Business and Entrepreneurship for Filmmakers by Charles Haine

Author:Charles Haine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Charles: And what was the gap between closing the last business and starting this one?

Emery: It was less clear. I didn’t have the heart to really just hard shut it down and just say . . . put up on the website, “Sorry. We’re closed.” Basically, my tasks for Frame.io started increasing and increasing and increasing, and I was continuing to take jobs for Katabatic as long as I could, but then it was like I’m either going to get this Frame.io thing done or take this job. And I would tell old clients that I was booked because I kind of kept my options open as long as I possibly could. So I just kept saying, “I’m booked. I’m booked. I’m booked. I’m booked.” I had some colleagues that I would try to bring in or I would try to pawn off some work to some colleagues and take a cut, and I tried doing that. It was just too hard. I was stuck in the middle. I was still spending cycles communicating. Eventually, the longer I just told people I was booked, they just stopped. They just kind of trickled off over a period of months. The spigot sort of slowly turned off.

At that point, I was already pretty deep into Frame.io. So I kept the spigot open basically until Frame.io officially launched publicly in the market. There was still a little bit of my old client activity going on. And then when we launched publicly in the market, we were only launched for three months before we raised our Seed round of capital. We got a $2 million Seed round from Excel. So by then, it was just 100%, 150% on Frame.io.

What Frame.io solves, the work-in-progress review and sort of all the hassle and pain of that was always terrible. It was significantly worse back when we started working on it because when you’re sending stuff for review, the services that existed back then, they didn’t transcode the media that you uploaded. You would have to upload something in a hundred different formats. They’re like “I need a high-res MP4, and I need flash.”

I’d say realistically on any given job, there might be maybe like five to seven different upload requests. We were doing advertising, so if you were doing a 30-second and a 60-second spot. You have the 60, but then you have the 30 and the 15, and then you have maybe a different end card and a title.

So you wind up uploading like 70 assets. I mean, the way that it multiplied because you’d think, “Oh, I’m doing a 60-second spot.” But the sort of versions and permutations and the different types of file formats that they needed, some with black in the front, some with not black in the front. All that stupid stuff.

There would be that one oddball format that you couldn’t make on your Mac, and you had to figure out how to do it. The whole thing was just terrible. But it would really quickly escalate to being a lot of different formats that you had to upload.

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