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Signs of the Apocalypse
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Hi Walter,
I was referring to your post of June 17th, 2010 in which you said” One of the sweet things about Georgia is the 30% tax break for
the media industry and our expansion will be able to take advantage
of some of that”Your exact words, Not Mine
I am glad to see that your organization was able to get the ear
of your legislature and get some advantageous tax policy past.
Maybe you should hang up the post-biz and become a lobbyist?
Anyway I don’t mean for any of this discussion to be taken
personally and wish you the best of luck in your new spot.
How did the build out go?My point was that the business is not expanding but that the pie
slices are getting sliced and diced smaller and diferently.Neil Hurwitz
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[Neil Hurwitz] “Hi Walter,
I was referring to your post of June 17th, 2010 in which you said” One of the sweet things about Georgia is the 30% tax break for
the media industry and our expansion will be able to take advantage
of some of that”Your exact words, Not Mine”
Quite honestly a LOT has changed since then. Yes our expansion will still put us in a position to take advantage of any productions in this area that require Post Production, Sound Mixing or even just a Screening Room. We will not be able to directly take advantage of the tax breaks, but we might be able to bring in some productions looking for a Post location.
But since I posted that, we have had many changes in our production outlook for 2011 and 2012 that will change the way we approach those productions.
[Neil Hurwitz] “I am glad to see that your organization was able to get the ear
of your legislature and get some advantageous tax policy past.
Maybe you should hang up the post-biz and become a lobbyist?”That tax break was brought to bear long before I joined on to the group. The GPP has simply an amazing leadership team that has really done a LOT of good for the community.
[Neil Hurwitz] “Anyway I don’t mean for any of this discussion to be taken
personally and wish you the best of luck in your new spot.
How did the build out go?”It’s nearing completion and believe me, I know how fortunate we are to be in a position to even try to make a run at this.
[Neil Hurwitz] “My point was that the business is not expanding but that the pie
slices are getting sliced and diced smaller and diferently.”Absolutely. One of my biggest strategies in my entire 10 years has been my pricing model. It differs from just about every other production company and freelancer I’ve encountered and it works for us. We just take a different strategy that results in a much more stable, long term clientele.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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This was a great thread guys. It touches on many interesting topics – I’d like to just add a little spin to it.
The economy sucks for many many people now. Just about everyone you talk to has some gloom and doom story of how x is happening and we’re all so helpless to the whims of fate. These stories add to the fear and desperation that feed recessions – people hold back the little cash they have to weather the storm, prices plummet, businesses go under, and the sky gets darker by the day. This is why we NEED people like Walter to share stories of his expansion. Stories of other’s growth may create a knee jerk reaction of ‘screw the rich’ in some people, but who doesn’t feel a little more secure to hear that it’s not all bad out there? Knowing that another person can still make it might make some jealous, but in my experience jealousy is a fantastic motivator. Let’s hear more about the successes, the ones who hit it, the people who aren’t just surviving, but thriving. No one should ever feel guilt for success in business.
So bring on the showboats, they’re the ones that are going to get us out of the hole.
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the best way to get warm bodies on the cheap is to give em a title of producer.
Worked for me in ’92, anyway.
But are there any victims? Aman, I had long hair, a bigass camera, a cool title and all thr trim I could handle. It mattered not that I made less than 20k a year. Who has time for money when you have the above?
The bottom line has never been the end product… in any industry. Not in this country, anyway.
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Wow…I didn’t realize my rant would create such a stir! I will say that as a company we’re going on our 15th year in business, so we’re not new to any of this and have seen our share of change in that time.
I am personally going on my 26th year in this business, and have produced and directed work that ranges from six-figure, grant supported PBS documentaries to $1500 yell and sell car commercials. Much like Bob, I also constantly try to learn new equipment, new software and try new ideas. We’ve been using ethernet based shared storage in our facility for 3 years and like Walter, didn’t realize it was even possible until I started exploring and hanging around the SAN forum a few years back. I’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to implement ethernet based deck control in our facility. We know it’s possible because Harris already uses it in a couple of their ingest systems.
The point here is that we ARE the type of company that tries new things and constantly looks for and explores new markets. We began as a video production company and are now a full-service ad agency. Just this year we began offering web design when before we farmed it out. We were sending TV spots encoded to MPEG2 using FTP back in 2001! We were sending radio spots first via satellite, then using DG, then using email… when other companies were still sending CDs in the mail. So we ARE progressive company both technologically and idealogically…yet.. we continue to struggle with what is easily the largest change we’ve seen. Just last week an ad agency here in our town, Keller-Crescent fired all their employees and were bought by their president. They changed their name to 10 over 12 (don’t ask) and are trying to survive as a “boutique type agency.” This is an agency that for 50 years was a top 100 agency in sales. They had many fortune 500 clients. But in less than a decade, they’re gone!
Were they slow to change? Yes. Were they arrogant as all get out? Yes. Were they expensive? Yes. Were they good? Yes…VERY!
My point isn’t so much that budgets are small or that people are inexperienced and green. It’s that people don’t seem to recognize what quality is and worse, even if they do, they don’t want to pay for it. They’re happy with mediocrity (at least in our region). Clients don’t even want to meet to discuss “ideas” or concepts. They just want their project shot. They have no desire to tell stories or “hook” people with clever visuals. Even when they have decent budgets they show up at the shoot without a script…heck…without a shot list….despite our repeated attempts to meet and discuss and even offers to write their script for them. This trend has definitely escalated…and that’s more what shocks me. Showing up for a shoot that IS expensive with no plan, heck…no idea of what they’re trying to accomplish is the norm instead of the exception!
It reminds me of when I was in college and the “video club” would meet on Saturdays and everyone would show up to the studio but nobody had a script or any ideas. They thought video would just “happen.” THIS is what many of the projects we’ve been working on lately are like. This is what is incredulous to me. And beleieve me…we try very hard to convince clients of the importance of ideas and story and uniuque visuals and sound.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Grinner,
“…all thr trim I could handle.”LOL, that is an expression I haven’t heard in a long time.
Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com -
Wow, what a long and interesting thread. I will add just a few notes:
1. You need to make your own opportunities. If business is bad, double your efforts.
2. When I first started blogging here on the COW, I wrote about past experiences, my training and bits and pieces of my every day work, but avoided outright promotion. But then I noticed that Walter, Richard Harrington and others blogged about their business activities and new projects as well as new products they have produced. These are two successful guys, so I started writing more specifically about events and products that we create and sell. Given the COW’s ability to get instantly indexed by the search engines, it seems like an added benefit beyond the enjoyment alone.
3. Yeah, the recession is sticking around. It affects everyone from the butcher to the cobbler to the candle stick maker. But don’t take a bad economy as an excuse to stop trying to sell your services and improve your business offerings. Now is the time to prepare for the recovery which will happen and likely result in a slightly different meaning of status quo.
4. To both the regulars and new visitors to this site – read everything from the top posters on this website – they are some smart people who know their stuff.
5. Refer to item 1 – print that one out and hang it on your wall.
Mike Cohen
Medical Education / Multimedia Producer
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[John Davidson] “Just about everyone you talk to has some gloom and doom story of how x is happening and we’re all so helpless to the whims of fate. These stories add to the fear and desperation that feed recessions – people hold back the little cash they have to weather the storm, prices plummet, businesses go under, and the sky gets darker by the day.”
Personally, when people talk like that, I ask them what are they doing about it.
Many Americans don’t seem to understand that they are now, by a vast majority, in a service economy — at least most don’t know what that means to them (if they did, they wouldn’t hoard their money and quake like lemmings running into dark corners to hide because the market’s “bad”). With no real manufacturing to speak of, it is hard to rebound when people are afraid to act and spend money. The flow of money is the life blood of a service-based economy.
Without that flow, things collapse fast. There is not much to fall back on at that point, other than government — and as I celebrate my 60th birthday, I find that idea laughable at best. It used to be government by and for the people, but the people aren’t reading, don’t act, and expect others to do it all for them. That’s a recipe for disaster. (Sometimes, I am really glad to be 60.)
Like Walter points out: if you live and talk like the sky is falling, then most assuredly it will fall…on you, the quickest of all.
I like strategies and plans. Things are always bad somewhere. It is what you do when things go bad that separates achievers from non-achievers.
If we had applied much of the rhetoric bandied about in this forum when we launched the COW with little more than a burning hope, vision, and blind ambition, we’d not be here today. Why? We had no money. We had no investors. To make matters worse, we had competitors that were sitting on many millions in the bank.
We didn’t have a proverbial pot to ____ in. We were recovering from three bouts of viral pneumonia. We had lost all our accounts. We had enemies who didn’t like us because we had built something before that they couldn’t. They lied publicly about all the money we “made” from our earlier site; with it, they tried to turn all of their friends — and many of ours — against us. I wish we had the money they claimed we made, because if we had, our struggle would have been far easier than the one we walked through for years.
Life kicks your ass sometime. Get over it. Suck it up and get on with it. Do something about it. Don’t take no for an answer. Build something. If it doesn’t work, quickly build something else.
Remember the dinosaurs, they couldn’t adapt. Little furry tiny-teethed (but oh so tasty) little mammals beat the giants in the game of life.
Creative COW is now bigger and has a larger footprint than every major multi-national trade publisher in this market. The Creative COW Magazine is now — at just five years old — the strongest magazine in this industry. As I have written in the magazine before, it was a gamble — we had no back-up and no money to fall back on. A year in reserve? We didn’t have a month in reserve when we launched it. It was all a gamble. After we announced that we’d be building a magazine, we heard that a competing website was also about to launch a magazine — so we jumped on it like a house afire. They never did release their magazine.
Did it work? Yes.
Creative COW is now, at long last after 15 years of work in this field, a real business that employs many, pays a bunch more sub-contractors, gives away over a million dollars a year in free services that we pay for, not counting the forums. And we’ve launched a foundation that awards grants to students at the American Film Institute.
Not bad for people who spent the better part of a half year in bed with pneumonia, then relapsed again and again for a couple more years. Those who know me know that I fight near-constant chronic ear infections because of it. It sucks. So what. My life is a cakewalk compared to the 3 year old girl I saw on Discovery Health Network recently who had so little spine that she was drowning in her own blood because her spine couldn’t hold her up — so her lungs were collapsing. Now that is heartbreaking. She had to have stainless steel rods screwed into her vertebrae to keep this from happening to her. And as she grows, she’ll have to have the surgery over and over. God bless that little girl, she has more courage than most men.
Fight back or lay down…it’s your call.
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW MagazineCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
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You use the + and – keys for that, I believe … or type the time codes if you’re very precise;-)
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[Mike Cohen] “5. Refer to item 1 – print that one out and hang it on your wall.”
Yessir! That’s a good one!
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.
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