Through trial and error, the brothers discover that if you stuff a sock with sand, soak it in gasoline, light it with a match and shoot it into the sky, it looks just like an asteroid when it comes screaming back to Earth.
It’s the mid-1990s. Rhett and Burke Lewis, their camcorder at the ready, are waiting till it gets dark so they can start launching the socks and filming the action from the backyard of their home in the small Cache Valley town of Millville. After the mayhem is over, before heading off to bed, the boys check the images in their camcorder, pleased with their work.
All is well until the next morning, when Barbara Lewis, aka Mom, looks out the window and sees the backyard full of burned-out craters.
She grounds the boys from the thing they love most in life … their camcorder.
Little realizing she is interfering with their career development.
Turns out, setting things on fire and blowing stuff up was more than just a passing fad for the Lewis brothers. Coming up with creative ways to film the chaos they created — making it look bigger, different, wilder, more entertaining — never got old.
They’d bought the camcorder — at $900, a considerable investment in the 1990s — with money they earned from paper routes delivering the Logan Herald–Journal. Their first indication that someone liked their work, other than just themselves, was when they hosted what was probably Millville’s first film festival and filled up the gym at the Latter-day Saint wardhouse. Their first indication they could make money doing this was when they got paid for shooting sports team videos at Mountain Crest High school.
After serving Latter-day Saint missions to Peru (Rhett) and Mississippi (Burke), the brothers, who are just a year apart in age, looked at college and looked at continuing to make videos. College didn’t stand a chance.
They upgraded their gear, turned their parents’ basement into a studio, named their new company Studio One Pictures, and in the days before the internet and YouTube took off, went door to door telling Logan businesses why it made sense for them to make a promotion video. To help sweeten the deal, they partnered with the local movie theater to show a company’s video before the movie started — something that’s commonplace now, but wasn’t back then.
One opportunity kept morphing into another. They won a Utah Film Commission contest, which led to editing a Sundance movie, which led to working on the “I am a Mormon” campaign, which led to someone from Amazon seeing their work and retaining them just as Amazon was going into orbit. (It didn’t hurt when Jeff Bezos saw the brothers’ spot for Amazon Dash, featuring a voice-over by Rhett’s 4-year-old daughter Stella, and declared it his favorite video.)
Meanwhile, while this was going on, the company expanded by a third when another partner was added: Rhett and Burke’s younger brother, Taylor. Taylor had been enamored by the crazy things his brothers did ever since he was 5 years old and watched them launch their asteroids into the night sky from his bedroom window when he was supposed to be sleeping.
They also changed their company name to Atomic City, for no other reason than there’s a town in southern Idaho named Atomic City and they thought it sounded cool.
Traveling together near and far — they’ve filmed in more than 30 countries — the Lewis brothers have essentially turned the world into their own backyard. What they grew up doing for fun … they’re still doing it.
Their client list ranges across the board, as evidenced by the variety of videos on their website — atomiccity.com — where you can see everything from a man riding a buffalo to a cyclops to a champion windsurfer to Gov. Spencer Cox’s recent “Disagree Better” campaign to a snack food commercial to the Amazon Dash spot to many more. None are alike. Few are what you’d call conventional.
“We try to be fun,” says Rhett. “I feel like we’ve always kind of gone against the grain. We like to think of just really bizarre concepts and make something we would still watch if we weren’t making it. I think our weird ideas are just trying to get back to the roots of blowing things up. Although clients don’t always want to just blow things up.”
Oh, and what about Barbara, the woman who more than once took their camcorder away?
“Mom calls herself the doughnut lady, because she brings doughnuts to the set,” says Burke. “If she had the opportunity to be at our side every set, every time we film, all day long, she would do it. She’s our biggest fan.”
