What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.
Unless the video you produced takes top honors at the Academy of Country Music Awards. Then you want the world to know.
Two days after the May 15 awards show in Las Vegas, Randy Brewer ('93) is still taking in the fact that "Before He Cheats," the video he produced for season four "American Idol" champ Carrie Underwood, won Video of the Year. It also was the first country music video featured on MTV's "Total Request Live."
"It makes me think, ‘What can I do next?' " he says.
During the past several years, Brewer has been busy making a name for himself through Revolution Pictures (www.revolutionpictures.com), the award-winning video production company he started in 1997. He produced Underwood's "Jesus Take the Wheel," which won the 2006 CMT Breakout Video of the Year.
In the face of such exciting success, Brewer remembers to stay grounded.
"I always pinch myself and say that any day, we could be right back to where we were before," he says.
As a student at ACU in the early 1990s, Brewer built a solid reputation through his video yearbooks, Welcome Week videos and a student-produced variety show called "Not Quite Live." After graduation, he headed to Los Angeles, where he basically lived in his car while working as a runner for a production company before getting into production management.
In 1995, Brewer moved to Nashville and started Revolution Pictures two years later. He and his wife, Julie, lived on her nursing salary while Revolution produced Christian music videos and lower-budget projects. Then recording giant Alan Jackson and other country music artists began noticing Revolution's work, and the company took off.
"When Carrie Underwood decided to use us in 2005, that really gave us some credibility," he says.
More important than keeping his bearings in the music industry for Brewer is keeping his faith at the forefront of his work.
"What does the success matter if I'm no different?" he says.
A frequent judge for ACU's FilmFest competition for student videographers, Brewer makes it a habit to hire interns from his alma mater not only to teach them the ins and outs of the music business, but also to encourage them to keep faith as their foundation.
"I tell them to remember who they are and what they learned at ACU, and then to go be whatever that is where they work in the industry," he says. "I'm always excited about the next ACU grads who are going to do great things in the music world."
