I started in Dutch television in 1990, at Endemol, in production. We shot on 16mm and 35mm — you loaded a magazine, you got eleven minutes, and you didn't see what you'd filmed until the lab sent the rushes back the next day.
Then I taught myself to edit. Nobody sent me on a course; I stayed late at the production company and worked it out on the machines after everyone had gone home. Editing was linear then — you assembled the film in order, and recutting scene two meant redoing everything after it.
Music videos were taking off in Holland, so I started my own production company and directed them. MTV, TMF. That ran until 1999.
Then my girlfriend, who is Spanish, had had enough of Holland. We moved to Barcelona. I started directing commercials in a country whose language I didn't speak, and built a service production company for northern European crews who needed a stable climate to shoot in. Suzuki, Heineken, Sony, Nintendo, Rexona, Pepsi, PlayStation, Sanex. A music video with Snoop Dogg, another with Liam Gallagher's Beady Eye, a Danet commercial with Ronaldinho while he was at Barcelona.
Then I moved to Ibiza, for nature instead of city noise. Smaller crews, so I picked up the camera and the edit myself again.
The pattern, and why it matters here.
Look at what actually happened four times: film gave way to non-linear editing, then to digital, then to online, and each time I taught myself the new thing because the old one was ending.
Every one of those changes came with the same two reactions — people insisting it was a gimmick, and people insisting it would replace everyone. Both wrong, every time. What actually happened was quieter: the tool changed, the craft stayed, and the people who learned it kept working.
AI is the fifth. Two years ago I started studying it properly — what it does, what it doesn't, and where it genuinely helps a small business rather than adding another tool nobody opens.
And same as the other four times, I didn't learn it alone.
Studying AI properly meant spending time where it's actually being built, and that put me among developers — most of them a good deal younger than me, all of them knowing things I didn't. They were generous with it. I asked a lot of basic questions and nobody made me feel stupid for asking.
I still work with several of them, project by project. When something needs building properly rather than assembled from tools, they build it. I'll tell you who is working on your project before it starts.
Thirty years of production taught me how companies actually run — not how the org chart says they run. They taught me what's possible to build. That combination is the whole idea. Most people offering this have one half or the other. The useful part is where they meet.
If there's a thread through all of it, it's this: I've never been frightened of the thing I didn't understand yet. That's most of what I'd bring to your business. Not certainty about AI — nobody honest has that. Just no particular fear of it, and thirty years of evidence that working out the new thing is survivable.
What that means for you.
I sit down and listen first. Then I come back with a proposal about one specific process, with a way to measure whether it worked, and a point where we stop if it doesn't.
I won't tell you how much you'll save. I'll tell you how we'd measure it.
Still making films.
I still direct and shoot — that hasn't stopped. If your project needs a film, I make films. See room-service.tv.
Sometimes both matter at once: the workflow that captures what your business knows, and the film that shows it. Not many people do both ends.
Right now, VIVAI is me.
One person, thirty years, and a method — plus the developers above, and editors and crew when a shoot needs them. I'd rather say that plainly than hide behind a "we".
Roderick Schröder Ibiza, Spain LinkedIn
The useful part is where they meet.