“Flying by the seat of our pants.” “Coping with learning curves.” Those are the types of phrases production and post companies in the Midwest are using to describe how they are dealing with the challenges and opportunities brought on by new technologies and alternative advertising mediums. But despite the uncertainty of it all, the excitement in their voices is palpable.
“To me what’s exciting about getting up and going to work everyday is every single day some new development in digital media happens. And it’s not very often in history that you get to be a part of something–an emerging form of communication,” says Mitch Apley, executive producer of Resolution Digital Studios (RDS) in Chicago. “When I was born, everyone had already figured out how to make movies and television, but right now we are still in the process. We are still trying to figure out how to make this Internet video work and it’s just cool to be a part of it.”
Not only is it cool to be part of forging a new world, it’s good for business.
“Post is doing very, very well. The variety of new outlets for produced material is helping post. It seems like it is very viable even though Detroit has lost some automotive accounts,” comments Sheldon Cohn, executive VP, director of broadcast at Doner Advertising in Southfield, Mich.
But with the trend towards digital acquisition and digital finishing becoming more and more the rule and not the exception, not all companies have stayed viable and some have had to close up shop.
“Part of it is that transitioning from an old analog system to an HD system is expensive. It’s not because the HD technology is particularly pricey, because it’s all computers and pricing is going down, but paying off your legacy analog gear is expensive,” explains Apley. RDS has been around for a little over a year now. “We were fortunate to come into existence without the baggage of two-inch decks and one-inch decks. And we were able to create an HD workflow that is cost efficient and effective.”
In the past year, Steven Wild, president of Grace & Wild in Farmington, Mich., has experienced growing interest in finishing work in HD, and not just from commercial producers. “Many customers producing digital signage, independent theatrical content, long-form broadcast and business television are now either creating or budgeting HD projects. At the same time, they are very tuned into the concept of re-purposing their program material for alternative media distribution, such as Internet video, podcasts, cell phone messaging, etc.,” he says.
Grace & Wild’s production and post division hdstudios was recently called on by Pass Left Productions of Hillsborough, North Carolina, to shoot half-hour broadband programs in HD and edit and format the programs for Internet delivery for the Borders Group. The Borders’ Book Club programs can be viewed as webcasts on the Bordersmedia.com Web site.
“The HD multi-cam shoot took place on location at a home in Border’s home town Ann Arbor, Michigan. Flash programming and DVD authoring and various format conversions were also provided for the website,” explains Wild.
“This was the second webcast we created for Borders, and they have several more projects planned.”
The complete package Apley notes that a lot of the work RDS does encompasses an entire project from start to finish, which is what attracted the attention of TV production company Intersport to RDS. Intersport tapped RDS last year during college basketball’s March Madness to create some of the first straight to mobile phone content.
“They chose us to help them to do something for Sprint’s Power Vision Network. We did news and coverage and updates of the NCAA men’s basketball tournaments. We did hundreds of two- to three-minute hits. Ten minutes after the announcer was done talking, we would have something up on the phones,” Apley recalls. “So we were rolling a live cut directly into an edit system, generating the graphics on the fly, slapping them together, putting on the music, compressing the file, and boom. It was basically like a news broadcast but instead of a tower we were uploading the files to an FTP site.”
He adds that they created the metadata and the file structure for all of the files so they showed up in the right order on the phone. “We were handling all of the stuff and it was a huge learning curve, because no one’s ever done it before.”
It’s looking like the RDS team will be doing it again this year because it was a big hit for Sprint. Although the client did not release any official numbers, Apley says it had a huge upswell in its web traffic and the numbers of subscribers.
Apley says RDS is also actively pursuing other original digital media creation. The company just produced an original short-form comedy pilot for NBC Universal’s dotcomedy.com. The web network features stand-up, highlights from television comedies, entire episodes from old-school sitcoms and original shorts and digital series like RDS’ Kyle’s in a Coma.
Show me the money The thing about digital media that Apley and others find a little bizarre is the lower price points. He says that compared to normal broadcasts where price points are $30,000 to $50,000 for a half-hour pilot, digital media is a fifth of that. No one has really figured out the structure of digital entertainment and how to monetize yet. But now that the big guys like Google and MySpace are getting involved, he believes an infrastructure will be put into place.
“This year because of Goo-Tube and Newscorp pushing the MySpace video site pretty hard, I think people are finally going to start making money on this in a pretty major way. Maybe not on cell phones just yet but definitely on the Internet,” says Apley. “And as the models come to light that are profitable, then I think we are headed for a time of pretty serious prosperity. All the white papers I’m reading would suggest that in the next three years, we’re looking at billions of dollars.”
Until then, digital media creation is at least opening up the doors for more ideas to be brought to light because lower cost production means networks are willing to risk more. “The fact that Budweiser has dedicated so many millions of dollars to their own web-based video network, Bud.TV, production companies like us salivate over stuff like that because we’ve got a million ideas. This new emphasis on digital media over the Internet is opening up a lot of opportunities for people with ideas more than the transition from analog to digital television.”
One company bringing ideas to the table for Bud.TV is SEED, a branded entertainment company affiliated with Venice, Calif-based Backyard Productions. Company partner Roy Skillicorn still calls Chicago home. The Backyard family also consists of Transistor Studios, a company specializing in motion graphics, web, print and DVD design.
“We have three entities and the beauty of that is we have the opportunity to create content and produce it in one family,” Skillicorn says, reiterating the importance these days of having a one-stop shop, which Apley alluded to earlier. Skillicorn is proud of the work they completed for Bud.TV, adding that he was not at liberty to discuss the details of the three projects but says that two of them are reality shows.
“There is a big learning curve there. You have lots of cameras and unscripted lines and it’s a very new world for us. Basically we are kind of flying by the seat of our pants in some cases,” he says with a laugh. He added that Backyard and its affiliates are not alone. “Other companies are on the forefront of this–we are all kind of setting our own rules and trying to get the client to understand our interests and making sure it’s a smooth process.”
Spots alive and well All of these new advertising vehicles are not a death knell for traditional spots either. Instead Skillicorn believes the industry is going to see a resurgence of creative in commercials because they will have to compete. Tom Duff, president/partner of Optimus in Chicago, agrees that commercials are still very much alive. But he is seeing augments to them as “packages.”
“Where we used to define a package as a number of :15s, :30s and :60s, now we see a couple of spots, a webisode, a cinema piece, a print piece or even a longer format branded content piece to be integrated for image purposes as opposed to a specific one time, one message application type thing,” Duff explains. “Not to mention finish it in HD, then they need it in three different formats and seven different standards for global use.
“Why? Branding itself is becoming more complex because of competition, there are a million various mediums available for getting the message out there, and the world is getting smaller by the day.”
It’s a small world Bob Ebel, president of Ebel Productions in Chicago, is being affected by how the Internet has made the world a smaller place. He is receiving a lot of interest from clients in Europe and from cities like London, Milan and Moscow. “I think the Internet has been the tool for that,” says Ebel. He recently met with a production company that is interested in repping him in Europe.
“It’s interesting. What they’ve done is taken my work around to some of the agencies in London. They have never seen that type of work in London. They were very excited about it because they are looking for something different. A lot of the kids’ work we do is unscripted.”
And because of the way he works with kids, he is getting more interest from agencies who want him to work his magic with adults. He garnered attention with the Hallmark campaign for DDB Chicago featuring adults that he did a little over a year ago. He is currently bidding on a project out of California that would also feature adults. “We’re doing a lot where we use non-actors and it’s really fun. What’s critical is the casting, finding the great people and then allowing the people to be themselves in front of the camera.”
When asked if the growth in popularity of this candid, non-scripted unrehearsed work has anything to do with the user-generated content trend, he said, “I think people can tell today when there is an actor acting. And when you create a commercial that doesn’t look like a commercial, I think it’s refreshing.”
Cohn personally wonders if the trend of pure awareness–an outrageous spot that is strictly for awareness and entertainment sake and doesn’t really have a strong selling message–has peaked. “Spots still need to be entertaining and get awareness but combined with a selling message. I think people are going to start to realize, all the awareness in the world, so what? It remains to be seen,” he said.
The agency recently tapped Picasso Pictures in London to get the selling message across in a lively way for Blockbuster’s Total Access program. “This was always a project with animation because there were a lot of facts that had to be conveyed seamlessly, and a lighthearted animation style seemed to be the best option of a way to communicate what Blockbuster Total Access was about and how it compared to Netflix.”
No matter what the medium, Ebel said he is disappointed when he sees work and there is no concept of what the product really is. “There are too many artists and poets and not enough people who understand that we are marketing products, and you can do both.
“I have a wish that there is more content and less technique in 2007.”
