By Iain Stasukevich, July 29, 2010
Take a look at Jake Hellbach's stock footage portfolio and you'll notice a wide variety of business and lifestyle clips, the same topics you'd see in many other portfolios. What differentiates Hellbach's work is his approach to content creation, which involves a lot more than just lights, camera and action.
One angle is keeping costs low. Since 2007, Hellbach's been running his own stock footage business, JHDT Stock Images, with partner Dolores Taylor. It's a small operation, with Hellbach taking on most of the producing and videography duties (with Sony HDR-FX1 and Canon EOS 5D Mk II cameras), and even going in front of the camera as an actor. Taylor is responsible for the back end of the business, assisting the models, shooting stills, handling uploads, and keywording all of their art assets.
Tax Woes
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Being timely with content is important for Hellbach. "We try to stay up on current news topics, like now, when the economy is pretty rough," he says. "We're doing what we call the 'bad news' series: frustrated people, people opening bills. It's unfortunate, but that's the kind of thing that's been selling really well."
Of course, JHDT's output isn't all doom and gloom. He makes clips with happy families and kids with puppies, and there are also the stylized scenes with religious themes. Faith-based themes shouldn't be ignored, he stresses. "If you've gone to any large church, you've noticed they all have big-screen plasma displays and play videos in the background to go with whatever the service is."
Kids and Pups Dolly Right
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No matter the situation, Hellbach approaches each shoot in the same efficient way: with minimal props, and close-ups on his subjects to minimize the need for a huge lighting setup. He wants the lights themselves to be as compact as possible, which his why he's making the switch from fluorescent fixtures to LEDs. "LEDs aren't quite as naturally soft as fluorescents, but the thing for me is portability, and LED lights are great for that. It's much easier than packing up all those umbrellas and softboxes." (Outdoors, he tends to use reflector panels.)
Additionally, Hellbach uses social media sites like Twitter (kk5hy) and Facebook to help him keep track of his customers and sales performance. In the meantime, stock library Shutterstock recently implemented the "Shuttertweet" service, which sends tweets to announce new sales or uploads to the site. While Twitter may be helpful for snagging new clients, Hellbach uses Facebook to keep current clients up to speed on new content that may be of interest.
Ultimately, he concedes, one can never really predict what footage is going to sell. "Peruse the forums on any site and that's the big question," he notes. "There's just no way of knowing, so I'll shoot any concept I can think of; sometimes it sells and sometimes it doesn't. You just can't second guess what someone's going to buy."
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