Grant Smith

Alumni

As the owner and creative director of the video production company Two Mile Media, Grant Smith creates video content for clients in the Upper Peninsula and beyond. According to Grant, the year he spent studying at Bay College helped him get to where he is today.

Grant graduated from high school in 2015. As a homeschooled student, he knew he wanted to go to college to study film, which he had been interested in since he was ten years old. However, he didn’t know where he wanted to start his college education.

“My parents encouraged me to get my general education classes done locally to save money,” he said.

Thus, Grant decided to sign up for classes at Bay during the Fall 2015 semester. He was also encouraged by the school’s convenient location and strong class selection.

“The year I started at Bay, they had just introduced a digital cinema class—that was of interest, too,” he said.

In the Fall 2015 semester and Winter 2016 semester, Grant was a full-time Bay student majoring in art and design. While he took general education classes like math, psychology, and economics at Bay, he also enrolled in two art classes per semester (including the school’s then-new digital cinema course).

These classes proved to be a highlight of Grant’s Bay College experience. More specifically, he said Kristine Granger (the instructor for his art classes and Bay’s fine arts coordinator) proved to be one of his favorite teachers ever.

“We were encouraged to think about art more deeply and from multiple perspectives—both as an artist and as a viewer,” he said.

Additionally, Grant submitted pieces he worked on in his art classes to Bay’s student art exhibitions. There, he won awards in the photography and cinema categories.

After the Winter 2016 semester, Grant transferred to Northeast Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay. He stayed there for another year before transferring one more time to Compass College of Film and Media in Grand Rapids.

In 2019, Grant received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Compass College (with a concentration in film production). Though he started putting his new credentials to work shortly after graduating, unforeseen circumstances forced him to change plans.

“After graduating, I started to work as a freelance videographer in the Grand Rapids area—but then, COVID-19 hit and the city shut down,” he said.

As a result, he moved back home to Gladstone in 2020.

“By that summer, I was getting tired of staying home, so I got back to work on establishing my own LLC. I began looking for clients in the area who needed help producing videos for their websites and social media,” Grant said.

That LLC was Two Mile Media, which Grant still runs today. Though he juggled Two Mile Media with a part-time job at TV6 for a few months in 2020 and 2021, Grant has focused entirely on his company ever since. And while he is currently working to expand his business’ client base, he said things are off to a solid start.

At Two Mile Media, Grant is responsible for everything from planning, filming, and editing videos to handling accounting for his company.

“Since I’m a business owner, there’s always something to keep me busy,” he said.

He said the lessons he learned about filmmaking at Bay have helped him thrive in this position.

“In my digital cinema class, we were instructed to develop ideas, write scripts, and find locations, props, and actors for our films. That gave me real-world experience on how to go about the filmmaking process, which I have been able to apply to a more corporate setting,” Grant said.

Grant’s time as a Bay student also helped him understand the importance of teamwork in the working world.

“Kristine cultivated a culture of collaboration, where students helped each other when they needed ideas. I’ve brought that mindset into the work I do every day—I can’t do everything myself, and other people are gifted in certain areas I’m not gifted in,” he said.

Based on his own experiences, Grant said local students planning to go to college should seriously think about starting at Bay.

“Bay has a lot of resources and opportunities that I didn’t know about until I started going to school there. They helped me quite a bit when I was starting out in my college career,” he said.