Video production grabs the spotlight
Houston a major player in commercials and corporate shoots
LIGHTSare beamed into an Ellington Airport hang ar. The camera is set as J.J. Watt takes his position. And, action!
Watt runs suicide drills across the white chalk letters stenciled onthe concrete floor. He turnsover a tire. He lifts weights. In an adjacent room, Lynn Bird well watches thescene unfold on a monitor, joined by representatives of Reebok and a London-based adagency. They’re all part of “Hunt Greatness ,” a television ad filmed this spring in Watt’ s adopted hometown.
Reebok’ s marketers had hired Bird well’ s Houstonbased commercial production services company, Bird House Productions, for the spot featuring the NFL Texans’ All-Pro defensive end. Birdwell believes Houston has the talent in place for many more big-time shoots, for both commercial and corporate clients. Herpeers are taking note.
Last month, ProductionHUB, a global networking group for the media and entertainment industry, recognized a subset of the city’s video world by ranking Houston as the third-fastestgrowing city for corporate video production, ahead of places like Los Angeles and Dallas.
Despite financial obstacles put in place by the 2015Texas Legislature, coupled with the loss of several global advertising agencies in the early 2000s, the local film business has continued to find work with major companies and studios. Byoneestimate, the local economic impact is as high as $60million a year.
“The proliferation of production companies is amazing. It’s really grown,”
“The corporate messaging has to be just as exciting as movies and TV shows.” Scott Szabo of Szabo Sound & Music
said Bird well, who has been doing production work in Houston since 1993.
Rather than Hollywood-style blockbusters, manyof the local jobs are corporately commissioned for companies’ internal use or marketing purposes. In noting Houston’s success in this arena, Production HUB cited the city’s professional labor force as a major draw. The base is small enough that crew members know each other, but skilled enough to handle projects for companies like Exxon Mobil, Apple and Reebok.
The number of Fortune 500 headquarters in the city, its relatively temperate climate andeven the layout of downtown also make Houston an ideal hub for shooting commercials and corporate gigs.
“I think it shows that the resources and talent for production in Houston are exceptional and well-recognized by this specific industry segment and, with more funding, has the potential to unleash exponential growth,” Heather Page, director of the Texas Film Commission, said in a statement.
Bill Brauer, a producer and writer at Houston-based South Coast Film& Video, has seen a diversification of the corporate client base over the last five years. Companies like Chevron and B Pare still major players, but the medical, tech and other fields are also focused on improving their branding with video.
“It’s starting to comearound to less dependence on the energy sector,” Brauer said.
About 200,000 small to midsize businesses based in Houston can afford some sort of video marketing, said Eric Calderon, a film making student at Houston Community College who works to connect fellow students with businesses looking for corporate video projects. That’s become much easier.
“I’ ve seen more and more students going straight into the industry here,” Calderon said.
There’s also been a diversification in terms of distribution. Ten years ago, many corporate videos would be shared throughout a company on video tapes. Today video content is being made for You Tube and social media, and corporate events a relive-streamed from headquarters to satellite offices.
Quality remains key whether it’s aninternal safety video or a five-second ad for Facebook, said Scott Szabo, president and composer of Szabo Sound& Music, a production services company that handles audio for all levels of production.
“The U.S. audience is sophisticated in terms of wanting high production value,” he said, “The corporate messaging has to be just as exciting as movies and TV shows.”
For a while, access to expensive equipment gave Los Angeles and New York a major advantage in video production. But as prices for high-quality tools leveled out over the years, personnel talent becamethe determining factor for which cities get the work, Szabo said.
The lack of large soundstages or a strong studio system in Houston, however, has caused some high-end projects from companies and ad agencies out of state to go for more developed cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles and London.
“I lose as many jobs as I get because I don’t have the studio space,” Birdwell said.
There’s also the Houston video production community’ s na scent national reputation. That, too, can be attributed in part to the lack of consistent high-end-studio work that helps build industry credibility, Szabo said.
One of the things Texas film companies have banked on for an even greater expansion into film and television hit a snag during the 2015 legislative session, when lawmakers cut funding for the Texas Film Commission’ s incentive program to $35 million from $95 million.
Texas and many other states offer incentive programs for the film and television industries to lure investment and create jobs. For comparison, last year the California Film Commission saw a $100 million increase to its program, to $330 million for the next three years.
Lobbyists for the filmindustry here blamed the lack of a working relationship between the industry and new legislators and legislators’ in experience with how the incentives work.
“Alot of people think it’s a bailout for Hollywood but it’s not,” Szabo said.
Bill Hammond, former CEO of the Texas Association of Business who lobbied on behalf of the filmindustry, called the cuts a “mistake” since the rebate incentive program required companies to spend funds in the state and on Texas residents.
The program was designed to lure out-of-state studios that could not only make significant economic investments in the state economy but also afford to hire Texas residents at a good wage, said Rick Ferguson, executive director of the Houston Film Commission.
Since the program’s start in 2007, morethan $182 million in incentive grants have created 22,210 full time jobs and led to morethan $1.2 billion in spending across the state, according to Page of the Texas Film Commission.
Bird House Productions typically handles two or three jobs a year that qualify for incentives. Birdwell said that without further funding and other changes to the program, however, it will remain more of a perk than a serious lure for companies.
The direct yearly expenditure from films, television and commercial sin Houston hovers around $20 million, Ferguson said, andthat’s counting only work that went through the city commission. Estimates for local economic impact range from $55 million to $60million a year.
While most corporate video productions aren’t expensive enough to qualify for the state incentives program, crews that work incorporate communications but also wish to work for film and television could gain valuable experience by scoring gigs with out-of-state studios.
Brian Aichlmayr, who works as a freelance first camera assistant, has even suggested city-specific incentives offering studios separate tax credits for specifically hiring crewin places like Houston.