On 2/18/13 11:01 AM, Andrew Robinson wrote:
On 2/18/2013 12:15 PM, miles wrote:To me this appears to be a big move downwards...Are you familiar with Sam or Aron personally? I would be cautious of such bold public statements without any grounds or facts. aTTi is a wonderful company with countless talented individuals that have already made groundbreaking contributions to our field. If anything, the acquisition was a blessing and I look forward to seeing great things to come from it in the near future.
I don't know, first hand, whether this is going to be good, bad, or indifferent. Certainly, Jeff did a great job in creating the business in the first place: he was probably the first to make a business that served the entertainment industry with Tesla Coils as a primary line of business. In the past, we had a variety of makers of Tesla Coils largely targeting the museum market and similar, or what were essentially "tesla coil consultants" (like Bill Wysock) who could run a coil for a show, or, people who have a tesla coil based show like Brian Austin (Dr. Megavolt).
Jeff put a lot of time into developing a basic business process, developing the needed paperwork and such for working with production companies and, in general, making it a "commodity" special effect in the sense that each time, you're not starting from scratch. Not to say that others haven't done this in the past, but kVA Effects has a good reputation in the business for being able to deliver an effect with minimum hassle to the production company.
There's no reason why Aron won't be able to do the same. Running a business is different than developing it. Maybe Jeff wants to do something else (fly UAVs for productions, I think), and Aron wants to run an effects business.
The change in location is potentially an issue. The vast majority of production work is still in "Hollywood" (actually, all over the Los Angeles area), claims of "runaway production" notwithstanding. There's probably nowhere else in the world with the sheer variety and number of niche providers and small productions going on. For every big ticket feature that films in Romania or even Vancouver, there's probably hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller production that are still here in SoCal. If your rental snorkel lift breaks at 1AM here, not only is the place you got it from probably open 24hrs, there's 3 other places to get one.
For the big traveling show or a location shoot or something like a convention, where the company is doesn't make much difference: you're traveling and shipping regardless. But for the producer shooting a commercial or music video with a 2 day shoot, being local helps. It means that moving the tesla coil and related gear from one shoot to the next takes hours, not days. Of course, storage and wages and living costs here in the land of eternal sunshine and happiness are more expensive than pretty much anywhere else other than Manhattan or something like that. But hey, you can eat cheap fresh strawberries for $25/flat (that's 12 of those little green baskets in the store) in February, so there are some advantages to being here.
I suspect, though, that Jeff and Aron and whoever else is involved have looked at the kinds of jobs they were getting, and figured out how it would work best.
(and I gotta say, the atti website is better than the kVAEffects website.. that tiny unscalable text and all the flash on kVA Effects is a royal pain, particularly on a smart phone)
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