Octavian (Tavi) Coman - Awesome Videographer

Tavi is one of the first to get to every CreativeMornings Friday and you might not even know he’s there.

Ever since primary school Tavi knew that he wanted to do journalism. He was 10 or 11 years old when he designed and wrote a newspaper by himself and 18 years old when he went to a local radio station from Brașov, his hometown, and asked if he could stick around and learn radio.

He went on studying journalism in Cluj and went back to radio during college, doing news for another station in his hometown, and then in Cluj. Three years later he made it from local to national and started working as a news reporter at Europa FM, one of the biggest private radio stations in Romania (it’s where he also met Ani, now his wife and the mother of his son). Being a more introverted person, Tavi had fallen in love with radio journalism because he could use his voice to get close to people and to share important stories with the world.

Growing more and more attached to radio features rather that news, Tavi got the chance to practice them more in the year he spent at BBC Romania in 2007, and later at the public radio station, where he got to work from in war zones like Afghanistan. His will for constant learning and development made Tavi start his own media production house: Content Media. He bought his first video camera and started learning to use it on his own as well as through some classes he took in the US. One of the dearest video features he managed to do was the story of his cousin Cătălin, who was deadly shot in the Romanian Revolution of ‘89. It was the first story that had a personal touch to it as well as factual information, and it was also a way for him to get to know his own family better. The story brought him to the narrative nonfiction magazine DoR (Decât o Revistă) and it was the beginning of their collaboration, during which he also got to be the video master of The Power of Storytelling conference.

The CreativeMornings Bucharest crew gave him a warm welcome in January 2016 and since then he’s responsible with getting every talk on camera and editing it so you can watch it later. ”I think that the success of every Creative Morning is the empathy that ensues, the fact that you can identify with the one speaking on stage.” His favorite talk so far is the one Mazilique gave on ‘Risk’, because hearing her story made him realize once again that it’s possible to make it as a freelancer.