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Making It In Today's Film/Video Business
by Tom Mulvey
Editor's note:
There has been much written and said about the lack of film and video production business in Colorado over the past four year. For many years, Colorado was a popular place to produce feature films. Centennial, True Grit, City Slickers" and many others were produced in the state because of the beautiful scenery and great crews available.
So what has changed? Probably the largest effect on the business is the rate of exchange between the US and Canadian dollar. The Canadian dollar is about 60% of the US dollar. A $10 million picture in the US can be shot in Canada for $6 million. Plus Canada has provided various tax break incentives. An example of this runaway production is the John Denver special shot in Vancouver British Columbia. Next is the intense competition among the states for production dollars. Some states offer tax break incentives on sales and room taxes, thus reducing the cost of production.
The excellent crews and facilities are still available in Colorado. The Colorado Film Commission, under the direction of Stephanie Two Eagles, has become very aggressive in promoting outside production to come to Colorado. Still, most of the production being done in the state is local business and this does not keep everyone as busy as needed. To this end, many production people and studios have had to find other ways to make ends meet. Some by expanding what they do best and creating new production, others by finding new ways to use their talents.
Advertising & Marketing Review contacted three people who have remained successful or found new ways to be successful in the business. There surely are many more success stories out there as individuals and companies use their initiative to survive and stay in the business. This same initiative can be applied to any phase of the advertising and marketing business from agency to supplier and media, as everyone finds their niche and a way to stay in business.
Jim Berger, President, Rocket Pictures
Partner, High Noon Productions
These days, creating and sustaining a television series beyond its initial season is a real big challenge.
At the networks, the goals and philosophies continually change, slots are limited, executives frequently move from job to job, and the perfect pitch is only as current as the latest hit show. Think Osbournes meets Anna Nicole meets Fear Factor (Survivor is very one year ago).
Last year, after five years in the business, we found ourselves in this rapidly changing marketplace. We'd had great success early on, creating strong series and specials for cable networks like Discovery, The Learning Channel, Animal Planet and Home & Garden Television. But things got harder. The cable networks matured (70-80 million homes each) and the advertising/ratings component of the business became much more critical than in years past. And to top it off, Hollywood was finally turning its focus to cable. Cable networks were receiving more than 200 pitches per week, many from experienced players within the dramatic/sitcom and film business. To survive, we made key adjustments, both within our current production and in the development of new pitches.
The biggest change wasn't actually a change at all, just a reinforcement and recommitment to crafting great stories with high commercial appeal. For example, Discovery's new daytime strand Surprise By Design isn't just another home improvement show. It presents New York designers who transform a home while an unsuspecting homeowner is out of the house for just eight hours. Food Network's Unwrapped isn't a cooking show. It's a nostalgia series that promises the inside story on all of America's great guilty pleasure foods, like Hershey's Chocolate, Twizzlers, Twinkies, and Snap, Crackle and Pop. And Animal Planet's Busted isn't a natural history series. It's a crime-reenacted genre heavy on mystery and creature forensics.
All of our more than one hundred staff producers are encouraged to research and write and produce and direct and shoot and edit with commercial sensitivities top of mind. From the moment a series is launched, we focus on ensuring that the message hierarchy of the story is clear, from the all-important premise to the theme, through the format and its packaging.
On the development side, we've made it our business to know what's happening within the worlds of telecom giants like Viacom and Fox and Vivendi. We frequently travel to New York and Los Angeles to meet with various cable nets like Court TV, VH1, E!, Travel Channel, Hallmark and others. And when it comes to the pitch, we focus on solid research to back each concept, in addition to a well-written treatment that has already survived a gauntlet of challenges within our own development department, prior to submitting to a network.
The television business continues to change at a relentless pace. Just last month, ABC agreed to air-in a secondary window-USA Network's first run drama The Monk. For the first time, a broadcast network in desperate need of a hit is playing second fiddle to a cable net. The world is no longer anchored with five major networks and a litter of smaller cable entities. Creative producers who can design and execute with a sizable audience in mind will still find themselves on that long, bumpy road. But hey, what a ride!
Jim Berger is the President of Rocket Pictures and a Partner in High Noon Productions. The television production companies combined will create more than 350 hours of programming in 2002 for networks including Discovery Channel (Surprise By Design and Miracle of Kandula), Animal Planet (Emergency Vets and Busted), Home & Garden Television (If Walls Could Talk, Modern Masters and Homes of Our Heritage), Food Network (Unwrapped and All American Festivals), and Country Music Television (CMT Got Me In With The Band). Rocket and High Noon are based in Littleton, Colorado.
Coming Full Circle
Lawnie Gold
My media career began in print, working with my dad; and I couldn't wait to get into television. Ironically, print would come full circle and save the day in more ways than one.
After the September 11 tragedy, when attacks on Muslims began, I recalled a story my dad told me when I was in first grade, about how the Japanese Americans, here in Denver, were placed in concentration camps during World War II, and also how unpopular the Jews were at this time. Motivated by this, in early November of 2001 I began working on developing a television series focusing on diversity issues in America. The objective of my series was to soften the American public's attitudes by telling stories about diverse populations - thereby providing role models and mentors through understanding tolerance and acceptance. "There's no such thing as bad love or good hate" became my tag line.
Near the end of November I met Elisabeth Burke, a filmmaker who had moved to Colorado after working in Los Angeles and New York. She told me about a project she was developing - a series profiling people of different walks of life. We quickly realized that by working together we could create something very special: a series about diverse people - achievers, leaders, mentors and artists from all cultures, all classes, all genders and all orientations. By April we had selected the participants for our pilot episode and had completed principal photography.
On May 4, 2002 the last piece of this puzzle became a reality. I volunteered to do a shoot at the new headquarters of the Colorado GLBT Community Center and had the opportunity to interview Art Thompson, the Center's new Executive Director, his management staff and Morris Price, the Center's Chairman of the Board. After the shoot, Art gave me a copy of the May issue of Diverse City Magazine. Diverse City's first issue had hit the streets of Denver in February 2002 as a much-needed alternative source for education and entertainment in Colorado. An additional surprise was a second magazine called Element. Element takes an in-depth look at entertainment, arts, culture and politics in Colorado.
I took the magazines home, read them cover-to-cover and then checked out the publisher's credits. As luck would have it, Diverse City's offices were located three doors north of my office. We all met and it just clicked. It was meant to happen. So here we were, four guys and a girl all working on media products involving diversity education, tolerance and acceptance. We began working together as a team of writers, editors, sales people, television producers and video editors. Along the way we've picked up some other friends, leased additional space and consolidated everything under one roof.
On August 1, 2002 we incorporated as Achievement Media, Inc. In October we delivered the ninth issues of Diverse City and Element magazines.
Our diversity television series concept is now "Diverse City TV." The pilot will be delivered for broadcast this fall.
The moral of this story is: You never know what you might just receive in return for volunteering your time and services to a nonprofit organization. As our Publisher Michael Pachelo so eloquently put it, "Right now it's not about getting rich, it's more about the prize at the end of the game."
Keep on truckin'.
Robert Bert, III
Berg Imaging, Inc.
Berg Imaging Inc. is a small Colorado company that has historically produced corporate and industrial films, public service announcements, and training videos for high tech electronic specialty firms and software companies. Headed by Robert Berg, III (a 1993 Emmy-nominated producer, director, and cinematographer), the company's projects have included national television commercials (aired on MTV and Nickelodeon) and other work with feature film companies in Colorado.
By the end of the last decade, with Colorado's film industry still ravaged by the effects of Hollywood's ire over the passage of the anti-gay Amendment 2 years earlier, and with corporate film spending down across the board, the tiny company found itself engaged in fewer and fewer video projects, even in its own high-tech niche. With budgets for new programs waning, the film cameras were idle.
But by mid-2000, rapidly advancing developments in digital video, Internet video compression technology, and high-speed Internet access sparked a revolutionary experiment for Berg. He had watched closely the industry's early attempts at Internet video delivery on sites like I-Film and Atom Films where viewers could download or stream 5-10 minute film festival shorts and cartoon animations. Berg and his associates in the entertainment and high-tech computer fields believed the world might be ready for something completely different. A radical idea was born: development of an episodic, made-for-Internet television program, produced entirely in Colorado, using local writers, performers, and craftspeople, that could be seen by a world-wide audience.
In early 2001, with an idea and a pilot script in hand, casting started for "City's Edge"...an effort that would create the first television soap opera made exclusively for distribution over the Internet.
In May, 2002, the pilot episode premiered on the Internet to a modest audience of around a thousand viewers. The numbers have been slowly growing as new segments of the show appear online, and as word about the show spreads. Since the show segments are continuously available for downloading to a viewer's computer, there is almost certainly a sizeable pass-around and uncounted repeat viewership. Even the advertising model for City's Edge is unique for the television industry. Ads placed within a segment of City's Edge remain in the show permanently. And since new viewers are always discovering the show site, an advertiser's return is ongoing; unlike the pay-per-play model used by the networks. "It's an exciting new medium for advertisers," Berg says, "offering opportunity and economy to reach audiences in a completely new way." "Right now," he adds, "the rate for an ad that becomes a permanent part of the show is very low...but I don't expect it to stay that way too long."
Despite small beginnings for the show, Berg and company are undaunted. He notes that every media, television and film entertainment company is trying to migrate to the Internet as fast as possible. And it's an outlet that is voracious for content. "Ultimately, for early players like City's Edge," he says, "it will be about staying power." "The longer we keep producing and offering episodes of the show, the more our fan base will grow as the high speed world discovers us." That world is growing fast with thousands of new broad-band connections being added to the Internet daily. "The challenge," Berg adds, "is to keep pushing our creative envelope, pushing the writing, the quality, the show production values and the technology, so the viewer always notices less and less that he's really watching one of his favorite TV shows on a computer." "City's Edge" can be seen on the Internet at www.citysedge.tv.
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