Rocky Walls has spent nearly two decades building a career around one deceptively simple idea: stories help people see the world—and one another—a little differently.

In 2007, Walls and his brother-in-law and business partner Zach Downs launched 12 Stars Media, a Noblesville-based video production company that has grown from a scrappy two-person shop into a documentary-driven storytelling studio (that, among many other things, made a wonderful mini-doc about one our favorite local artists - Dan Thompson). Today, 12 Stars works with corporations and nonprofits to create character-centered films that help organizations communicate who they are, what they value, and why their work matters.

But Walls’ creative orbit has expanded far beyond client work. He is also the executive director of Hoodox, a nonprofit streaming platform and ecosystem-building organization for Indiana documentary filmmakers; a co-owner with his wife of Debbie’s Daughters Bakery & Cafe in Noblesville; and, most recently, part of the team behind Logan Street Theater, a small neighborhood theater opening in a historic building just a block from 12 Stars.

Across all of it, the mission is consistent: build community, spark conversation, support local storytellers, and help Indiana become more willing to tell its own story well. Walls is also a reminder that one person, rooted deeply in a place and willing to keep building, can have an outsize impact on a community. And Noblesville itself is worth paying attention to. Over the past decade, the city has grown into one of Indiana’s more interesting local hubs, with new restaurants, small businesses, public spaces, and creative energy that deserve more credit than they often get. If you haven’t been recently, make the trip. Yes, it is north of 86th Street. You will be okay! ;)

Indiana is full of places like this—communities doing far more than people realize—and part of the work ahead is learning to see, visit, and value what is already happening here.

p.s. DreamDox Filmmaker Conference returns on July 23, 2026. Register today!

Polina Osherov: You’ve been doing 12 Stars Media for almost 20 years. How hard was it to build it here?

Rocky Walls: I think it was kind of a double-edged sword. We started in 2007, obviously right at the beginning of a recession. That made things harder in some ways, but because we started in a recession and learned how to do things in that economic environment, I think it made us scrappy. It helped us with sustainability over time.

For the first few years, it was just me, Zach, and my amazingly supportive wife, Jessica. I don’t think we hired anybody for the first three years. I always tell people that our first year was “do anything for anybody.” The second year was “do certain things for anybody.” And the third year was “do certain things for certain people.”

It was really about learning what we were best at, what fulfilled us the most, and how those circles intersected.

PO: Do you consider yourself a serial entrepreneur?

RW: Not really. When I think of a serial entrepreneur, I think of someone who starts a business with the intent of exiting it. That’s the exact opposite of what we’ve done.

We've deliberately built businesses around the creative lives we wanted to live. We don’t want to remove ourselves from it. Have we hired people? Sure. Have we grown companies and seen the teams change many times over the last 20 years? Sure. But all of the things — 12 Stars Media, our family’s bakery, and now the theater — we started because we want to do that work. We enjoy it. It’s fulfilling to us.

And part of that is the sense of place. Doing it in Noblesville, where we’ve really invested in the community and where we have a really supportive community, matters.

PO: For people who don’t know 12 Stars well, how do you describe the company?

RW: 12 Stars Media is a video production company, but we lean very hard into documentary and docu-style storytelling.

Corporations will hire us for corporate brand, employer branding, corporate responsibility — things that tend to be very character-driven within an organization and less about marketing or selling products and services. We’re not really working with an organization’s products. We’re working with the organization’s people.

A great example is a series we produced for Amazon Design. They were recruiting new talent pretty aggressively, and they wanted a series that put some of their most aspirational leaders in front of people. We traveled from Seattle to South Africa, and a lot places in between, to show how some of the most interesting and inspiring people fulfilled the mission of Amazon’s design team through three- to four-minute mini documentaries.

The idea was that somebody might watch and think, “I never really thought I would apply for a role at Amazon, but I can see myself in this interesting person’s story.”

PO: So 12 Stars didn’t start out that focused?

RW: No. At the beginning, we were designing logos, building websites, all kinds of stuff. I wouldn’t say we pivoted as much as we refined.

After a few years, we realized we were really a video production company. Then after a few more years, we realized we were a video production company that didn’t really do traditional marketing. By 2016 or 2017, around our 10-year anniversary, we produced our first feature-length documentary film that was our own intellectual property and self-funded.

By then, we had settled into this idea that we’re really documentary filmmakers, and specifically character-driven documentary filmmakers. We like to say that we tell the stories of interesting characters who inspire communities to make positive changes. Or sometimes I say we tell the stories of interesting people who help you see the world differently.

PO: Is that what led to Hoodox?

RW: Around 2020, during the pandemic, we had three or four documentary films under our belts. We were networking with other people doing filmmaking in Indiana, and we saw this gap.

You had people doing really good work, and you had people who were conscious consumers. They wanted to eat local and support local. They would probably watch documentaries about things relevant to their community, too, but they had no idea where to find them. What are you going to do, look up “Indiana documentaries” on YouTube? You’re not going to find much, and you’re definitely not going to find some of the most interesting and relevant things because they fly under the radar.

So Hoodox started with the mission of spotlighting those great films. It started with the streaming service first, but quickly grew into something broader. If you’re going to support storytelling in Indiana, you need to support it from beginning to end.

That means helping fund films, providing professional development, mentorship, and other opportunities for filmmakers throughout the process. If filmmakers only turn to Hoodox when they’ve completed a film and are ready to put it on a streaming service, then we’re only supporting a tiny piece of the overall ecosystem.

PO: How many projects are on Hoodox now?

RW: There are over 130 titles streaming on Hoodox at this point, with hundreds of filmmakers and people in the film industry represented by that work from across the state.

We’ve also opened up opportunities like PitchDox, DreamDox, and LIFT for filmmakers to get mentorship, professional development, and financial support. That has served hundreds of filmmakers across Indiana. It’s been a wild ride already.

PO: What is the top-level impact of Hoodox?

RW: We’ve been able to create and sustain a nonprofit organization that now has a couple of staff members and has served hundreds of filmmakers. And after this year’s PitchDox, we will have given over $150,000 in financial awards directly to filmmakers.

That’s cash money put in their pockets. Not $150,000 worth of services. We’ve always said we want 50% or more of what we bring in as a nonprofit to go right back out into the pockets of filmmakers.

PO: How are you generating that support?

RW: Well, first we have some incredibly supportive partner organizations like Heartland Film, Indiana Humanities, Free Press Indiana, and, of course, Pattern. I’ve taken a hard line on not reinventing any wheels with Hoodox, so partnering with organizations to unite our efforts and accomplish more together has been essential and inspiring.

Financially speaking, a lot of our support comes from private donors, and now we’re receiving grant funding from places like the Indiana Arts Commission, the Herbert Simon Family Foundation, Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, and others.

One of the things we’re doing is helping foundations and donors feel more comfortable supporting filmmaking. Historically, filmmaking has been difficult for philanthropic organizations to wrap their heads around. There’s risk associated with it. Films sometimes don’t get finished. In fact, often films don’t get finished, and lack of funding is one of the reasons why.

But I think we’re helping demystify that and make the ecosystem a little more risk-tolerant. If you know you can support a documentary film through Hoodox, and Hoodox has other resources and guardrails in place, maybe you’re more likely and more capable of supporting it.

PO: You’ve recently gotten involved in statewide film advocacy work through the Creative Economy Leadership Alliance (CELA) Film Council. Why does Indiana need that kind of organizing?

RW: Organizing matters more than people realize. If we can pool resources, make better connections, and increase the inputs into this industry, we can create a stronger environment for people who are making a living—or trying to make a living—in film and media.

For me, CELA’s Film Council is about more than one program or one organization. It’s about organizing the people, resources, and advocacy needed to make Indiana a better place to make films, support filmmakers, and help people understand the value of this place.

PO: Why does storytelling matter to Indiana’s larger economic and cultural future?

RW: Storytelling and economic impact are inseparable. Nobody moves a corporate headquarters to Indiana without somebody telling a story. Nobody chooses to live somewhere without some idea of what that place is like.

I think the opportunity Indiana has is to better tell stories about our people, places, culture, and art. Sports are important, of course, but there are so many other things that make a place.

There’s untapped potential there to help people from outside Indiana understand us, but also to help Hoosiers understand that we have a lot to be proud of. We have a lot to celebrate. We have a lot of stories we can tell in a way that honors who we are and lets us put our Midwestern humility aside for a second.

Some of that is philanthropic. Some of it is about socially important work. But some of it is also tourism, talent attraction, and convincing people that Indiana is actually a great place to live, work, and play.

PO: What do you think emerging filmmakers often misunderstand about building a sustainable career?

RW: Sometimes people have this idea that you can be a full-time filmmaker, and what that looks like is just being out there making fictional movies while somebody pays you to do that. That might be the case for a fraction of a percent of people who call themselves filmmakers.

It’s very uncommon for a filmmaker to be doing exclusively what a lot of people think of as “the art”—just what they want to do. Most of us are finding ways to also do that work for somebody who wants to pay us.

The number of people who want to create content—filmmakers, influencers, media producers of all different kinds—is only going to increase. That’s the world we live in. You’ve got young people going through school thinking, “I’m going to make YouTube videos,” or “I’m going to be an influencer.” That’s fine. There are jobs like that for some people. But there are inadequate resources to help those young people figure out what they really want to do.

If someone says they want to be a YouTuber, is it because they love cameras? Because they love to perform? Because they love sharing opinions? Those might be completely different career paths. Maybe they actually want to be a marketing director. Maybe they want to be a videographer. Maybe they want to act.

We need better resources to help people understand how to use that creativity, and we need to be more honest about the business side. You can be a good filmmaker, but unless you’re going to work for somebody else, you also have to be a smart business person. Being a good filmmaker isn’t enough.

PO: Pattern and Hoodox recently received a Community Collaboration Fund grant to launch Greenlight Labs, a program that will provide business mentorship and training for emerging filmmakers. What do you hope filmmakers take away from that experience?

RW: It took us 20 years to get to where we are with 12 Stars Media. I’d like to see us work together to shrink that timeline for other people, so they can learn some of what we learned in three to five years.

I want filmmakers to see all the different ways you can do this work. It is just as noble and viable to get a full-time job somewhere and make films on the side. There’s nothing wrong with that. For some people, it may be the best way to do it.

If you don’t want to chase freelance opportunities, network, build relationships, estimate projects, send invoices, or do sales, it might be better to let somebody else handle that. Get a job and do the filmmaking for somebody else.

A lot of the work we do at 12 Stars Media probably isn’t even on most people’s radar. Most people think video production means advertising, commercials, music videos, or movies. But there are a lot of other ways to do it. Some people make a lot of money filming weddings or other events. There’s nothing wrong with that.

That’s what I hope Greenlight Labs can do: expose people to the different ways this career can work, celebrate those ways, and give them some of the tools they need to be successful.

PO: You’re also opening Logan Street Theater. How does that fit into everything else?

RW: What we want there is similar to all the other things we’ve done. We want people to come there and be inspired. We want them to think and have conversations. We want them to connect with their community.

We say Debbie’s Daughters is your neighborhood bakery. Logan Street Theater will be your neighborhood theater. It will be guided and shaped by what the community wants along with some new things we hope to introduce the community to.

PO: With so many roles — 12 Stars, Hoodox, the bakery, the theater — how do you keep your own creativity alive?

RW: I’ve had to work really hard as I’ve taken on all these different roles and responsibilities to make sure none of them completely consumes me, and that I get to continue to be creative and artistic in my own ways.

I’m an artist. I’m a chef. I’m a photographer. I’m all these different things. As a creative person, I’ve had to learn that it’s healthy to create - and not just for money. We're constantly told to monetize everything we create. I actually think it's healthy to push back against that. Some creativity should exist simply for creativity's sake.

One of the ways I do that is through photography. I travel a lot for work, so I balance the work by doing street photography in my downtime. 

Another way is through drawing. A series of outrageous character drawings I started on last year, called Slice Freaks, is my way of tapping back into the personality, texture, and a bit of gross-out charm I grew up loving - Madballs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Nickelodeon. Every new Freak is just a fun challenge to see how much attitude I can cram inside one of the best shapes on earth: a slice of pizza.

My medium changes. Sometimes it's a documentary. Sometimes it's a bakery. Sometimes it's a theater. Sometimes it's a sketchbook. For me, they've all become different ways of doing the same thing: creating spaces where curiosity can grow, bringing people together, and helping us see the world and one another a little differently.

This story was made possible thanks to the generous support of our friends at Life in Indy.