UZ Media

UZ Media is a small and independent American production company formerly headquartered in Port Washington, New York; and now headquartered in Billings, Montana that's been owned by Adam Dulco and Gweneviere Sharp since 2023.
UZ Media was founded as UnitardZ Productions, an umbrella company by Zachary Serra, Gwen Sharp and Adam Dulco in 2016. Upon the end of 2015, Serra's YouTube channel UnitardZ started to be referred to as UnitardZ Productions, with the name of UnitardZ being used to refer to their wrestling and combat sports channel. This would set up the UnitardZ Productions company to overlap into their independent film wing, which would often film commercials for local businesses. In 2018, the company would begin the process of rebranding itself to UZ Media.
The production's videos and content are more than primarily based on the internet video-sharing website YouTube. In 2016; Serra announced that there were plans to open up new divisions with separate YouTube channels for diverse topics, including politics, sports and gaming. UnitardZ would launch "UnitardZ Gaming" in the summer 2016 alongside co-hosts, but the channel quickly fell vacant. In 2017; Serra would confirm that UnitardZ Productions was intended to become an umbrella for many of his future ventures. In April 2017, Serra would launch a new Twitter account centred around professional wrestling news, called "The Wrestle Target" which was originally run by Serra under three monikers, though hired employees would later take over the project. The Wrestle Target had become a sponsor of sorts to UnitardZ Productions and vice versa, with many of Serra's professional wrestling reviews on YouTube being subjected under the Wrestle Target umbrella. Serra would continue the company's soft expansion by opening a new ghost-writing company in February of 2018, called "The Lyricist Ghouls" which would see a staff of writers charge aspiring musicians ghost write songs. Serra eventually stepped down from overseeing the branch in August of 2018. In September 2018; Serra confirmed on Twitter that there were seven different locations in which the company operated out of. Serra stated that UnitardZ Productions was located in Stratford, Connecticut as of March 2018. Additionally; his personal music studio and his "The Hardy Complex" podcast projects were headed out of his personal home in Port Washington, New York. In addition to these projects, The Lyricist Ghouls and the Wrestle Target were both headquartered out of the third location in Hoboken, New Jersey.
In 2018, UZ Media saw more direct financing from outside investors through their work on independent commercial filming, which would eventually see multiple investors being given more direct power in the company. Over time, the company continued to invest effort into expanding their production into short films, though no projects were ever finished beyond scripts. In addition to this, UZ Media would enter the fictional story market with their launch of UZ: The Chronicles in 2018. Though the platform would only last until mid-2020, notable stories to premiere on the platform include Ollie Welsh's The Author, which would run for three series prior to The Chronicles closure before finishing with a fourth series on Welsh's personal website. Zachary Serra's Rise would premiere on The Chronicles in December 2018 and run for two seasons before Serra would choose to leave UZ Media. This would result in a case that led to The Chronicles cancelling the series and negotiating with Serra for the rights to the series. In 2020, the two sides came to an agreement that would allow Serra to continue the series on a different platform, but he would be unable to release the seasons that originally premiered on The Chronicles until 2024. Serra instead rewrote the first two seasons and eventually released them under the title of Rise: Remastered. Serra would create the small serial story network brand Pacer1, a platform similar to The Chronicles in its focus on serial stories, where he would release Rise: Remastered and the remainder of the original Rise series starting with the third season.
In 2020, UZ Media began laying off employees working with the company in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Zachary Serra was among those released in the first wave of layoffs in 2020, whilst Ollie Welsh was eventually relieved of his duties in August 2021. The company decreased its work staff by over eighty percent between 2020 and 2021, decreasing to 21 employees by the start of 2022. Gwen Sharp and Adam Dulco originally retained their roles as the company's president and CBO respectively, though their roles in the company were greatly reduced. In July 2022, the final location of UZ Media in Newport, Rhode Island was closed, and the company began operating solely online. In December 2022, the company began liquidating assets before selling UZ Media back to Sharp and Dulco as the rights to the intellectual property. Sharp and Dulco would take on the brand under their new LLC The Dulco Sharp Company before receiving a grant to relocate the company's operation to Billings, Montana in September 2023. A company statement released in early December 2023 suggests that the pair are openly hiring and plan to begin filming independent projects of an undisclosed nature in 2024.
== History ==
=== "UnitardZ Productions", Creation as an umbrella brand, Soft expansion, and Rebranding to UZ Media (June 2016-October 2019) ===
In June 2016, Serra brought on Brandon White, a classmate of his also known under the nickname of "Branflakes" to start making videos with him on a new UnitardZ Gaming channel. The channel was described as being an "extension of the main channel" under the title of UnitardZ Productions, which would serve as an identity in which his various projects would fall under. This, however, was to serve as a unifier between Serra's various projects and the nameless, independent studio he'd founded with Gwen Sharp, Adam Dulco and Ollie Welsh. Originally operating as a group effort, the four began taking on enough work to warrant establishing a proper company, which would take on the name of UnitardZ Productions. Through 2016 and 2017, the new UnitardZ Productions would increase their effort in the independent productions of commercials for local companies throughout New England.
Serra, however, continued to use the term to incorporate his other projects into the network as well. Though the UnitardZ Gaming channel would quickly fall vacant after its launch, the main channel continued to operate for multiple years under the original name of UnitardZ. In order to appear more professional, Serra would rename the channel to the UnitardZ Network in 2018 amidst an effort to break into the podcasting market, and launch a series called The Hardy Complex, a variety show that would run for two seasons from September 2018 to September 2019 on Podcast One and Radio One as a prelude to an eventual launch of a UnitardZ Productions-specific podcast network. This was a move made at the suggestion of investors in UnitardZ Network, who would pay Serra to begin the show as a way of garnering interest in the future podcast network that would never end up launching. In addition to this, Serra launched a pro wrestling news account on Twitter called The Wrestle Target and a ghost writing platform called The Lyricist Ghouls, both in 2017. Both would be promoted under the UnitardZ Productions umbrella for a period of time. The Wrestle Target would originally be run by Serra before being handed over to other employees before being shut down for budgetary reasons in 2019. The Lyricist Ghouls lasted the longest of his projects, running until 2021 under the oversight of then-Chief Branding Officer Adam Dulco. Alongside the launch of Serra's podcast, the company would begin the process of rebranding itself as UZ Media, a move that then-President Gweneviere Sharp admitted was in line with the desire for a more professional brand from outside investors. Serra's extensions on UnitardZ Productions were efforts that both kept his side projects aligned under one entity and attempted to quietly gage the interest audiences had in UnitardZ Productions projects to determine future investments for the company to make. Serra also planned to launch a music label under the UnitardZ Productions name shortly after becoming a founding member in the rock group Letter To Yesterday, though the label was never launched and Letter To Yesterday never released material.
Ollie Welsh, a scriptwriter from Orange, Connecticut that operates the Welsh Writes online blog, was the first outside contributor brought into the project in 2016, and would remain a well-established member of the project once it began operating under the name of UnitardZ Productions. Though Serra remained the face that the company promoted to the public as a faux-spokesman whilst Sharp and Dulco operated the company behind the scenes, Welsh became a large contributor to the creative processes behind UnitardZ Productions projects. Writing scripts for the local commercials that the company was responsible for putting together between 2016 and 2019, Welsh would eventually become the force behind the creation of UZ: The Chronicles in 2018, a webfiction platform that would run until financial issues brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic forced its closure. Though he was not a founder of the company, then-President Gweneviere Sharp admitted that the three founders viewed Welsh as being "their professional equal" in an interview with Providence Monthly in 2019. Upon its creation in 2018, The Chronicles featured web serials created by interested employees of the now-renamed UZ Media, including Welsh's own The Author in October 2018, and founder Zachary Serra's Rise in December 2018. Upon The Chronicles' closure in mid 2020, Welsh continued The Author for a fourth and final series in early 2021 on his Welsh Writes blog, whilst Serra would not only continue Rise for a third season, but would start a completely new venture in Pacer1 in January 2021, where Rise would continue being released alongside other originals. Pacer1 follows a very similar operation to Welsh's The Chronicles, though all of its original series are written exclusively by Serra.
In March 2018, then-UnitardZ Productions began taking on outside investments from private, interested parties. These investments afforded them the ability to open small offices regionally across New England to broaden their client base and take on more projects at once than they had previously been capable of. These parties were never named, but Sharp admitted they had "significant power" in the company through the influence of their investments in her 2019 interview with the Providence Monthly. Alongside investing in the opening of several new, regional locations throughout the northeastern United States, the investors provided funding for equipment with better quality and incentives for employees to relocate for further accommodation. Shortly after the involvement of investors, UnitardZ Productions began rebranding itself as UZ Media and hiring independent screen writers unaffiliated with SAG-AFTRA, with this move later being explained by Gweneviere Sharp in her 2019 Providence Monthly interview as the start of expanding into independent film production. In addition to the rebrand, Gweneviere Sharp was promoted as company's president whilst Adam Dulco was promoted as the chief branding officer. During the process of these promotions, Zachary Serra remained without an administrative title and carried on being referred to in the company as simply being a "founder" whilst Welsh remained without a title. In an interview with the Northshore Magazine in early 2020, Sharp revealed that Welsh had not been offered a promotion within the company, but Serra had been offered a the title of chief business development officer by the investors, however, he chose to turn the offer down. In late 2019, Welsh began promoting a short film he stated he was approved to begin planning for, affiliating it with UZ Media. Working with the early production title of "Short Walk on the Shoreline", the film would begin being promoted on UZ Media's website until April 2020, where both the promotional material for it and posts regarding it on Welsh's social media would disappear. At this time, UZ Media expanded to seven offices across New England, with one office in each state of the region and New York and had employed roughly two hundred people.
=== COVID-19, Layoffs, Departures, Drastic financial cutbacks, and Sale (April 2020-September 2023) ===
In March 2020, UZ Media announced they would be allowing all employees to work from home following the spread of the COVID-19 virus in the United States. All employees, including video and audio production staff and scriptwriters, were informed that they would not be allowed in the offices for a minimum of two weeks. Following the lapse of this order, select employees were allowed to return to their regional bases, including president Gweneviere Sharp, CBO Adam Dulco, and Zachary Serra, along with select members of post production staff that had been working on affiliated projects prior to the order. Following the completion of these projects, a second order would be given out to UZ Media staff in April 2020 preventing employees of all titles from returning to their regional bases. At the same time, the company announced that further releases through UZ: The Chronicles would be halted indefinitely, before releasing a memo the following day announcing that the project had been permanently cancelled. Three weeks later in May 2020, the order was lifted for high-ranking personnel only, including Sharp and Dulco, though Serra was not amongst those granted permission to return to their regional base. In the same month, announcements were passed out on behalf of Gweneviere Sharp, Adam Dulco, and those titled "Investors of UZ Media", warning that layoffs would be eminent to account for the lost revenue brought on by the shutdown. In June 2020, forty employees- including Zachary Serra- were laid off due to the COVID-19 virus and sixty further employees, mostly comprising of production workers, were furloughed. In September 2020, memos were handed out to all UZ Media employees that they were to be given two weeks to retrieve their belongings from each regional branch in the event that the company could not pay its rent for the spaces. In November 2020, UZ Media would lay off over one hundred further employees and furlough another thirty. In the same month, the company closed down its offices in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York.
In January 2021, UZ Media announced that they intended to resume operations with skeleton staff in the remaining locations. In February 2021, the company announced that they were undergoing managerial changes and that resumed operations would be paused whilst UZ Media continued operating unchanged. In June 2021, the company closed its office in Vermont and Connecticut, and laid off thirty employees that had worked there and initially been furloughed in the June 2020 wave of cutbacks. In that same month, services through The Lyricist Ghouls had officially been ended. In August 2021, the remaining thirty employees that had been furloughed over a year prior were laid off and ten others- including Ollie Welsh- had also been relieved of their duties. In February 2022, Gweneviere Sharp reported that all investors had pulled out of their responsibilities with the company, but a small group had begun the process of taking them to court over the physical assets and branding identity secured with their financial investments. In the same announcement, they confirmed that they would be continuing to operate until they were legally mandated to cease operations. In March 2022, UZ Media laid off a further fifteen employees, and a civil case was brought forward in New York over the rights to the company's likeness and assets. In July 2022, the company closed its Rhode Island location, shut down their website, and announced to all remaining employees that were ceasing operations effective immediately.
In October 2022, the unnamed group of investors were granted ownership over the UZ Media branding and the physical equipment purchased throughout the duration of their affiliation with UZ Media, and the case was allowed to close. In December 2022, the group began liquidating assets of UZ Media including all physical goods and the video library they owned. That same month, Sharp and Dulco launched a new LLC named The Dulco Sharp Company, and began negotiating with the investors for the rights to the UZ Media name. On December 24, 2022, an agreement was reached between the group and The Dulco Sharp Company to sell the rights to the UZ Media branding back to the original founders. On January 3, 2023, The Dulco Sharp Company purchased the rights to the UZ Media branding and all other affiliated products and projects from the investor group for $15,000 dollars. On March 12, 2023, The Dulco Sharp Company began applying for grants throughout the United States and reconnecting with former employees with offers to bring them back at a reduced pay if they desired. In September 2023, The Dulco Sharp Company received a grant of an undisclosed amount to relocate their business to Billings, Montana. In December 2023, the company announced that it would be resuming operations for the project and hiring immediately under the title of "UZ Media, The Dulco Sharp Company" and would begin filming independent projects in 2024.
=== The Dulco Sharp Company (March 2023-present) ===
Following its purchase by The Dulco Sharp Company, UZ Media would be reactivated and relocated to Billings, Montana. Along with this, Adam Dulco was announced as resuming his initial role as chief branding officer in the company, whilst Gweneviere Sharp would be given the title of chief administrative officer. UZ Media would begin operating as an extension of The Dulco Sharp Company, where both Dulco and Sharp would assume the title of Co-CEO's.