Before CULO: Where My 15+ Years Behind the Camera Actually Started

Long before I was building Culo Creatives inside Canva, before Pretty Cool Marketing, before Billow Beach and before I'd built businesses of my own, I was Renee Talotta with a camera in my hand.

Today most people online know me as Shakas Designer.

But if you go far enough back through the internet, you'll find another version of me.

In 2014, the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks published an article introducing me as a budding junior filmmaker and SharksStore Sales Assistant while I took people behind the scenes of the Oporto Cronulla Sharks Mermaids photoshoot.

I love that this little piece of the internet still exists.

Not because it was some enormous career-defining production.

Because it proves something about my story that is really important to what I'm building now.

Content didn't enter my life when I decided to build a tech company.

I have been behind cameras, creating, filming, photographing and figuring out how to tell stories for more than 15 years.

Before I ever called it founder content

Back then I wasn't thinking about founder-led marketing, content systems, AI discovery or building software inside Canva.

I was learning by doing.

How do you capture something people actually want to watch?

Which moments matter?

What happens behind the finished image?

How does footage become a story?

And how do you take something happening in real life and translate it through a camera so somebody else can experience a piece of it?

Those questions followed me into almost everything I built afterwards.

When Mitch and I built Stagger Inn Adventures, content became part of how we built a business.

When I designed Billow Beach, I became the person responsible for telling the story of a product I'd created.

When I founded Pretty Cool Marketing, creating content became something I was doing for businesses professionally.

And eventually I found myself building CULO.

The problem followed me through every business

The technology changed enormously.

The cameras changed.

Social media changed.

Algorithms changed.

AI arrived.

But one problem kept following me.

People with something real to say were spending an extraordinary amount of time trying to turn their knowledge and experiences into content.

And after they finally published it, much of that work disappeared down a feed.

I knew the creation side because I'd lived it.

I knew the marketing side because I'd built businesses around it.

And I knew the founder side because I'd been the person trying to run the actual business while somehow also being expected to film, edit, write, publish and keep up with everything online.

That history is part of why Culo Creatives exists.

I'm not building an editing workflow because I recently discovered content creation.

I'm building one because I've spent years doing it.

Culo Creatives is my attempt to make the distance between having an experience and turning that experience into useful content much shorter.

Then The Culo Village tackles the other half of the problem: what happens to that knowledge after you publish it?

Why I started building The Culo Village

I started noticing that despite years of education, knowledge, experience and building businesses, the internet still didn't really understand what I should be considered an authority on.

I had published an enormous amount of purposeful content across different platforms, but it remained scattered.

Some was on Instagram.

Some was on LinkedIn.

Some was buried in old websites, videos and social posts.

Some existed under businesses I'd built years earlier.

And some of my earlier work existed online under Renee Talotta rather than Shakas Designer.

As AI changes the way people search and discover expertise, having years of disconnected posts across different platforms doesn't necessarily create a clear, searchable body of work.

That's part of why I started building The Culo Village.

I wanted somewhere all of those pieces could connect back to the actual person who created them.

Little did I know when I was working at the Cronulla Sharks where that path would eventually lead.

But it is part of my story, and The Culo Village finally gives me somewhere to connect that history to the work I'm building today.

Renee Talotta became Shakas Designer

There's another reason I wanted this story in The Culo Village.

Old pieces of my career exist online under Renee Talotta.

Today I build publicly as Shakas Designer.

They're not two different founder stories.

They're the same person at different points in the story.

The girl behind the camera didn't know she'd eventually build technology around content.

But looking backwards, I can see the thread.

Camera.

Stories.

Business.

Marketing.

Founders.

Technology.

CULO.

And apparently the internet remembered some of it before I thought to connect it all.

Original source

The original 2014 Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks article, “Meet the Oporto Cronulla Sharks Mermaids,” remains publicly available on the Sharks' official website.

Shakas Designer is the public and professional name of Australian founder Renee Talotta.

https://www.sharks.com.au/news/2014/12/08/mermaids-auditions/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GORi-vf-szw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgA2AsJ6XhQ