Category Archives: interviews
Interview: Martin Lisius Owner at StormStock
Footage News exclusive interview: Owner at Storm Stock – the ‘world’s premier collection of storm imagery, for creative professionals who demand only the best’
Name: Martin Lisius – pictured above ©Prairie Pictures
Stock footage agency: StormStock
Position: Owner
Q. When did you decide to start offering stock footage?
1993
Q. Why?
People were calling for it before StormStock existed, so StormStock was created as an answer to a need. People saw my storm footage in documentaries I produced about extreme weather.
Q. What is the latest footage stock you are offering?
We have the devastating May 20, 2013 Moore, OK tornado. You can see a shot of it at www.prairiepictures.com
Q. Do you provide commissioned video/broadcast production services?
Yes, on occasion.
Q. What in your view is the largest hurdle when starting to offer footage stock?
Keeping up with orders. It’s very time consuming and leaves little time to shoot new footage.
Q. Is there a standard industry pricing structure for editorial and creative stock?
No, I don’t think so. License fees depend on use but also on the quality and uniqueness of the footage.
Q. Where do footage requests come from?
Researchers and production companies. Usually archivists, producers and sometimes editors.
Q. Which are the most regular video formats requested for license?
HD 1080 in an .mov file format, mostly.
Q. How do you ensure your footage is credited StormStock?
We require a credit in our license, unless it is a commercial or other form that normally cannot credit.
Q. How do you currently deliver licensed footage?
Either FTP or on a drive via FedEx.
Q. Which area of the library are you looking to increase content in?
Stills. We are known for our footage, but we have a really nice still collection that we want people to know about.
Q. What was your best seller this month?
The Moore, OK EF5 tornado:
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Q. Any exclusive stock?
Yes, most of StormStock is exclusive.
Q. Whats new at StormStock?
The Moore, OK EF5 tornado and the OK tornadoes from the previous day, May 19.
Q. Whats next for StormStock?
4K. I have shot “4K” since 1997 on Super 35mm. Much of that will be scanned to 4K sometime this year.
ENDS –
Thanks Martin – Visit and license from Storm Stock here
View all FootageNews.com interviews on our Features page
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Interview: Rachel Brinton Matthews – Footage Manager – Bridgeman
Name: Rachel Brinton Matthews
Position: Footage Manager
Footage library: The Bridgeman Art Library
Q. Explain Bridgeman Footage in a sentence:
A rich and eclectic footage archive specialising in arts, culture and history.
Q. when did you decide to start offering stock footage?
Bridgeman Footage launched in spring 2012 so we are just about to celebrate our 1st birthday!
Q. Why?
In response to the moving times; offering footage was a natural progression for us, particularly as existing suppliers began asking if we could license their AV content. One of our main client sectors is publishing and as technologies have developed we’ve seen a surge of interest in video content from our traditional licensors so it was important that we made the efforts to respond to their needs.
Q. Which stock footage subjects are you offering now?
Along with our existing stills catalogue of over 500,000 clips, Bridgeman Footage includes clips and films on the arts, world culture and 20th century history. As well as presenting these subject areas in regular showreels, we also producer trailers and teasers focusing on current events or themes to show the breadth of our archive and how the clips can be used in different ways; our recent ‘Smile montage’ (to celebrate National Smile Month) has proved particularly popular!
Art will always be at the forefront of Bridgeman, it is after all what the company was founded upon, so our video collection on the arts has been the basis for building our footage library. Our historic collection is proving very popular with clients and the contemporary stock we have acquired from numerous filmmakers across the world is very exciting as much of it comes from exclusive and never-before commercialised sources,
Q All stock – or do you also license editorial and feature video?
The Bridgeman footage collection is a mixture of stock and archive clips as well as some full programmes and animated films. We are able to sell most of these full programmes in their entirety but for the most part, clients tend to license sections as stock clips.
Q. Have you needed to employ new staff to cater for the footage/video market?
Yes. I have been with Bridgeman for the last two years, initially employed to manage the development of the footage platform and collections. Since launching I have continued to manage the footage project at Bridgeman and have been joined by Holly who assists me with cataloguing, marketing and research. Together we support the UK and International sales teams with all footage requests.
Q. What in your view is the largest hurdle when starting to offer footage stock?
Getting the platform up to scratch was a long process, with many bumps along the way. We’re still working on our development plan and have lots of new and exciting features that will be released over the next year.
It’s also been quite a task making sure people know we offer footage as well as stills. Where Bridgeman’s name is so much associated with art I think people have found it difficult to understand what type of films we could possibly have. Bridgeman is much more than paintings though; we have a huge collection of social documentary photography as well as contemporary design and now footage; there is a lot for people to explore!
Q. Is there a standard industry pricing structure for editorial and creative stock?
Not in our experience. Bridgeman licenses on a per second basis which is perhaps the more traditional licensing method. Subscriptions are definitely in use more and more now although it seems to be a particular type of content that is best suited for this type of licensing model.
Q. Where do your requests come from? individual researchers, production companies?
We work with a lot of independent production companies and they have been our key clients since launching Bridgeman Footage, both in the UK and internationally. Requests can come from the in-house development team or freelancers. We are also working closely with all of our existing publishing clients as they begin to move into digital options and products, offering advice where needed as many of their picture editors suddenly find themselves faced with licensing things that move!
Q. Which are the most regular video formats requested for license?
HD definitely. We offer a transcode option with all of our footage.
Q. How do you ensure your footage is credited?
For broadcast we would ensure Bridgeman is mentioned in the end credits and for editorial we would expect the description of the clip found on our website to be referenced together with our company name.
Q. How do you currently deliver licensed footage?
Via a download link sent directly to the client’s email. E-commerce plans are in motion for the future but our existing service is very efficient and allows us to give our customers the personal service that underpins Bridgeman’s excellent reputation.
Q. Are any of your stills contributors supplying footage?
Yes, quite a few stock photographers have given us complimentary clips from their various shoots and we are hoping to work with more and more of our museums and galleries. Footage can prove trickier when it comes to clearing rights and gaining access so we’re offering help wherever we can to our current suppliers who are keen to add their film collections.
Q. Which footage subjects are you looking to increase content in?
Arts based archive. We get a lot of requests for C20th painters at work so I am working hard to develop this section of the library.
Q. What was your best seller this month?
This clip from the Battle of Somme.
Q. Any exclusive stock?
We work with a number of exclusive collections including the de Laszlo Archive, Benoy K Behl, Moonweed Digital, Buff Films, Laboratoriorosso and Battlefields in Motion. Those collections that are not exclusive, the Beeld en Geluid archive for example, have been additionally enriched with detailed cataloguing from our in-house team, taking into account how our specific clients search and access our assets.
Q. whats new at Bridgeman Footage?
Our latest collection, Chronos Media, has just submitted a fantastic set of clips from 1920s Berlin so we are busily cataloguing to get these online. We’ve also just released our latest showreel which can be seen on our Youtube channel along with our back catalogue from our Clip of the Week. And finally, we have recently started tweeting (BridgemanFtage)!
Q. What’s next for Bridgeman Footage?
We were at the Sheffield Documentary festival on the 13th and 14th of June and attended the Meet the Archives sessions hosted by FOCAL International. We’ve also got a birthday to celebrate and a number of exiting new collections in the pipeline that we hope to have ready for the summer.
– ENDS –
View and license Bridgeman Footage here
See our May interview with Ben Jones Head of Motion at Science Photo Library
Posted in Featured, interviews, news
Interview: Ben Jones Head of Motion – Science Photo Library
Footage News Exclusive:
Here is the first in a series of interviews by Footage News we’re calling ‘Getting-To-Know-The-Library’ – more to follow!
Name: Ben Jones
Position: Head of Motion
Stock footage Agency: Science Photo Library
Explain Science Photo Library in a sentence:
We collate and create unique, accurate and informative clips about the world around us, the processes that shape it, and the research that reveals how it works.
Q. When did you decide to start offering stock footage?
Around the start of 2007, although it had long been discussed.
Q. Why?
Around that time, the move to digital workflows within the industry made it more accessible to us, as it obviated the need for us to handle tape and film. On top of that, around the same time, devices and technologies were emerging that allowed our existing still image client base to utilise video in their new products, which meant that we had a developing market that knew us and would find uses for our clips. Taken together, they made a compelling case for taking the plunge.
Q. Which stock footage subjects are you offering now?
We divide the collection into seven broad subject areas: Science & Technology, Health & Medicine, Environment, Space & Spaceflight, Animals, Plants and History.
Each has a dedicated showreel on our home page.
Running through all of those subject categories, though, we specialise in science education, following the curriculum to produce material likely to be of use to publishers of electronic learning resources, and also specialise in using the latest scientific imaging techniques to visualise subjects in a novel way.
Q. All stock – or do you also license editorial and feature video?
We do licence clips taken from TV shows etc, but we licence it all as stock clips.
Q. Have you needed to employ new staff to cater for the footage/video market?
Yes, we have employed two dedicated video editors to create and manage the video workflow, as well as creating my role to manage it all. Much of the sales and back-office work has been undertaken by the existing stills staff, who are kept up to date with the demands and complexities of the new product.
Q. What in your view is the largest hurdle when starting to offer footage stock?
Putting the technological infrastructure in place for the video archive was a serious task – we’d been amassing footage for less than a year when we overtook the storage requirements of the 26-year-old stills library, for instance. With that in place, the biggest ongoing task is marketing it to the new clients – the stock footage industry is quite different to the one we knew in stills.
Q. Is there a standard industry pricing structure for editorial and creative stock?
Similar distinctions apply as with stills, with pricing tiers for RM, RF, micro and subscription, and mixed in with that sites that allow contributors to set their own prices, and then there’s per clip versus per second billing on top of that. There are broad groupings by industry that have developed, for instance in TV production rates, where things are more mature and seem more stable, but plenty of agencies are trying different things in different sectors all the time.
Q. Where do your requests come from? individual researchers, production companies?
Production companies generally seem to hire freelance researchers for a specific project, and then the researcher moves on to the next company and project. Many of the requests come from these researchers. With other clients, for instance publishing, it’s more likely to be permanent in-house research staff. And as well as those, there are always the random ones that come out of the blue.
Q. Which are the most regular video formats requested for license?
HD footage is the most popular, even for people not making HD programmes. We do downsize to PAL or NTSC for some clients. We send everything out with Photo JPEG compression, which seems universally accepted.
Q. How do you ensure your footage is credited?
It’s a condition of the terms & conditions, although in practice it’s hard to enforce, especially for TV uses.
Q. How do you currently deliver licensed footage?
Mostly by FTP, but if it’s a large order we can send discs or even drives. More recently we have developed an e-commerce platform and the ability for registered clients to download directly from our website.
Q. Are any of your stills contributors supplying footage?
Yes, a lot of them were producing footage and animations long before we supplied it. Some contributors have moved into footage with the arrival of cameras like the Canon 5d MkII, which shoots fine video and stills.
Q. Which footage subjects are you looking to increase content in?
Science education and specialist imaging are our big target areas.
Q. What was your best seller this month (MAY)?
Our best deal so far this month has been for three medical scans: this brain ,this heart and this chest
Q. Any exclusive stock?
More than half of our clips are exclusive, and a good amount of them are wholly-owned, including the brain and heart above. We’ve shot chemistry experiments, biology demonstrations, hospitals, doctors and nurses, and created animations in healthcare, chemistry, biology, physics, astrophysics and astronomy… it didn’t look like there was anyone out there making it for stock, so we had to take matters into our own hands!
Q. Whats new at SPL?
We get amazing new footage in constantly: we’ve recently taken on an authoritative weather collection, mathematical modelling, some incredible electron microscope movies, the start of an encyclopaedic collection of cell biology animations and we’ve just completed a shoot filming human parasites at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Away from the footage, there’s been a promising start since last year’s launch of our e-commerce-enabled website, which has seen some good uses already. Internally, we’ve been streamlining our workflow and processes to speed up the delivery of clips to clients and agents, which is less glitzy but just as important.
– ENDS –
Thanks for your time on this Ben!
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Show Report: Footage News at the BVE Expo London – the photos!
Updated: here are the photos – from the Footage News Blackberry camera ©FootageNews.com
Nick Millen (suit) of Canon demonstrating some serious gear – and the Canon camera ice sculpture shaping up
Picture researcher Charlotte Lippmann, nice camera! …and with husband Mike, European Manager Miller Fluid Heads Europe Ltd
Footage News reporting team – David Jacobs (Action Images founder) and Will – Oh No! …David at the Drift camera stand …tempted by another gadget ;-)
Amazing broadcast trade show this one – everything accessible from the smallest HD cameras – Drift and GoPro- to the mighty machines of Canon! – Last day today!
Article 26th Feb
26 – 28 Feb London
Footage News will be at the show today – text or call Will on 07802437827 to hook up ….I have my mobile phone camera poised!
BVE showcases a comprehensive selection of products, services and technologies for taking content from conception to consumption. BVE offers you the chance to gain hands-on experience and insight to inspire creativity, support your business and help you shape the future of content.
Details here: BVE
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