Edwin Mejia and Vlad Yudin took the brave risk of producing films and other multimedia products when they started The Vladar Company. Since 2008, they have come out with a new films, and a hit graphic novel. They took a moment off their busy path to success to offer Cliché readers a peek inside how Vladar was formed and what’s to come in the near future.
Cliché: What made you want to work in films and with multimedia?
Edwin Mejia: Well, my background stems from finance as does his. Basically, Vlad had this vision to work with films. He started working on a project, entitled Big Pun: The Legacy, back in 2008, which I started helping him with the production side, or producing side. We started getting really great reviews and attention. We started making this into a business when we started working on the film Last Day of Summer, a production that featured Nikki Reed, from Twilight, DJ Qualls and William Sadler. That was our first featured narrative and then we started to work on several different properties which eventually became a mass multimedia production outfit that we started to create content on. Now, we have a least five, six different properties that we’ve acquired. We have three films in release. Our strategy was really to cultivate what we already had in the music world, by working this Sony Music to market and sale our music catalog to film and video. That helped us to expand into the motion picture film industry.
How easy or difficult is it to work with each other? And how do you split up the work? Is it different case by case or do you have different roles you like to fill?
Vlad Yudin: Well, you know that we definitely have our own responsibilities on every project that we do and with the company in general. So, it’s a process. It’s definitely easy for us to do it because we know what are responsibilities are and what our strengths are. We work as a team, of course. Everybody has their own job to do within the company. So, the past year and a half, we have been building a team around us, the company to make sure that we have a strong team of people that share our vision and help us progress further and further.
We also produce projects that are not ours, that we didn’t write. We just recently shot a film called Police State that Ed and I produced for another writer. So, it varies from project to project.
What was the motivation behind Generation Iron?
Vlad: The professional bodybuilding world is something that’s very unexplored. Pumping Iron was a great documentary that was released in 1977 and that introduced the world of bodybuilding to the masses. It started a revolution in sports and fitness. It introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lou Ferrigno to the mainstream world. Even though it started all these movements, professional bodybuilding still remains unexplored. So, everytime you come across a subject that is sort of misunderstood, you kind of want to explore it more.
When we started doing research, exploring the world of bodybuilders and it’s characters, we realized that they were very interesting, the sport was very interesting. We realized that there was a great story to tell there. So, that was the main inspiration behind the film. Of course, we teamed up with Jerome Gary. Jerome was a producer of Pumping Iron and he gave us more inspiration and motivation to make a film like this one
To read the full article check out our October/November 2013 Issue. Photos taken by Bobby Quillard
