Mindy
Pastrovich.

The long version

How I got here.

Before either of the names on this site there was a portrait studio, which I owned and ran. After that came eight years of the calendar and the marketing at my family's Route 66 drive-in in Litchfield. Running an event is a very different education from photographing one from the outside. Then four years shooting for the Illinois State Senate. That is where you learn to move through a room full of people who are working and still come out with the frame. Alongside all of it ran a long stretch of sitting with organizations that could not explain in one sentence what they do. I stayed at the table until they could, then went out and produced the photography and video the campaign had to run on.

All of that lands in the same place. A photograph is not the end of the job. It is a tool that has to do something later, in a specific spot, for a specific person. Settle that before the shutter moves and the client gets a better product. Their business gets something it can put to work.

Message Matters Co. is the strategy practice. Driven by Story is the production arm. Both are me, and both run out of Central Illinois for now. That is why the brief and the shot list end up being the same document.

Here is the part a resume will not carry. Dogs and kids like me. At a festival the dogs arrive first. They lean on my leg and stay there. Then somebody's four year old decides I am worth showing a rock to. That is not a party trick. It is a working advantage. Once the kids and the dogs have signed off, the adults quit standing like they are having a photograph taken. The day starts looking like itself. I have been outvoted by a labrador and it turned out to be the right call.

Route 66 became a specialty almost by accident and then very much on purpose. Four years running I have been hired to photograph recognized gatherings on the Illinois stretch. The job is to document the people, the cars, the towns and the roadside culture that keeps the road alive. The centennial in 2026 is the best excuse anyone has had in a hundred years to get all of that down properly.

Away from the paying work I shoot whatever is in front of me. Old growth timber and creek water. Magnolias against the columns and the state capitol inside and out. Downtown blocks at last light, standing corn in October, whitetail at dusk, storm light coming across a field. The archive also holds the water and the coast range in southeast Alaska. The southwest is in there too, though it has not been sorted into a collection here yet.

Here is where this is going. Inside six months the truck and the RV go out for good and the work happens from the road. Route 66 comes first, since the centennial is putting a hundred years of it in one season. After that, a boat, and whale migration. That last part gets a laugh at parties and it is still the plan.

Before the camera was the whole job

Eight years running a Route 66 drive-in.

My family owned the Skyview Drive-In in Litchfield, Illinois for eight years. It opened in 1950 and it sits on the original alignment of Route 66. It is the last of the road's original drive-ins still running in Illinois. It went into the Illinois Route 66 Hall of Fame in 1998. That is the building we were handed the keys to.

I ran the schedule. Which films played which weekends, what the double feature was, when the gates opened, how the season started and ended. I built events on top of the movies, because a drive-in that only shows films on a screen is leaving most of the lot unused.

The marketing was mine as well. Every announcement, every ad, every post that had to put cars on a gravel lot by Friday night. That is about as direct a test of a message as the work gets. Either the lot fills or it does not. On Saturday morning you know which one you wrote.

Then 2020 arrived and the schools around us had nowhere to put a graduating class. We held graduations on the lot. Cars parked in rows, families in them, names read out, the screen behind the stage. We ran senior parades through the lot, so a class that had lost every other ceremony still got driven past people who wanted to clap. We put movies of the graduates up on the screen, forty feet of them. The school plays came to us as well. They could not be performed live that year, so they were filmed and screened instead. That was not a marketing idea. It was a field of gravel and a town that needed somewhere to stand.

In October 2022 we went after a Guinness World Records title for the most dogs attending a film screening. We ran A Dog's Way Home and an adjudicator came out to count. When the count closed, 199 dogs were on the lot and watching. The old mark was 120. Close to four hundred dogs turned up that night, but registration had to stop near two hundred for safety. Most of them came as guests rather than as record. A veterinarian stood by all evening. People drove in from five states.

The record has since been broken by a screening in Los Angeles, which is what happens to records. We set it, on Route 66, in a town of seven thousand people.

The part that carries over is this. When a festival organizer tells me the parade steps off at ten and the crowd hits its peak at one, I have stood on the other side of that. I have sold the tickets, moved the cars and worked the gate. I have watched what an audience actually does with an evening. That is the part you cannot learn from a shot list.

Illinois Route 66 on the record (opens in a new tab) Route 66 News coverage (opens in a new tab) The Skyview today (opens in a new tab)