Andy Evans Managing Director, The Pavement, UK www.the-pavement.com  Andy Evans ‘At that point we decided to not join the gang and lower our prices. We basically restated our mission statement, which is we will basically pitch and go for every single client's A grade work, no matter what the price for that A grade work is.'
"I am sure for certain aspects, we can become a voice, an industry voice for the UK that can push forward thru the DVDA our thoughts to people at the Forum and so on. I think it is a very good association to develop how the DVD format is going to be used in the UK and potentially internationally."
Nov. 2004
DVDA (Bernie Mitchell, President): Tell me about your background? What led you to DVD?
Andy Evans: Well I left the University after finishing my master's degree in Engineering and got a job at the British Telecom Research Labs. I stayed there for awhile and decided to have a completely different change of direction and got a job at post production facility in the West End of London called TVI in the multimedia department, where my job was basically to burn CDs in 1996. During that exciting job description and noticing that TVI was actually mastering films for VHS distribution in Europe for big clients, Universal, Polygram and so on. I heard of this thing called DVD in Japan and decided to write a business plan based on that to change the multimedia department into a DVD production company. Which was submitted to my boss and I think he put his name on it and submitted it to his boss and got about 300 thousand pounds to set up what is now known as Stream Digital media, which is still happily up and running and owned by Ascent Media, if I remember rightly. We had done some of the first DVDs produced in the UK for companies like Carlton Video, and BBC and Polygram and now Universal Pictures. I resigned from Stream in July of 1999 and started up the Pavement with Kristen O'Sullivan and Lloyd Shaer under the premise that the three of us know how to make a DVD. Lloyd is a designer, Kristen is a producer and I am a techie. We sought studios at Strongroom Studios. Mainly because we wanted to do music DVDs, we thought that was the way potential there was going to be a new market. So, that was five years ago.
DVDA: Your first client's then were music clients?
Andy: Mainly music clients, plus TV clients and film. We started with James Bond Special Edition DVDs for MGM, and TV shows for the BBC and our first set of music DVDs for bands like Underworld, Motorhead, Orbital and a few other UK based bands. And in the four and a half years since then we grew like a virus within Strongroom taking over studio after studio and increasing in terms of size of people until we moved into our own premises about July 2003. We are like 20 strong now and got pretty much and equal split between TV, film, music, special interest or corporate DVD work.
DVDA: Let's get technical a moment, talk about the facility. Give us the tour, what type of equipment, software, and tools, do you use. And maybe some of your own biases on what seems to work and what doesn't.
Andy: We are pretty much a 100% Scenarist NT based authoring studio, because it was one of the first. We adopted that at Stream back in 1997 as one of the first users of the NT system and we have sort of kept with it ever since, mainly because of the kind of work we do. Yes, it is a bit more complex to use than other authoring packages like Spruce Maestro or Apple Maestro, but it does give us a lot more flexibility to do the kind of work we do. We are not an authoring facility that just churns out a lot of films to the same formula look. Every production we do is pretty unique, mainly because we are working very close with the artist and the actors and the management and the writers. We sort of pitch ourselves as the higher profile of DVDs and Scenarist gives us everything we need to achieve most of the time to do that. Encoding wise, we have multiple encoders, video encoders again depending on the application. I think we have four hardware real-time encoders and three or four software encoders. We like Cinemacraft as a software encoder. Design is mainly taken up by primarily AfterEffects, Maya, the traditional PhotoShop tools, and StudioMax, plus we have editing facilities here as well, thru Avid. Most of our audio work is actually taken care of by our partner at Strongroom. They are obviously very strong in the music field, so they do most our 5.1 mixing and conforming and encoding. Most of our post production is taken care of by our sister company, called Pepper Post Production. The Pavement invested in Pepper about 18 months ago, they are a West End Post Production facility about 45 people strong and primarily editing and Telecine. They are very well know in the feature film and drama market, we also have Hi Definition there. We have about 4 Avid Nitris DS systems, the Spirit, famous HD graded tool, and a few other HD services in editing like the Flame, Inferno and Henry, and all the post services that go with that, you know dubbing, standards conversion, aspect ratio conversion, all the nuances. So, that is sort of our three corners that help us produce any sort of DVD. We've got the audio with Strongroom, the video post with Pepper and the DVD design and production with Pavement.
DVDA: That sounds like a great complement, actually.
Andy: It's nice and what really works well over here is that it is kept completely transparent to the client. We don't try to stand up and say, " Right, we're Pavement and we can do everything because we are great in everything." We say, " Right, this is us and we think we are very good at doing DVD, and this is Pepper who are great at doing pictures, and this is Strongroom who are very good at audio." And it works very well with the clients, and I think that it has allowed us to make some great looking DVDs.
DVDA: Are you seeing an increase in work and what about competition and downward price trends?
Andy: Well, we've seen a massive increase this year in work for us. I am not sure about the competition, because we pitch ourselves slightly uniquely, as most of our competition are quite pretty much all owned by blue chip monsters and they are capable of doing huge deals with the film studios. So, we tend to pick off the jobs that would almost throw a spanner in their production mind. We have had a hell of a lot more work this year, I think for us mainly because there is more demand for DVDs now. People are starting to understand them and they expect, on bigger titles, more on them, whether it is in the design or the extras or complimentary materials. So, I think we have seen one growth on that side of things. The downward trend in pricing...my personal feel on this is that about 18 months, 2 years ago we really felt the push from most of the clients and the studios because there was a lot more competition popping up offering crazy prices to do DVDs. At that point we decided to not join the gang and lower our prices. We basically restated our mission statement, which is we will basically pitch and go for every single client's A grade work, no matter what the price for that A grade work is. Obviously, an A grade Spiderman for Columbia is probably going to have more spend on it than an A grade TV show for a UK independent. But it doesn't matter, we will still go for that work. So we refused to drop the prices and it was hard for awhile, and I think what has happened in the last 12 months is that a lot of deals that are being done for huge volume production have not really come to fruition the way that the financial bean counters or the distributors would have liked. Therefore there has been a lot more work to pick off. So we did have a dip, but now it has come back up and price is not such a pressure in the market that we are in because people are recognizing it's now just not an afterthought as oh, please just run me off a VHS, it is now being recognized as a creative process, as in producing the show is a creative process. Therefore, there is a bit more leniency, a bit more tendency to spend more money on the projects.
DVDA: The pavement has won numerous awards including DVD Excellence Awards from the DVDA . Let me ask you about some of those projects and what the awards mean to you and why you would submit your titles and perhaps your feeling on why some of the would have won.
Andy: Well, I think we were always for submitting titles for awards like the Excellence Awards for a few reasons. One is we've been very proactive over the last 5-6 years definitely just trying to raise the awareness on what DVDs are all about to everyone including the clients. Which obviously has a knock on effect, in that if you are raising awareness they realize that you know about the format and therefore there is a trust build and therefore work can come out of that. I think the Awards are one way to build that in your industry as well. Now we haven't submitted everything and anything to awards, we have only ever submitted things that we think that deserve an award. So, off the top of my head, in the film categories recently, My Little Eye, which is a film from Momentum Pictures in the UK. Not a great box office smash hit, but one that the distributor decided to take a different view on. We went for a process that said, "ok, let's go all out on making this DVD and make it the most incredible DVD with a statement that we wanted to send to the market that was " If you have a DVD player then you need this in your collection." Doesn't matter that it is the film, you need this DVD because of what it has to offer. So, we worked very closely with whole departments, the marketing department and the production team to come up with a DVD that is so unique in many ways. We had a whole marketing campaign, so that when this thing hit the shelves 6 months later, everyone was waiting for it. And it was the first thing we had ever done that uses a complete feature length interactive menu running in parallel to the main feature. Therefore if you run it in angle two which is a completely interactive real time menu running along side. That won a couple of awards. It won an excellence award and an award from Testronics, the famous testing lab. They said it was the most incredible thing that they had ever tested so they decided to give us an award.
Music, one that stands out in my head is a double disc special edition for The Jam, Paul Weller's great band back in the 70's early 80's. That won the first music awards at MusicWeek in the UK about two years ago.
DVDA: What about the Fat Boy Slim Disc?
Andy: Oh yes, that was a good one in the music category once again, I think we were helped by the quarter of a million people that we got on the beach that afternoon when we were expecting 60,000. That was good from a creative perspective in that we were brought in and involved in the production of the DVD even before the gig was shot. So, we managed to story board the whole DVD as part of shooting the concert. So you end up with a DVD which basically expresses the whole event rather than just having a nice static menu and then a linear gig to put behind it. I think it was recognized for that sort of achievement. Which I think that if you look at most DVDs now, the best ones that you sit and look at have actually had some thought before the content being finalized.
DVDA: Recently, you joined us over at Mipcom in Cannes France and was part of a DVDA's activities over there; the workshop, the awards ceremony and the DVD Club. Give us your impressions of the workshop that you gave, of how you felt about the awards ceremony and the kinds of things that went on in the Club, and. your impressions of Mipcom in general.
Andy: I think the most surprising thing for me during Mipcom across the board, and a good thing is that it was almost like going back in time to when I was telling the first film studios about DVD, it was the people dealing with VHS and they wanted to know what you could do and stick it on with their content. The great thing I found at Mipcom that sort of relates to what I was saying earlier is that there are so many people now who are actually the people creating the content who are now starting to think more about how they can create their content for this format, outside of the usual mindset of creating a linear program, which is great! So, I had some great conversations with those kinds of people. And I think it was very well timed for the DVDA to be involved with Mipcom because it provided an outlet for these people to talk to someone. People at the DVD Club could help them understand what they are trying to achieve without them actually knowing what they want to achieve from the format. So, it really helped a lot of people really get on their heads that this DVD really isn't a black art. A great DVD still comes down to great content. You can make the nicest menus in the world but still content is still the king. I think the club actually allowed a lot of these independent producers and content owners to give them some more strings to their bow to add value to their own content, whether they are reselling it all, or producing new content. So, I think that was really good achievement for the club for the DVDA to be associated with that as well, not just a technical organization but an organization that can help people who want to make content to enhance their content. So, I think it was a great link there. I thought the awards were superb. The actual award winners, it was obvious that a lot of thought had gone into judging the award, rather than just saying it was a big film by a major studio. I thought that the awards were very respectable. The workshop, I particularly enjoyed that because I have presented at pretty much every DVD European conference for the last 6 years and it was really nice to get a re-invigorated delegates coming to the workshop. Again, it was almost starting again and showing some great content and what we can actually do with this, and what they can achieve. I think it opened a lot of eyes. The variety of content that we showed between Gerard (Schmidt), myself and Bill (Kuper) with his very good Scene-it DVDs, you know it's not just for a film now. One of the things I have always said is that DVD was not invented for the feature film, and then suddenly you've got Bill there showing a family board game based around DVD. Again I think it goes hand in hand with what the club actually showed. It opened up a lot of doors for people minds. I like to say it gives them ideas for inspiration. That's the main thing I think we achieved for those people there.
DVDA: After Mipcom, you helped us launch the UK Chapter of the DVDA, What were your impressions of the first meeting?
Andy: I thought it was excellent. I was a little nervous about who should be invited to this first meeting. I was very careful in choosing a very stripped down list of individuals from across the industry in the UK, from content owners, to producers, from replication facilities to authoring facilities. I think we decided to go for a number between 60 and 100 people. And I think pretty much everyone we invited turned up, which I think a) is a good sign. So we had a very good spread of people there. And the presentations given by Bernie and Jim Taylor were very well received. I think for me as a starting point is very encouraging especially from the amount of emails I have had since saying, what do we do next. So the next step is to now maybe spread the net a little wider, now that we know there is some interest, general definite interest and start recruiting actively. And then get the UK Chapter a self sufficient, independent board and team of people and start setting some goals for what we want to achieve for the UK. I think also of the UK being pretty much the center for international distribution as well, for most European countries, it is going to be a good spring board for potentially other chapters in other European territories as a working model to get going.
DVDA: Since you are the international development manager for the DVD Association, as people are reading this interview and decide to try to start a chapter, should they contact you directly.
Andy: I think they should on even the initial thoughts of do you think it will work kind of attitude. I think what is really nice is the timing of this, 5 years ago I think it might have been a bit tougher to do this because DVD was such a young technology and everyone was very careful in guarding their own information, their own intelligence. 5 years down the line, it is a much friendly industry to be in, in terms of , everyone seems to know everyone and what they're doing and so it is great that we can get a bunch of people together and start to share information and knowledge, and even to a point that we, I am sure for certain aspects, we can become a voice, an industry voice for the UK that can push forward thru the DVDA our thoughts to people at the Forum and so on. I think it is a very good association to develop how the DVD format is going to be used in the UK and potentially internationally.
DVDA: Looking forward, where do you see DVD, where do you see the Pavement and where do you see the DVD Association in 3 years?
Andy: I think that, the Pavement and the DVD Association, because I think what I am going to say works for both, and the Pavement are already doing this to some extent, I think we need to put a strategy together for diversifying beyond just DVD. Because DVD is yes the most successful format ever, but at the end of the day it is just one delivery media for this age that we are moving forward in. Now the Pavement's approach is DVD is one delivery medium that we work on. And I think the strategy is that we should embrace our methodology and culture and bring other delivery mediums under the umbrella. You know, your personal delivery systems like your iPOD, the video version that is coming soon, whether it is interactive TV or on-line or broadcast, mobile phones. So I personally would like to see the Pavement and the DVDA grow outside of just DVD as the delivery medium. I think it is becoming more important as I speak to more clients, more often now, about their product on things other than DVD and how they can harness it, maximize the use of it, and therefore gain more money for it and so on.
DVDA: Fair enough, any closing comments to our readers?
Andy: (Laughs) Drink beer and be happy.
DVDA: Ok, one more, If there was not DVD, what do you think you would be doing?
Andy: Running a bar called the Pavement, or sleeping on it (laughter).
DVDA: Thank you, Andy Evans and continued success with the Pavement. Interview conducted by: Bernie Mitchell, President, DVDA
|
