Last March, James Khabushani and R.J. Collins were a couple of students at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and Chapman University's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, respectively, when they spent $1,500 on a commercial for Tesla that quickly went viral. The clip, which features a boy imagining his father's luxury electric vehicle as a spaceship, caught the attention not only of Elon Musk but of the Atom Factory's Troy Carter, who was shown the video while giving a lecture at their new media class. Shortly thereafter, Carter enlisted Khabushani and Collins' media and entertainment company, Everdream Studios, to make a heartwarming video for his client John Legend's "You & I (Nobody in the World)."
"Creatively they were equal, if not better, than a lot of production companies video directors we’d worked with in the past," Carter tells Billboard. "They didn’t have baggage of overhead or of working on half a million dollar music videos. For one of John Legend videos we had shot, we spent few hundred thousand on a video that he didn’t like; so we gave it to Everdream, which shot it for $30,000 in a three week shoot, and it's one of the best videos he's done so far. It just shows that money and creativity don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand."