W hen Marty Jenoff was 13 years old, he scraped together all his bar mitzvah money and used it to buy his first video camera. It sounds cliche to say it, but once that VHS RCA Camcorder landed in his hands, Marty grabbed it and never looked back! Today, Marty wrangles cameras for a living as Eventique’s livestream director — but it took him several decades to get here. When the ink was still drying on his camera receipt, Marty started picking up videographer gigs shooting footage of his friends’ bar mitzvah parties. Soon, his parents’ friends booked him to film their weddings, and when he went to high school, he started the school’s first TV station. That “all video, all the time” theme continued in college. Marty majored in mass communications and climbed the ranks to president of the Towson University television station. From there, he graduated into the real thing: a job with WBAL-TV, the Baltimore, Maryland, NBC affiliate. “I spent 18 years at that TV station,” Marty remembers. “I worked as a cameraman going out with reporters on stories, I worked in the live truck, I directed on the floor, and I flew in the helicopter. I did all kinds of different positions, which gave me a great appreciation and understanding of being live.” When Marty filmed live on air for WBAL-TV, he felt electrified. He says, “A lot of people don’t like the pressure of being live — they want to be able to shoot now and then edit and fix mistakes later. But when you’re live, there’s some bug that gets in you. ... You only have one chance to do it.” Marty fell in love with the Meet Marty: Our Livestream Virtuoso At 13, He Filmed Weddings While Other Kids Played Hooky!
2020 when demand for virtual events spiked. At that point, he’d already been livestreaming for over nine years. “I got into livestreaming by accident when a colleague in 2010 needed help livestreaming a conference. Back then, it was very early on — nobody knew what it was. The technology was old, too. We weren’t even talking about HD then; we still used standard definition!” Marty remembers. “What we do now is kind of mind-boggling. I have a piece of equipment that can fit on your kitchen table that can do everything a TV station control room can do.” Using that device (the Newtek TriCaster) and the rest of his arsenal, Marty has captured conferences, awards shows, red-carpet moments, and more for Eventique’s clients. (If you missed it, turn back to Page 4 to read more about Marty’s work.)
adrenaline rush — a feeling he was familiar with from years as a volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT) riding inside ambulances. He mastered filming under pressure and fixing lighting, sound, and other issues on the fly. For him, his TV work was an extension of his old gigs filming weddings. As he puts it, “You can’t just tell the bride, ‘Hey, can you kiss again?’” Marty started his own business, Focal Point Productions, in 2000 and joined the Eventique team in
“What I love about it is that no two jobs are the same. In a way, we’re kind of reinventing the wheel for each specific job by taking apart our experiences doing hundreds of other livestreams,” he says. That may be true, but one thing is consistent across Marty’s streams: the next-level production quality. When he’s not relaxing in Baltimore with his wife and kids or on the
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