Christin Mell & Nicole Valentine
tellofilms.com, the brainchild of Christin Mell (left) and Nicole Valentine, is a web-based video distribution and production outfit for projects by, for, and about lesbians. It is a “team production” business model, they say, in which the money viewers pay to watch the projects gets channeled back to the artists so they can create more content. Founded in 2007 and based in Chicago, tellofilms.com has evolved with online video technology and does the back-end work for independent video makers all over the world. “We hear better ideas on the street than there will ever be room for on Network TV. Why should they go unproduced? We want to enjoy them!” say Mell and Valentine. These DIY experts are still humbled by their project. “We still look around and say, ‘this is so exciting! How did us nerds end up here?’…This has been a lot of hard work, but we started tellofilms.com to produce content we wanted to see and the site has become a forum for others to do the same. For us, it doesn’t get any better than that.” –KL
