Atlanta Unbuttoned

producing its first feature film, has worked in both Atlanta and Los Angeles.

“We have shot films out there (in Los Angeles), and it literally is a manufacturing process. You’re manufacturing shots just like you’re manufacturing a car,” Carter says. “Just think of how many feature films you’ve seen that really aren’t that creative.” The difference, and the reason Los Angeles has a reputation as a creative town, is that there are so many more creative people out there than there are here. But, on any one film or video, Atlanta studios hold their own against competitors in other markets.

Just to name a few, Blue Marble Media of Atlanta recently won gold and silver honors in the New York Television and Film Awards competition, competing against firms from across the globe. Wide Open Films is midway through production on “Dirt Boy,” a feature film being cut by notable film editor Megan Agosto. Craig Miller Productions has made several trailers, those commercials shown before the previews begin at movie theaters.

All of these studios pay their bills producing corporate film and video. Their forays into international competition, Hollywood-style filmmaking and big-screen commercials mean that Georgia’s ever-growing stable of corporations doesn’t need to look to outside the state for state-of-the-art creative work.

The market and the sophistication of client firms in Atlanta has grown exponentially since the early 1980’s, when David Womick of Earthling Films, Inc. started his company with two VHS machines in his apartment. Back then, Womick says, video was a lot more basic: “We’ve come a long way.”

So has the business community here. In 1978, when Atlanta Business Chronicle published its first-ever list of Atlanta public companies, the reporter had to scramble to find 50 companies to put on the list. That newspaper’s 1999 Book of Lists includes 242 corporations in its public companies list.

“What makes Georgia a great market is there are lots of Fortune 500 companies here. What makes it even better is the influx of technology companies that have the venture capital behind them. They’re trying to get their message out, and they’re creating new technology,” says Craig Miller. “Georgia has changed dramatically in 15 years. I believe Georgia is a good production market for corporate work. Major companies have events. Those events generate video production. The companies also have major needs for rolling out new products and communicating with a global field force.”

A Kodak moment

When Mary Sorrel, Vice Chairman and President of Atlanta-based Hayslett Sorrel, needed to assist her client Kodak with marketing a new, high-end product, the Kodak Picture Maker, to its retailers, she hired Craig Miller Productions. Since it was Kodak, the piece had to be produced on film, not video, which immediately made it an expensive production.

“The story runs about ten minutes. It starts out at a family reunion. It’s grandma’s birthday. Our heroine is trying to restore a very old photo of grandma and grandpa and uses Picture Maker to do it. There’s a real sweet moment when she gives the photo to grandma, and grandma gets a little weepy. It all fell into place so nicely. The production quality far exceeded our expectations,” says Sorrel.

The results far exceeded Kodak’s expectations. One goal of the film was to generate sales of 2,150 Picture Makers to Kodak retailers throughout the United States. In fact, Kodak sold 4,702 Picture Makers, each of which retails for $19,995. Sales exceeded goals by 119 percent, with Kodak selling $94 million worth of Picture Makers when its goal was $43 million. Return on the investment of the money spent making the film: 376 percent.

“Kodak was thrilled. The film won a number of awards for effectiveness. The crew was all from Georgia. All the talent was from here and we shot the whole thing here. The exteriors were shot in an antebellum house in Inman Park. A musician out of Gwinnett County wrote the music. We probably didn’t get out of a 15-mile radius of my office,” Sorrel says.

Katie and her dad

The CEO of CheckFree Corp., a client of Blue Marble Media, wanted a short video to set up a concept. When the CEO goes out to give speeches about online bill paying, the video is shown just prior to his address. His idea was to use the video to remind people how ubiquitous e-mail is today even though it wasn’t a household term just a few years ago. His speech conveys the idea that online bill paying will follow the same path.

“The power of video is to be brief, strike an emotional chord,” says Ben Barineau, co-founder and creative director of Blue Marble. The most important thing, Barineau says, is to make a handful of key points, not provide an encyclopedia of information.

“So, we took the scenario of a father and a daughter. The daughter is about six years old, and she knows everything about the Internet. She e-mails all of her friends. And her dad knows nothing about it. She’s kind of coaching her dad. There wasn’t a whole lot of dialogue, and because they were only trying to make one key point, it worked well,” Barineau says.

The client was so happy with the video that, since it was produced, Katie and her dad have starred in two more CheckFree videos, with a fourth in the making.

Low budget, high marks

Another Blue Marble client, Home Depot, wanted a training video to help staff members who give employee reviews. Explains Barineau: “Training people how to properly conduct an employee review is a really big deal, and it was something that had been overlooked. Positive reviews are easy to handle. But people react differently in negative reviews. So, they took all of the folks that are being reviewed and broke them into five categories of types of reactions they get during negative reviews.”

Then Blue Marble hired improv actors for the low-budget video, where they used actual Home Depot facilitators to conduct the interviews. Before the actors went in to be interviewed, they were briefed about the personality type of the person they were portraying - angry, devastated, nervous.

“Ultimately, the video shows the facilitator bringing the person around and having a productive 360-degree feedback session. We got a letter back from Home Depot saying how much more prepared the facilitators are to handle these situations after viewing the video,” Barineau says.

The Atlanta conundrum

Atlanta has never been known as a creative town. By anybody’s standards it’s a corporate town and a pretty buttoned-up one at that. On the one hand, the proliferation of businesses here provides an ever-growing client base for film and video production studios. On the other hand, the client base is corporate. It’s a conundrum that production companies confront every day.

Everytime we walk in the door to meet a new client, we can’t guess what we’re about to encounter, whether they’re sophisticated buyers and spend a lot of money or if they’ve never really bought this kind of service before. A lot of times the size of the company or the image of the company in the marketplace doesn’t clue you in as to how they invest in corporate communications. Sometimes, it’s surprising,” says Barineau.

“You think, oh, they have a really strong, polished image in the marketplace. They’re a big organization. They really know what they’re doing, and you walk in and find out they grossly underfund what they’re trying to accomplish and have very little appreciation for quality and creativity.”

Barineau says there are two scenarios that help produce a creative environment. “Either you’re dealing with the person at the top or the company has hired a communications professional who knows what he, or she, is doing.”

Carter of Wide Open Films says it’s important to establish trust. “Once the client has trust, then we are free to drive the production based on the concept. To be successful, we try to come in very early and pull the team together. We build the team to suit the project.” One of Carter’s best experiences involved a project for Coca-Cola. He and his team had already had several meetings about the project when a member of upper management pulled him aside and said, “‘Let’s just make ‘em cry. That’s all I want.’ So, that’s just what we did.”

Carter also makes the point that corporate is corporate whether you’re in Los Angeles or Atlanta. “A corporation in Los Angeles is an American corporation. I think once a corporation gets to a certain size, there’s just a way that the corporate culture is.”

Womick of Earthling Films says clients have gotten a little edgier in recent history, thanks to the proliferation of dot com companies here, which tend to be less rigid than traditional companies. “People are getting more casual all the way around,” he says.

Success secrets

The most important part of the whole process, Womick says, is getting the message across and “doing it effectively so people don’t fall asleep.” The hardest part, he adds, is figuring out what the client wants.

“Sometimes clients will hand you an outline. Other times, they’ll hand you the company brochure. Sometimes you have to do a lot of handholding, and other times you don’t. The scripting process is extremely important because that’s your foundation for everything. That part is the most critical. After that, once you’ve nailed down the message and the style, everything else is fine.”

Carter says it’s essential to stick to the story. “We continually go back to, ‘What’s the story here?’ As human beings, one of our most basic orientations communicatively is ‘What’s the story?’ We’re so oriented to a good story that if you can capture the story element in your work then people can really engage with you. It’s a huge point. When we haven’t really done that as well as we could have, we have been less successful. When we’ve done it fantastically, we’ve been fantastically successful.”

Barineau says it’s vital to never underestimate the importance of the soundtrack. “Even if you’re not doing original music, that’s no excuse for not making a killer soundtrack. If you take the right amount of time, you can make the soundtrack sound like it’s custom-tailored. Sound strikes the emotional chord more quickly than any other component of the video. If you’re trying to establish mood, the music does it faster than anything. Atlanta is a great city for soundtrack production.“

The fun stuff

Over and above his corporate work, Craig Miller says he really enjoys the movie trailer business. “All of us who are filmmakers at heart love seeing our images on a big screen. We’ve done five or six trailers. Our best was for the Olympics torch relay for Coca-Cola.” Miller’s team recreated the event in a thunderstorm in a small Southern town. It featured interplay between a child, who was the first kid to show up on the street for the parade in the morning, the rainstorm and the runner who was carrying the torch.

Blue Marble did a pro bono piece for Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts, where their crew interviewed puppets. “We’ve got puppets who’ve just come off the stage from a performance, huffing and puffing, and saying how great it is to be a part of the Center.” Barineau likes the video so much that he wants to use puppets in one of his corporate videos.

“Dirt Boy,” the feature filmed being produced by Wide Open Films is about a young man in search of a career. He decides he wants to be a forensics detective so he signs up for a special clinic run by a famous mystery writer. As he is driving to the clinic, he listens to a book on tape by the mystery writer. Then, what he’s listening to on the tape starts to become what is actually happening. Wide Open Films has one more feature film in development.

Just doing it in Georgia

Carter, Barineau, Womick and Miller, all veterans of corporate film and video, are quite happy with the crews, facilities and talent available in Georgia.

Observes Carter: “It comes down to the right producer and the right production manager or coordinator. The times we’ve had more difficult productions are when we didn’t have a really solid producer or production manager. There are five or six of them in Atlanta. Having one of them on board with you is paramount to a real creative job, and a job that’s profitable. That is really where it lies. What’s here in Atlanta are a few key people, and you need to engage them and really take care of them. As a company, we really need to give them the chocolate cake that they want, because we really need them desperately.”

Miller says there is a line that can be drawn in this town. “There are a lot of people who do this as a business. For them, it’s about, ‘Well, we have this piece of equipment,’ or ‘We have a big sales force.’ From that business side of the thing, there is a good market here in town, and people are making a lot of money. But, I also believe there is a community of creatives. It’s about doing great work, being noticed for that work and moving on to the next great work.”

The typical job

Typical jobs for corporate film and video companies range from internal promotions to stock analyst presentations, business to business advertising, commercials and image pieces. Many are now doing CD presentations and interactive work for the Internet as well.