Somewhere in the North Carolina mountains, in a U-Haul carrying everything I owned, my brain would not stop racing. I had just spent nearly every dollar I had to start a production company. I was nervous, and my spirits were high anyway. I had a dream, and Louisville was where I was going to build it.
That was September 1, 2014. Chronicle Cinema turns twelve today.
Twelve years later, that company is an award winning production house with its own stage, a comedy special about to premiere, and more than 5,400 videos behind it. This is the story of how we got from that U-Haul to here.
How it started
I was working at an agency in Greenville, South Carolina, and the agency was going through serious challenges. One of my teammates and I took an offer to the owner. The two of us would work for him free for three months and fulfill all of their video contracts, and at the end of it we would take all of his top of the line video equipment.
He said yes. Three months later I was driving west.
Four months at my parents’ house
My business partner at the time and one of our first employees moved back into my parents’ house with me. We asked my parents, Tim and Cindy Meiners, for four months. We would work, make videos for clients, and find a place of our own.
In those four months we completed more than 40 videos for 38 different clients.
And we kept the promise. On January 1, 2015, Chronicle Cinema moved into a two story condo on East Broadway in the Highlands. We worked on the first floor and we lived on the second.
The goal that drove us here was not complicated: provide the best video production in the Louisville region. We wanted to take what we had learned as filmmakers and make our own path with it.
In 2016, I bought out my business partner. I have owned Chronicle Cinema on my own ever since.
The year every contract went on hold
There have been plenty of challenges. The one everybody remembers is 2020.
When the shutdown came, every single contract we had was put on hold. Not trimmed, not delayed a week. Every one. There was no playbook for running a production company when nobody is allowed on a set.
Then Energy BBDO called about Woodford Reserve and the Derby.
It is April 2020. Churchill Downs is empty, all 150,000 seats of it, and two of our crew are standing outside the Paddock Gate in masks, flying a drone over a racetrack with nobody in it. We build the whole spot in eight days.
My Old Kentucky Home aired on NBC during the virtual Derby. It did 1.3 million views in its first 24 hours and it is past five million now, and it was one of the first national ads filmed during the pandemic. See the project.
That same year, HP called. Their events had to go virtual, so we built an interview kit that shipped in a box because nobody could travel. Those kits went to more than 30 states and four countries, and the work grew into Chronicle Connects, an entire vertical of the company.
“The thing that has defined Chronicle is not any one camera or stage or spot. It is adapting to meet our clients and the market in the middle of real adversity, and rising to meet it rather than waiting it out or playing it safe.”
What twelve years actually built
Between that U-Haul and today: an Emmy for Free Bird, the Lynyrd Skynyrd video directed by Max Moore, now past 31 million views. National spots for Hallmark and Mercer Transportation. A production partner on the a16z LP Summit since 2021. And Studio C, the region’s only LED wall virtual production stage, where we have since built four separate worlds in a single day and taped a comedy special in front of a live audience. And original work of our own, like Conversion, premiering to a packed house on our own red carpet.
None of it was done alone. Twelve years is a network of more than 175 crew, a full time team across Louisville and Jeffersonville, and clients who kept calling back long enough that we now plan years with them instead of projects.
On January 1, 2026, Chronicle acquired Vidionix, a company founded across the river in 2015, one year after we started. Twelve years is long enough that the companies you once watched from a distance end up under the same roof.
What the future looks like
Studio C is expanding. We are signing more long term contracts with clients who want a production partner rather than a vendor. Second Nature, our reality series with the TurfMutt Foundation, premieres in September. And the comedy special we taped at Studio C in front of two sold out audiences premieres October 3.
In 2027 we are starting something we have wanted to do for years: an education series for young filmmakers. Twelve years ago somebody let me trade three months of work for a chance to build something truly special. Not everyone gets an opening like that, and we would like to be the reason a few more people do.
What it has always been about
“It has always been about crafting stories that move people. And it’s not just what you make but how you make it.”
Zach Meiners, Founder
Communicating with clients. Meeting or surpassing expectations. Treating people well along the way. Those are not slogans we picked out later, they are the parts of this job that were true at the patio table and are still true on a stage with an LED wall in it.
Twelve years in, which is genuinely hard to believe, we are building a company strong enough to serve our clients and our community and to entertain audiences for a lot more years than this.
I still think about that drive. What I actually had was a U-Haul, a plan, and no real idea whether any of it would work. What I know now is that the not knowing was never the problem. The willingness to adapt was the whole job.
Twelve years in. Still adapting. Still growing.
What story are you telling?
Tell us what you’re planning, or come see Studio C in person. We have been at this a while.