A happy mentality

Tim O’Neil’s trailer production agency thrives on the joy of storytelling 

By Samantha Bronson

STEP INTO THE OFFICE of MENTALiTY Creative and you’ll quickly pick up on a sense of fun. 

A pack of employees’ dogs happily greets visitors to the light-filled office, where an eclectic array of movie and TV posters line the walls. Out on the deck, you’re treated not only to a view of the distinctive red tile roofs of downtown Santa Barbara but also to a sneak peek of the Pacific Ocean. 

The vibrant culture and beach vibes are underpinned by a serious commitment to producing award-winning trailers for movies and television series. Outside the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles, this Gaucho-founded boutique agency has made a name for itself. The client list reads like a who’s who of Hollywood studios: Disney, Pixar, Universal, Dreamworks Animation, Apple, Hulu, Amazon. The firm has done campaigns for “The Bear,” “Bill Nye Saves the World,” “The Wild Robot,” “The Paper” and a handful of movies they can’t mention until they arrive in theaters. 

“If you find the movie theater to be a sacred place, if you love the experience of going to the movies, and you go in and see your trailer play before a movie on the big screen, there’s nothing like that,” says founder and executive creative director Tim O’Neil ’01. “Our work is hard but it’s also play, and that’s what makes it fun. You’re constantly reading scripts, watching stuff, taking it from long form to short form. You’re thinking, ‘How do we make this 2½-hour movie into two minutes?’” 

O’Neil started the agency in 2013, but his experience in the industry extends further back. In fact, he first arrived at UCSB interested not just in film generally but in short-form film specifically. As a kid, he’d always loved movie trailers, calling them one of his “nerd obsessions.” 

After completing a double major in film and media studies and economics, O’Neil headed to Los Angeles. He worked as an assistant for a trailer company, then as a writer for trailers before joining what was then a startup, Create Advertising Group. O’Neil helped grow that company from just five people to about 100 in Los Angeles, with an additional 20 in a London office. 

The work was rewarding, he says, but over time, also personally depleting. After a lot of soul-searching, O’Neil decided to switch careers and moved to Santa Barbara with his wife and young daughter to pursue a graduate degree in psychology at Pacifica. Yet after classes, internships and homework, he’d head to his garage to work on trailers for friends still in the business. Before long, he was just as consumed as before but, with his second child on the way, something had to give. O’Neil quit graduate school after a year and MENTALiTY was born. 

UCSB was instrumental in helping O’Neil build a local team, he says, crediting UCSB’s head of production, Chris Jenkins, and the film and media program with steering talented students their way. “There’s no one in the trailer business in Santa Barbara,” O’Neil says. “We couldn’t just call our friends and say, ‘Hey, want to work for us?’ You had to train people, so we just started from scratch, hired the key talent to help us train and we built this incredible team.” 

O’Neil and the MENTALiTY team – half of whom are Gauchos – juggle anywhere from 10 to 15 projects at a time, all in different phases of production. 

When the agency gets an assignment, the first task is understanding the goals of the trailer. Who are the target audiences? What’s the key messaging? What’s the overall tone the client wants? What’s the most emotionally engaging story they need to tell? From there, they gather and sift through everything, from footage to scripts to possible music, and begin assembling a rough structure for the first version. It’s a collaborative process that taps into the creative energy of the team. 

“Every trailer is a different jigsaw puzzle that you have to figure out,” says Sydney Black ’18, editor/head of editorial. “They all have their different solutions.” 

Throughout, the team reviews, revises and gets feedback from the client. The entire process, from assignment to seeing it on the big screen, can take anywhere from months to a year or longer. 

Trailers they work on don’t automatically make it to theaters. That’s because studios typically work with several trailer houses to create potential trailers. O’Neil says MENTALiTY is often competing with three or four other agencies to get the so-called “finish” – the trailer the client at the studio ultimately chooses. When that happens, there’s a celebratory mood in the office and more work usually follows: the rest of the big ad campaign – TV spots, social media spots and creative content spots. 

That teamwork vibe is evident in the easy camaraderie among employees, who also often hang out outside of work. It’s an advantage of being a smaller, more nimble agency, O’Neil says, as is the ability to easily take on what MENTALiTY calls its Worthy Cause Creative projects, without the interference of bureaucracy or investors in their way. That’s their way of putting their entertainment skills to use on different causes important to them. 

To be a boutique agency working on big projects, all in this beautiful location, O’Neil says, is a dream. 

“When we first started, I wasn’t sure we could do this here. I thought that as soon as I told clients we’re in Santa Barbara that they wouldn’t send me projects since we were outside of L.A.,” he says. “But the location is actually an advantage. Clients love to come up here and see us. We like to tell them, ‘Come look at a cut on a Friday. Come here into the office. We’ve got a rooftop deck. You can see the ocean.’ Maybe we go out to dinner and then they have a weekend in Santa Barbara. Everybody’s happy.”