Derek Toombs: (Almost) Everything is Storytelling

Our interview of Derek Toombs for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today. Derek is a filmmaker and the lead instructor in media communications at the LA Film School.

Derek shares his adventuresome life experience from serving in the Coast Guard, to going back to film school and how he approaches storytelling and finding your voice as an influencer in a crowded field.

Derek shared the following takeaways:  

On Artificial Intelligence (AI):

“I think AI is going to be a terrific tool. I think it'll get to where it's accepted as a spell check. Years down the road, you'll almost get shamed. You'll be like, "Did you run this through an AI? Because this reads really poorly." You know what I mean? That's the kind of stuff that you can get it to help you out. But I certainly wouldn't use it as a load bearing piece of the creative process because it can be clever, it can give you things that you didn't think of, but those are coming from somewhere else. It really is important that you're doing the heavy lifting.”

On honing your craft:

“When everyone can make pretty good video, it's up to you to make really good video because people will nope out of a video if it doesn't sound right or if they can't see you well enough and stuff like that. We do stress all the things that every video shares, and then we can focus on what makes them all different.”

On the cross-over of different disciplines:

“Everything is media, everything is communication. I think less and less we're seeing just somebody who's strictly a journalist or who is strictly in PR.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I'm joined today by Derek Toombs. Welcome to the podcast.

Derek Toombs:
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You're welcome. Let's start, because you are very different from where you are. Where did you grow up?

Derek Toombs:
I grew up in South Florida, not too far from Fort Lauderdale. A little town called Margate.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I hate to make fun of people from Florida, but there is a game that play on the talk show radios out here, Florida or Not Florida. There's a strange story in the news, but we'll leave that at that.

Derek Toombs:
No, that's got to be tough because anything can happen here.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, that's right. Okay. You are currently the lead instructor in media communications at the LA Film School?

Derek Toombs:
Correct.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. That path to that position hasn't been the normal path that you would expect. I read that you are a veteran filmmaker.

Derek Toombs:
Yes. Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
When you say use that term, what do you mean?

Derek Toombs:
Yeah, I do have to specify that. It doesn't mean I was a grip on Chinatown or something like that. I'm a veteran and a filmmaker. I did a little under eight years in the Coast Guard and left to pursue my dream of filmmaking.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. Just because it fascinates me, how did you pick the Coast Guard?

Derek Toombs:
That's a wild story. I was actually being recruited pretty hard for the army. This was not too long after 9/11, and it seemed like just the thing to do. It just felt so right. I was talking to somebody and I was young. I was still in high school, they were pulling me out of class. I'm talking to people in the cafeteria, just hanging out. Seemed awesome. I was young and dumb and I wasn't thinking about what could happen to me. But it occurred to me that my job, should I join the army, was to train to kill people. I was like, "Oh, that's not something I wanted to do at all." I knew I wanted to serve my country. As a Boy Scout, we used to camp out on a Coast Guard base, and those guys seemed really cool. They were on the water. I love being on the water, and it just seemed like a much better fit for what I wanted to do. That's how I wound up there.

Jon Pfeiffer:
After Coast Guard, you ended up going to film school. Why film school?

Derek Toombs:
Film is something I've been interested since I was a kid. I used to make little videos with my toys, with dad's camera and stuff like that. What I really wanted to do after high school was go to film school, but I didn't get into the choice that I wanted to go to. I was going to community college and I stink at it. I was only getting good grades in the classes that interested me. I just had no focus or drive really. That's kind of what prompted me to join the Coast Guard. Because I was like, "Well, I'm just blowing through money going to college and I don't like it here." Once I had done two enlistments, I was like, "I think it's time. I'm going to kick myself if I don't make an honest go at this." I said I was going to get out, go to film school and just go from there.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How old were you at that time when you went to school?

Derek Toombs:
By the time I graduated I was 32. I was the one old guy in my class.

Jon Pfeiffer:
The veteran.

Derek Toombs:
Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. Apropos to nothing, and we'll come back to the film in a second, but I read you were a standup comic.

Derek Toombs:
Yeah, I did that. Also, I was in the Coast Guard. I've always been a creative spirit. I've always had a performative streak. There's not a ton of outlets for that in the military. I always found little pockets where standup comedy, open mic nights and stuff like that was a place that I could get that out of my system. That was a lot of fun.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Back to the real topic, tell me, I'm going to throw you a real softball question. But tell me about the LA Film School so we can set the scene.

Derek Toombs:
The LA Film School is really cool. It's super accelerated. They run through a course a month. School-wide, I think what's really neat about it is we get a lot of non-traditional students. These are a lot of students like myself who they've already had some life happen to them. Maybe they got kids. Maybe they've got a career. It's really an awesome fit for people who are in a situation like me. People who maybe couldn't go to a brick and mortar school, maybe it's based on where they live or based on just their life circumstance. We just run them through, I don't want to say a crash course, but it's a really fast curricula. I really like it there. Our major especially is really cool because we are kind of the Swiss Army Knife program in media communications where they're learning graphic design. They're learning journalism, PR, obviously a bunch of video. That's really cool for the students who want to be what we call a unicorn, which is what a lot of the industry is looking for.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now, is it both online and in-person?

Derek Toombs:
There is an in-person component. There's a campus. Honest-to-goodness, it's on Sunset Boulevard. It's in the old historic RCA Building. Then there's an online component. All the online is actually operating out of Orlando, oddly enough, which is where I am. Then everyone on campus is, of course, in LA.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do they work the online? Because I teach one class at Pepperdine, so I taught through the pandemic on Zoom. How do they do the online? Is it, you are in a studio setting and then you broadcast from there? Or how do they do it?

Derek Toombs:
We're online right now. As a result of the pandemic, we're all pretty much... Our home is our studio. But we are, I'm happy to say, we're building out a studio in the offices. We're going to have a green screen and three separate... Each wall is a different backdrop and we've got all this cool stuff. Hopefully the days of just our bedroom being our backdrop are soon to be over. Every instructor has super hands-on for their curriculum. I mean, even if a course is established and it changes hands from one instructor to another, they get to adjust the curriculum. We make sure everything's super up-to-date, nothing's written in stone. The instructors really have their fingerprint on their courses. We're present in all the videos where if they're watching it asynchronous, they're still seeing us, our face and stuff like that. Then at least once a week we're getting on Zoom with them offering extra lessons and they can reach out to us for a one-on-one anytime. There's no risk of them thinking they're running through an automated system or something like that. They really are with instructors.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How do you keep up? What sources do you use to keep up with what's going on in the industry?

Derek Toombs:
Sure. We actually, just this week, we had what's called a PAC meeting, a Professional Advisory Committee. We've got people who are in each industry. These are really cool because our majors' still spread out. We've got journalists, we've got graphic designers, stuff like that, who are in the industry that will come back once or twice a year. We'll show them our curriculum. We'll show them classes that we're about to launch and things like that. We'll ask them what's something that anybody heading out into your industry needs to know or where's the vacuum that we can fill. We do have people in the industry meeting with us at least once a year to check on that. Then of course, we stay just as instructors. The focus is much more heavy on industry experience for us than teaching experience. That's a big part of how we stay on top of things. It's because you're not going to get the instructor who taught journalism or was a journalist 25 years ago teaching journalism. People are coming right out of their career to us. That's awesome.

Jon Pfeiffer:
A quick story about that is my oldest son just graduated from law school, from ASU. They have, the journalism school is the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. I asked my cabby, do you know who Walter Cronkite is?

Derek Toombs:
Oh, no.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, no.

Derek Toombs:
That's funny.

Jon Pfeiffer:
It's all kind of generational. I saw one of the things that you have taught in the past is storytelling. Take me through a very abbreviated, how do you teach storytelling?

Derek Toombs:
Yeah. One of the first things I explain to my students, I give them this example where I say, "Let's say I had an old friend from college, came and stayed in town, and he was a complete jerk." I could say that, what made him a jerk? Well, he was like detestable. He was rude. Well, I gave you the definition of the word jerk, and it still tells you nothing. But if I told you the story that he ate all my leftovers and he wore my girlfriend's robe and things like that, that actually communicates that way better. Storytelling is our most effective means of communication, and you don't have to be a creative writer to benefit from that. That's where we just started. What's the way where you'll really just inject your point into somebody's veins in the most direct way. That's really what we get across there. It's all about being heard and saying things succinctly.

Jon Pfeiffer:
If you're teaching storytelling, you start there, but how do you get that so the student can learn to craft a story? Do you have a framework you use?

Derek Toombs:
Yeah. I mean, one really cool assignment we do is a collaborative story where everybody starts the first paragraph to tell the story. You have to learn to, well, what's the appropriate way to continue this? I think it's interesting because you're taking somebody else's framework and running from there. It teaches you how to tell a story on the macro level where it's like, "I don't want to derail somebody else's story and I may have things that I want to get across. How do I do that in a way that I'm playing nice with other stories?" That's really cool. Then of course, we really stress on how to make stories personal even when they're not. It's like find your connection to a story, and that's really going to get anyone else to listen. Where do you come in in all this? Those are some of the big factors we try to push.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How does YouTube figure into this? The creation of YouTube videos and what you teach your students about. The YouTube generation. I mean, because you watch YouTube videos and there's all these jump cuts. You don't see that in television.

Derek Toombs:
Right. Yeah, we really try to teach them. There's just so many types of video out there, and there are all the kind where the jump cuts are appropriate. In a weird way, if you upload your video and it had none, you'd be doing it wrong. Then there's types of videos where it's like, "Don't you dare." We really do try to walk them through just the different formats of video and things like that. I teach an advanced video course as well, and so they've got options for a documentary for a branded video and things like that.

We just show them there's different types of video, and one of the things we really get across is video has become so democratized. Everyone's got a really good camera in their pocket. Like I said, I was making films with my dad's camera. If I could meet myself when I was that age, I'd be high-fiving my hand off for having a 4K camera in my pocket. When everyone can make pretty good video, it's up to you to make really good video because people will nope out of a video if it doesn't sound right or if they can't see you well enough and stuff like that. We do stress all the things that every video shares, and then we can focus on what makes them all different.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You're teaching a budding videographer, who wants to start his own or her own YouTube channel, or wants to grow their channel. What advice do you have for them as they're shooting these and just developing what they're going to do?

Derek Toombs:
Yeah, one big thing I try to teach, and it's something that I learned doing comedy, and that was to make sure that you have an onstage or onscreen or just creative persona. You can't just shotgun out any type of video that you'd like to make or to see. You'll develop it over time. You don't have to have it right away. But there needs to be a reason that people are watching your videos versus just any video that's on that same topic. The same goes for, say, podcasting. Everyone wants to make, "Oh, I'm going to make a podcast about movies," where there's a thousand million of those. What is yours? Sell me yours. That's really important for YouTube. By now there's every type of YouTube channel you're going to get. What is it about you or your eye or your sensibility? I think that's really important just setting yourself apart that way and knowing what is your specific path towards this.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now you obviously know who you are at this point. I know who I am. How does somebody who is just getting out of high school find out who they are? How can they identify their unique... What kind of exercises do you take them through to identify this is really what makes you unique? Go with it.

Derek Toombs:
Yeah. Well, early on, we make a point to identify their taste because usually anybody who wants to create content, it's because they have a really strong or really good taste in the media that they want to create. You prep somebody like, "Look, the stuff you make at first, it's going to be miles different between the stuff that made you want to make video, music, writing and what you make. It's going to be disappointing, but somewhere in there in that gap is where you are going to find yourself. Because you don't want to just ape." As a filmmaker, if I was just making stuff, trying to be like Steven Spielberg, I'm not going to be Steven Spielberg, and so I'm just going to fall short every time. But somewhere in that gap where it's like, "I think my stuff stinks because it's not Steven Spielberg." But somewhere in there it's like, "My stuff is good because I found my own lane." That's what's really important for everybody, I think, to start out that way.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Have you found some rule of thumb about how long it takes people to actually develop that and get their own rhythm?

Derek Toombs:
No, there's not really a set. It really depends on... It takes a lot of patience. It also depends on people's level, their passionate level. Because especially in a major like ours where sometimes I am teaching people who what they really want to do is they just want to be a strong collaborator. It's like, "I'm not going to make my own videos, but I don't want to get plowed over by somebody who does if I need to hire somebody or work with somebody." I mean, it's such a big spectrum. Some people take to it really quickly because they've just consumed a lot and they can see those patterns. That is the shortcut really, recognizing the patterns in what you like. The cognitive effect is how does this video make you feel and how do they achieve that? How are you going to go about something similar?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Shifting gears a second. I have played with both of the major... More than played them. Done a lot of time on both of the major platforms for the artificial intelligence.

Derek Toombs:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Given that the writers are on strike, and it looks like the actors are going to go out on strike now, what do you see as the benefits of using AI in creating content, and then the downside of using AI in creating content?

Derek Toombs:
Sure. I think the benefits are if you could use AI as almost like a silent partner or something like that, where it's like you've got an assistant or it's like your intern or something like that. I think where we might be in trouble, especially as it relates to the Writers Guild and things like that, is if people do start to think that AI is a one-for-one, you can just replace a writer with AI. Because I have experimented as an exercise I was working on. What was it? A detective story with AI. It's like, "Let's see how this does." The things that comes up with her like, "Well, on act two, he should find clues." Of course. I compare it to you're working with a teenager who's only interested in what you're doing. It's going to give you like, "Yes, you're right, he should find clues in act two." But it will be like, I'm going to need to give it more if I want something back.

I think AI is going to be a terrific tool. I think it'll get to where it's accepted as a spell check. Years down the road, you'll almost get shamed. You'll be like, "Did you run this through an AI? Because this reads really poorly." You know what I mean? That's the kind of stuff that you can get it to help you out. But I certainly wouldn't use it as a load bearing piece of the creative process because it can be clever, it can give you things that you didn't think of, but those are coming from somewhere else. It really is important that you're doing the heavy lifting.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Have you found that your students are using AI as not just as an intern as you put it, but as the primary author?

Derek Toombs:
We haven't seen much of that. We've seen bits and pieces because now luckily there's things that can detect AI. We're not seeing actually a ton of that, because for us luckily, we're teaching the core classes. People are there taking those classes because that's what they want to do. I feel for the gen ed people, because I suspect they're going to see a lot more of that until we work out the kinks on how to explain to students. It's like the calculator. They always told you, "You're not going to have a calculator on you all the time." We do. It is nice that that's like a tool, but we still need to learn math and something.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, that's a great example, because I was told, "You're not going to have a calculator. You got to know how to do it." No. Who knew that you would have a video camera and a calculator with you? Okay. What is your prediction? Just AI... Let me back up. The writers are all scared of AI, at least reducing the number of writers in the writer's room. We can have AI do the first draft, and now we only need two to polish as opposed to six or seven sitting around. What do you think is going to be... What's your prediction about what's going to happen with that?

Derek Toombs:
Yeah, unfortunately, I think we will see a bit of that. I think the real fear is not the AI itself, but it's just that production companies are going to get their hands on it and they can save money and they will. But I think that already we're starting to see with... I'm a big Marvel fan of things like that, but you already are starting to see complaints that things are a little bit derivative or things are the same. I mean, I can only imagine how much more that will be the case with AI. I think people's tolerance for things that are just by the numbers is already low enough that even if you can save money on it, you'll lose money because people just aren't going to want to see that kind of stuff.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Jumping around. But it fascinates me, the approach. One of the things I saw where you approach a classroom like assembling an obstacle course for students. What does that mean?

Derek Toombs:
Because we're not brick and mortar and we meet once a week or so, but I'm never going to be the teacher who gets to sit on the corner of the desk and just lecture. What I need to be doing is laying out this, what I call an obstacle course, like a field day type deal where I recognize things that I learned maybe too late or challenge me or whatever. You just give them the tools and then you say, "Try this out. Let me see how you do with this." We're very project-based. We're very activity-based. Program-wide quizzes are the exception that proves a rule there. There's very few quizzes or definitely no matching stuff and things like that. We really are activity-based. What we really are doing is just setting up this. It's like a video editing challenge or a journalism challenge that you get to complete each week.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How many different areas of expertise are there? If you went online to look at what was offered. The spectrum.

Derek Toombs:
What's weird is it's wide, but it's overlapping. It's what we're finding. We talked about how across the industry they're looking for unicorns. At new student orientation, we show them this slide of a journalist. But what's interesting is we explain to them, it's a journalist standing in front of a camera. They're on site. You figure this person probably wrote their own story. It's very likely there's no camera person. They set up the camera. They probably loaded what they wrote into a teleprompter with an iPad or something like that. They're probably going to hop either in their journalism van or just in a coffee shop, edit what they just shot and send it off either to an agency that they work for or they're just going to put it up on their own blog. You look at somebody like that and you're like, "Well, what do I call what that person does or is?"

You're looking at all that melding together. In quite a few of the classes, we do a job search and they realize how many jobs are adjacent to storytelling. For example, one of my students found there was a snowmobile tour guide in Alaska, but they needed them to tell the history of every place they took them. They need a storyteller who can ride a snowmobile. It's wild. I mean, it's very vast. But everything is media, everything is communication. I think less and less we're seeing just somebody who's strictly a journalist or who is strictly in PR. But there's a ton. In our program alone, we do focus on journalism, graphic design, photography, videography, web design, and it's all interlinked. It's wild.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now, is this something that if somebody didn't necessarily wanted to get a certificate at the end of the day, but was just interested in a particular topic, they could come in and take a couple classes?

Derek Toombs:
We're working towards that. Right now, we are a bachelor's program. But we are working towards an associates and certificate programs in each kind of spoke of the wheel that we have.

Jon Pfeiffer:
What would people be surprised to learn about you or the college that you wouldn't think about?

Derek Toombs:
Yeah, let's think. I think one of the things that's most surprising even to the students who sign up that they don't realize what they had gotten into is when we introduce the instructors. On our team, we've got one of the guys teaching journalism was an on-air news anchor for 25 years. He still gets street spotted and stuff like that. I remember when he came to work for us, there were blogs wondering where he had gone like, "Why is he not on TV anymore?" We've got an Emmy award-winning news producer. We've got the podcast teacher is the host of the Apple Insider podcast. I think that you don't want to advertise a program just on its instructors because instructors come and go. But when people get in and they're like, "Holy cow, these are the people who are teaching me," I mean, that's a pleasant surprise that I get to see at new student orientation and stuff like that.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I did research, but I didn't find that you had a podcast class. How would you? Podcasting?

Derek Toombs:
That was interesting.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Maybe I can get some personal knowledge.

Derek Toombs:
Yeah. No, our podcasting instructor is remarkable. That's a fun one because it starts with introduction. There's a lot of the different genres of podcasts. People choose audio drama podcast maybe for the first time. Some of the students will take that avenue. There's a lot of that branding aspect that I mentioned where it's like... There's a student who for some reason they don't particularly like podcasts. We all agree, we're like, "That's the podcast I want to listen to." It's like, "I don't really podcast podcast," because that's such an interesting angle and there's probably not too many of those. There's a lot of that. It's finding your own voice and recognizing what's out there and seeing what people do well and where there's a gap you can fill.

Jon Pfeiffer:
My last question or second to last question. What are you working on now?

Derek Toombs:
Me personally, I've got two short films wrapping up their festival season. This is my first year really doing a festival run. Usually I just put stuff out on YouTube and stuff like that. That's been really cool. I'm ramping up production on my first feature. I'm doing a sci-fi adventure story about a park ranger who discovers that there's UFO phenomenon in his national park. I'm really looking forward to that. I'm still writing, and that's an interesting process because I'm writing for something super indie. I'll like write and then I'll go location scout and be like, "Can I even do this?" They can. It's kind of a cool process, but I'm really excited about that. That's what I'm working on lately. Then of course, like I said, our majors, our program is relatively new, so we're wrapping up our last few classes of curriculum development. I'm working on that at the school and that's always fun. That's one of my favorite parts, getting to develop the class. That's exciting. We're about to have our first graduate and stuff like that, so it's a really exciting time. A lot going on.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Last question. Where can people find you and find the school on the internet?

Derek Toombs:
Sure. The school is just pretty simple. It's just the LA Film School website, which I believe is just the initials, lafs.com. Then myself, probably best bet is Instagram. My studios is a mouthful. It's Newfangled Motion Picture Company. You can find me on newfangledmpc and that's on Instagram. The LA Film School has a TikTok and things like that. They've actually got a pretty fun TikTok. They participate in a lot of the fun sounds and things like that. Check them out there.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Thank you.