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Lights, Camera, Action
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St. Louis
is home to a vibrant and growing audio and video production scene.
By Chris Brown
Imagine the CEO of a St. Louis-based company who has decided to
put together a series of video presentations to help promote the
launch of a new product line. The CEO is excited about the power
of video to motivate and train a sales force, and inform and entice
his or her customers. The CEO is intrigued at the possibility of
adding video presentations to the company Web site. But where will
they find the producer to oversee the project, the scriptwriters
to provide the words, the cameramen, lighting pros and electricians,
the props and equipment? What about on-camera talent? And where
will the video be taken for post-production work, in which the project
is shaped into a powerful finished product?
Los Angeles? New York?
Not so fast. Most of the above resources and more can be found right
here in St. Louis, which is home to an increasingly vibrant audio
and video production scene. “We’ve worked very hard in the St. Louis
production community to get the word out over the last few years
that high-quality work is being done here right now, every day,”
says Cameron Sanders, associate vice president for audio and video
at A.G. Edwards & Sons, and president of the Media Communications
Association International of St. Louis.
“Whether it’s corporate image videos, training videos, educational
videos, marketing videos—there’s a lot of real bread-and-butter
work in St. Louis,” he says. “And the production people in this
town are as good as anywhere else.”
According to Jim Leonis, president of the St. Louis Film Office,
St. Louis is one of a few cities in the United States with a production
community that’s showing real signs of life. “We’ve really turned
around over the past five years,” he says. “We’ve been growing while
other cities have been losing work. Even Los Angeles is shrinking.
But we’ve been gaining ground.”
At the heart of the St. Louis success story in audio-video production
is the fine local pool of technical talent, says Patrick Murphy,
director of content at KETC Channel 9 and president of the local
chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists
(AFTRA), a union for on-camera and on-air talent.
“We’ve got the cameramen and grips and gaffers, the lighting pros
and set people, the producers and writers,” he says. “We’ve got
great studio spaces and great production houses. We’ve got the talent
to put in front of the camera. It’s really all here.”
Murphy also stresses another strength of the St. Louis area for
the creation of successful videos, one that grows from the city’s
rich and varied history. “St. Louis is a great American city with
an amazingly rich and contrasting array of neighborhoods and locales,”
he says. “And that’s great if you want to make great pictures.
“Whether it’s small towns, rolling countryside, crowded urban streets
or wealthy neighborhoods filled with stately homes—St. Louis has
it.”
Mike Stroot, owner of Technisonic Studios, agrees that St. Louis
possesses all but the most specialized talent in its audio and video
production community. “For most commercial work and most industrial
videos, you can get it done in St. Louis with no problem at all,”
he says.
Stroot’s own work is evenly divided between commercials on the one
hand and corporate and training videos on the other. His team begins
its work after a script has already been written, providing the
direction, photography, editing and special effects.
One bright spot in the local scene, Stroot says, is the willingness
of local advertising agencies to turn to local talent to make commercials.
“Especially for medium-budget work, I see many more commercials
being made here than in the past,” he says.
A local CEO who decides to get corporate video work done here in
town can proceed in a variety of ways. Perhaps the simplest is to
turn to a one-stop shop such as Avatar Studios. President Bill Faris
describes his company as a “full-service production and post-production
facility” that handles everything from simple industrial training
videos shot with two-man crews to high-end commercials shot in feature-film
quality on 35 mm film.
“We can handle sophisticated higher-end productions completely with
our in-house facilities and talent,” Faris says. “We have our own
studio, grip trucks for shooting on location, and all the dollies
and cranes you could want for shooting in any situation.”
Another full-service operation is Creative Producers Group, where
Keith Alper is CEO and executive producer. Alper says that his company
specializes in “telling a story.” “Most clients don’t know very
much about the latest production gadgetry, and they don’t need to
know about it,” he says. “They don’t care if we edit on a non-linear
editing system—they just want to tell a story, and that’s what we
help them do.”
Alper says that for 90 percent of his customers, his company delivers
the entire package from creative concept to final product. “We find
out what our customer needs, come up with the creative concept and
go from there,” he says. “We write the script, shoot it, edit and
put it through post-production all with a single focus. ”And that
single focus is important.”
But the talent pool in St. Louis extends far beyond these one-stop
operations. One example of a niche operation is Bad Dog Productions,
run by president Tom Petrie. “I’m a cameraman,” he says. “That’s
our niche, and that’s what we do well.” Petrie explains that most
of the projects he works on are run by a producer who acts as a
kind of general contractor to assemble the technical talent.
Another such hired gun is David Houlle, owner of Sight & Sound Productions,
who operates two grip and electrical trucks. “We provide grip equipment,
camera support equipment, lighting equipment, and get electricity
to the location,” he says.
Houlle is proud of the work of the St. Louis production community,
and wants to get the word out. “We got the talent, the production
people, the studios and the equipment,” he says. “And when this
kind of work stays in St. Louis, it benefits the whole community.”
Chris Brown is a St. Louis-based free-lance writer.
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