Dakotah with Kota Video Productions blends cinema, storytelling, and 10 years of experience to showcase what makes you unique.
We bring over 10 years of experience to capturing your moment and telling your story. We invest in top of the line camera and lighting equipment as well as editing software.
Dakotah came into film through writing. He started posting videos as a teenager, learned structure before he learned gear, and still builds every project around a beginning, a middle and a turn. That order matters. A wedding film with beautiful drone footage and no story is a slideshow. A brand video with a polished voiceover and no point is an expensive scroll-past.
The practical version of that: you get asked questions before anyone unpacks a case. How did you two meet? What does your customer misunderstand about you? What is the one moment you would be upset to miss. The answers shape the shot list.
Kota Video is based in Carlsbad and works across San Diego County, Riverside and Orange County. Weddings on the sand at Moonlight Beach. Brand films along the 78 corridor. Nonprofit galas downtown.
Weddings. Cinematic highlight films, full ceremony and speech coverage, guest interviews, drone, and social cuts you can post the same month. Collections start at $1,800, and couples booking with Kota typically spend around $2,300.
Brand and commercial video. We help tell your brands story through a creative lens and provide high production value social content for your business. Brand films, product and service promos, founder stories, testimonials, recruitment pieces and real estate video.
Events. Conferences, fundraisers, grand openings, bar and bat mitzvahs, city and municipal projects. Highlights, interviews, and cutdowns that give your marketing team something to work with on Monday.
Carlsbad is home base, which makes North County the shortest drive: Encinitas, Oceanside, Vista, San Marcos, Del Mar and Solana Beach. From there, the range covers the City of San Diego, La Jolla, Coronado, Point Loma, the Gaslamp Quarter, plus Temecula, Riverside and Orange County. Destination work is available, and travel is quoted honestly.
Local knowledge saves money on shoot day. Kota already knows that most of Carlsbad’s coastline sits under California State Parks jurisdiction rather than the city’s, that Encinitas runs its own six beaches, and that flying a drone near McClellan-Palomar Airport means pulling FAA authorization before takeoff, not after.
1. A real conversation. Fifteen minutes on the phone or a coffee. What you need, what it’s worth to you, whether Kota is the right fit. If it isn’t, you’ll be told.
2. A written scope. Deliverables, runtimes, crew size, hours and price in writing. Wedding collections are fixed. Commercial and event work runs roughly $100 per hour on a half-day or full-day basis, adjusted for crew, gear and post.
3. The shoot. Professional 4K cameras, cinema lenses, lighting, wireless audio, gimbals and drone as the project requires.
4. The edit. Colour, sound, licensed music, and a review round so the film lands the way you pictured it.
Photography is handled in-house rather than subcontracted, which matters more than it sounds. When one team runs both, the shot lists are built together, the timeline gets negotiated once, and nobody is standing in the frame you paid for. Headshots, candids, architecture and full wedding galleries are all bookable alongside video on a single contract.
Ten years of work. A 5.0 rating. Couples who use words like breathtaking and beyond anything we could have imagined. Businesses and nonprofits who came back for a second and third project.
Video earns that attention for a reason. In Wyzowl’s 2026 survey of marketers, 82% said video delivered good ROI, 85% said it generated leads, and 83% said it directly increased sales. Those numbers only show up when the film is built on a real story rather than a template.