By Paul Bonnette
If you happened to be in downtown Panama City in April, you may have noticed a reddish tint adorning everything around Harrison Avenue. This was in celebration of Redfish Film Festival, Bay County’s first-of-its-kind documentary film festival featuring over 80 documentaries as well as block parties, speakeasies, meet and greets, and more. Redfish Film Festival is the brainchild of Bay County resident and ringleader Kevin Elliot. Although putting together a film festival has been a daunting undertaking, Kevin Elliot is well qualified. As the co-founder and lead producer of Wewa Films, a documentary film company based in Bay County, Wewa Films utilizes Corporate Storytelling and Destination Marketing for companies such as Tyndall Federal Credit Union, Johnstone Foods – McDonald’s, Destination Panama City, Maharaja’s, Panama City Toyota and more. A resident of Bay County for over three decades, Kevin has a deep love and understanding of the art community in the area and has plans to make sure Bay County is well known as the place to be for arts and culture.
Although Kevin Elliot was born in South Florida, he moved to Bay County as a teenager and knew that this was home. “I was an Air Force Kid. I was born in Miami, but we moved from there when I was very young, so I spent all of my childhood until I was thirteen moving around. We lived in South Florida, Kentucky, and California, and we lived in Germany for three years before we moved here, and [my father] got stationed at Tyndall Air Force Base. I was thirteen years old, and I’ve been here ever since. I fell in love with Panama City right away. I especially fell in love with downtown and the Martin Theater.”
For Elliot, the feeling of belonging was what made him want to stay in Bay County.
“I liked it here almost instantly. I never had a hometown. So, I think part of me was looking for a hometown. I wanted to be from somewhere.”
Although today Elliot is a well-known Marketing Manager and Creative Director, he has also owned and operated multiple businesses including a childcare center as well as a home renovations and property maintenance business. According to Elliot, transitioning into the field of marketing from being an entrepreneur was an exciting step forward.
“I wandered around. I’ve always been a wanderer. I got into marketing in a very roundabout way… At 36 years old I decided I needed to do something different with my life. I’d always been academic, and I always liked school, so I looked at Florida State University Panama City’s Master’s Program to see if there was anything on the list of what they have that appealed to me. The one that stood out to me was Corporate and Public Communications. Of all the businesses I’d been in and done, the thing I liked best was the marketing and communications part. Client communications, sales, marketing, I just liked doing that.”
Today, in addition to being the lead producer and co-founder of Wewa Films, Elliot is also the Senior Marketing and Communications Manager for Applied Research Associates, a strategic communications and training group that creates communications plans and multimedia technology for companies such as the Federal Highway Administration, the Florida Department of Transportation, the Air Force Civil Engineer Center and more.
For marketer, producer, and Bay County resident Kevin Elliot, the future looks bright as he has no intention of slowing down – plans are already in the works for the second annual Redfish Film Festival to take place in Downtown Panama City. For more information on Redfish Film Festival, please visit www.redfishfilmfest.com.
