he took here was “experimental”, and had never been taught before. When Kevin first arrived, West Hall was called Residence Hall because it was the only dorm on campus. He lived in modular housing for part of his junior year while East Hall was being built.
Coming to Olin in the early days was a big risk. As a high school senior, Kevin was deciding between UCLA and Olin. He went to the UCLA engineering open house, and the dean told the admittees that most people would drop out of the engineering program by the end of the four years. Deterred by this negativity, he looked towards Olin. Even though Olin was a highly experimental school at that time and Kevin was overwhelmed by the caliber of the candidates and Candidates’ Weekend, he really loved the personal and intimate environment at Olin and the idea of founding the culture of the school from scratch, and had his parents support in coming.
Doing your own thing at Olin
In the early days of Olin, just like now, time and energy were the limiting factors in what Kevin was able to do. As a senior, he made the decision to devote some of his time to pursuing his passion in filmmaking. By combining Passionate Pursuit funding, an AHS capstone, and a bunch of work over the summer, he partnered with Tom Kochem to make the feature-length film Yellow Lights. To do that, he ended up intentionally failing one of his classes that he wasn’t learning much from.
Being a creative business
Kevin wanted to have the freedom to film what he was passionate about. He was deciding between starting his own studio or going to film school. Even though he would have a wider network if he went to film school, he decided to start his own business because, in classic ‘do-learn’ mentality, getting hands on experience and seeing what works for him.
Converting that experience into a real business can be challenging, especially in creative fields like filmmaking. Large film studios have a developed process for vetting film ideas, and then moving them through production, but replicating that process as an independent company is both difficult and essential. To do that, Kevin leans on his network a lot, finding people with whom to co-produce films and funding projects with loans from friends and family. Kevin has to spend a lot of time for the legal and financial aspects of hiring out contractors and finding investors, and as a result, he has to treat each of his projects like a business, and treat it in a professional light for others.
Awards from Under the Boardwalk: The MONOPOLY Story
Raising funds and Cash Flow
The business of movie production is really challenging from a cashflow perspective because large amounts of money need to be poured into a production early in the process, while profit, if any, likely won’t come until many years later. Traditional venture capitalists aren’t very interested in the movie production space, because the potential profits don’t reach into the billions, and the risks are so challenging to evaluate.
His kickstarter for his next film is starting soon, to pitch his film to his potential audience before pitching it to investors. If his kickstarter is successful, he can argue to investors that people are interested in this film, and if the kickstarter is unsuccessful, he knows to move onto a different project. Kevin is also very present on social media. On the early days of Facebook, he created a Monopoly fan page, where he collected the Monopoly fan base and promoted his documentary.
Final reflections
His advice to Olin students: Always remain open to redirecting your path as you discover new things you love.