IT would be fair to say there are two sides to Perth-based production company Bolder Pictures.
IT would be fair to say there are two sides to Perth-based production company Bolder Pictures.
Camille Chen is obviously a creative spirit, having forged a career in advertising production and film making, while Peter Thomas – who is also a Fortescue Metals Group executive – can take a large part of the credit for providing a business edge for the film company.
“There are so many dimensions to any business and partnership is one of the key ingredients,” Ms Chen said of the complementary business and creative skills in the partnership.
The pair set up Bolder Pictures in 2008 with Mr Thomas personally backing the business, and went about producing a short film to take to the holy grail of film festivals – The Cannes Film Festival.
“That was the real education for us about the film industry. There are 5,000 films entered and everybody is really desperate to meet the people on the feature film side but nobody has any contacts,” Mr Thomas said.
Fast track to 2011 and the company’s 2010 feature film, Little Sparrows, has been shown at seven international film festivals, received the tick of approval from film critics around the world, and been picked up by distributors in the US, UK, across Europe and potentially an airline.
For all the success, however, there were challenges.
“We had a friend of ours who was happy to put a lot of money into it so we decided we were going to go into the feature film and moreover we were going to do it in 12 months so we would have a feature film to take to Cannes in 2010,” Mr Thomas told WA Business News.
“We put together a schedule working back from 2010 that basically said we had to complete the shoot by Christmas 2009 and we had to have it edited and finished by February.
“Our investor decided in August-September (2009) that they were no longer going to invest, so we had a problem.
“I told Camille we could do one of two things. We could delay the project a year and seek third-party or government funding, or we could just go for it on next to nothing and our budget would be $200,000.”
As it turned out, they went ahead on a much tighter budget than that for their first short film, wrapping Little Sparrows’ 63 scenes in just 19 days.
Ms Chen said shifting the focus of Little Sparrows (which will premiere in Perth next month) was made easier by the experience she had gained from her work shooting advertisements in Taiwan.
“When you produce advertisements it is all about delivery, all about whether you can finish the job right on time, right on budget ensuring your percentage of profit and delivering to your client,” she said.
As a result of that background, Ms Chen said she had become all about ‘delivery’.
“When our initial finance plan fell through it was about restructuring the plan and I was able to do that effectively, and this is perhaps not the case with other production companies,” she said.
While Mr Thomas’ involvement with Bolder Pictures extends only to the commercialisation of Little Sparrows, Ms Chen is currently in the process of getting another film off the ground.
She hopes to announce the project at Cannes this year and start filming at the end of the year.
“Every film is incredibly different. It is about mastering the nuances and differences and the opportunities,” Ms Chen said of learning as the production company develops.
Mr Thomas said securing investors for film projects required education. Film and commodities were different beasts, he said, as were private investors and the government.
Film producers should adapt their approach to investors accordingly.
“The understanding of what is economic in the film industry and what generally oil and gas and mining investors understand is quite different, it takes a while to be educated. The returns have a tail that can go on for more than a decade,” he said.
“The film industry generally doesn’t treat its investors very well and I think that is a big gap, especially in WA.
“There are an awful lot of people with an awful lot of money who can put it into film but unless the film industry pays attention to investors, it is not going to get much money.”
