By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>

THE COVID pandemic has changed the film industry.

Michael Budd, an Australian film maker who heads up the company Amazing People Pictures said the big lesson from COVID was that “no-one now knows when the next pandemic will come”.

“I don’t think our world will be the same, not within the film business, not within most businesses,” Mr Budd told Talking Business. “I think we’re going to have to live with the slight chance of some sort of pandemic looming on us.

“For that reason, we would need to consider that when shooting.” 

Mr Budd said the pandemic had created a number of logistical and financial costs for his company when it was shooting films. Amazing People Pictures had worked through the pandemic, managing all the logistical issues and production cuts.

Movies made ‘more difficult’

Mr Budd said the pandemic had made film work more difficult and had created a lot of uncertainty in the movie business.

“It’s also become challenging from the financial sense that you have to incorporate all these additional safety measures,” Mr Budd said.

“You’ve got to have deep cleaning if you’re actually shooting in a venue. You’ve got to have that additional cost. You’ve got to have COVID marshals on hand at all times.

“You’ve got to also sanitise face masks. You can only get on the set one way, you can only come off the set one way … which slows you down.

“You’re actually tracking and tracing every member of your crew and cast daily. You can’t have a situation where someone from your crew and cast go outside the filming bubble and interact with another set of people – because if there is a slight chance that they may be under a protocol, that could filter all the way down to your production and costing you hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. So it is a tricky thing to navigate,” he said.

“You’ve also got to keep this distance between each other. People who know the film business know that a director, a producer, an actor, cinematographer need to work quite closely to achieve the day-to-day work. So it does make it very challenging.”

There were also a number of other costs with film production during COVID, particularly when companies had to bring out actors from overseas and they had to be located in premises away from the production studio and isolate from the crew, director and other actors. 

Aussie crews resilient

However, Mr Budd said Australian film crews were resilient and had wanted to keep working during the pandemic.

At the same time, Australia had become the safest place to shoot a film during the pandemic because of the stringent controls. Australia also offered top-line production studios.

Mr Budd said dealing with the pandemic had affected the film industry worldwide – and into the future.

The industry in the US had shut down during the pandemic and film-makers were shooting productions in Canada. There had been “nothing happening” in the UK during the pandemic.

“You were talking about countries that had thousands upon thousands of cases on a daily basis so you just couldn’t put your crew and cast through those sorts of risks,” Mr Budd said.

Now the industry was getting back to normal. But, as Mr Budd said, the pandemic had nevertheless created a continuing uncertainty across the industry.

www.amazingpeoplepictures.com

www.leongettler.com

About Michael Budd

Well-known actor Michael Budd is the first Australian born of African-American descent to direct and produce a feature film in Australia. His latest film, Ruby’s Choice, stars two-time Golden Globe winner Jane Seymour OBE as Ruby, and award-winning Australian stage and screen actress Jacqueline McKenzie. Mr Budd had to overcome enormous logistical problems in Australia – including a change of State – to complete Ruby’s Choice and see it debut internationally, in March 2022, at the 37th Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where it was a nominee for Best International Feature Film. Mr Budd passionately supports the Dementia Foundation Spark of Life, the official charity associated with the film and which assisted as its authenticity advisor.

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business20-interview-with-michael-budd-from-amazing-

A BOOK writing workshop in Brisbane this weekend is tackling the very real challenge of artificial intelligence (AI) being deployed to create non-fiction books.

The use of AI in creative and promotional writing is moving fast, with claims of a boom in AI-written e-books on Amazon already, prompting warnings of the pitfalls in using AI for non-fiction books.

Global Publishing Group CEO Andrew Carter -- who is staging the weekend workshop in Brisbane, said while people have been getting excited about the ChatGPT artificial intelligence software, which can generate blocks of text from simple prompts, it "will never be able to tell a person’s story".

“We are losing our humanity and losing trust in people,” Mr Carter said. 

“AI can’t share your personal story which then disconnects the reader from you. People will do more worthless e-books. This will devalue e-books more, which will make a real book stand out further.”

Mr Carter said AI would lead to the ‘dumbing down of society’ -- just like what mobile phones did to people remembering phone numbers or how GPS led to people now having trouble reading maps.

“People want to hear your voice,” he said.

“84 percent of the western world have a book in them. Unfortunately, most die with that book in them or unrealised. There is a simple way to do a book. We can show you how to create the entire content for a book in under three hours, rather than six months as people may expect.”

Global Publishing Group claims to be Australia’s leading entrepreneurial publisher and was founded in Melbourne in 2007.

“As a percentage of authors published, we have created the highest number of best selling authors,” Mr Carter said. 

“We have the insider knowledge, systems, resources and distribution network to make that happen time after time. We teach would-be authors about the ‘game behind the game’ so they can generate tens of thousands of dollars before their book is even published and a lot more after it is.

“If you want to be seen as an authority in your field, it won’t be with an e-book. To establish real credibility, you need a physical book.”

He said when people wrote books, they gained confidence, worked on their inner issues and helped boost their finances.

“It changes people’s lives,” Mr Carter said. 

“One man we worked with went from doing a mundane job to pay the bills to earning $1 million a year in his own business after he did his book. This is the game behind the game. It revolutionalises people’s lives.

“We provide the number one strategy for taking any business to the next level. We make the business and the business owner stand out among all competition, position them as the go-to authority and gain them far more clients or customers than they ever could without this tool.”

Global Publishing Group is hosting a three-day Publish for Profit Workshop for Business Owners at Voco Brisbane from March 24 to 26. Mr Carter will host the workshop and will be joined by special guest speaker Sharon Jurd.

www.bestsellerevent.com 

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CANVA has created The Visual Economy Report to show business leaders how important visual communication is, in today’s highly competitive world, as a tool for more effective business development.

The Visual Economy Report presents actionable data from 1,600 global business leaders as examples of how business leaders can innovate visually to improve performance on many levels.

Canva – the Australian company that lays claim to being the world’s only all-in-one visual communication platform – has created the report to provide the most comprehensive view so far “into how global business leaders are approaching visual communication principles internally and externally to run more efficient teams, build stronger audience engagement, and fuel greater economic returns on their business”.

Among the top findings of The Visual Economy Report are:  

Visual communication enhances workplace efficiency and collaboration

Nearly all business leaders agree that visual communication methods increase efficiency (90%), enhance collaboration (89%) and carry more authority (85%) than other methods of communication. The majority (89%) also agree visual communication tools result in stronger business returns.
 

Visual communication accelerates sales cycles

With teams more global than ever, visual communication is making it possible for teams to be more collaborative; therefore, more productive in a world that’s now digital-first.
The majority of global business leaders (89%) believe visual communication has had a positive impact on remote and hybrid team members connecting with each other. About 88 percent also say visual communication tools have accelerated their sales cycles. That’s because most business leaders (85%) agree that visual content is generally more digestible, leading to more responsive prospects that stay engaged throughout the sales process.
 

Design literacy is now table stakes for most jobs

Design literacy has become critical for most professionalsbeyond trained designers. For this reason, more than half of business leaders (61%) say that employees in non-design roles are expected to have extensive design knowledge, such as the ability to create persuasive visual assets and engaging presentations, as well as being able to edit others’ designs with ease. As a result, nearly two-thirds (63%) provide training to those not in graphic-design roles.
 

Businesses need better visual content

Businesses are plagued by consistency, workflow, and quality issues with their design platforms. Nearly two-thirds of business leaders (64%) say that their company lacks a streamlined visual design software platform, and more than half agree their content is neither aesthetically pleasing (53%) nor consistent (56%).
 

Gen Z is driving design in the workplace

Generation Z is more agile and creative and is embracing visual communication tools more frequently in the workplace. More than other generations, Gen Z (93%) feel visual communication helps them articulate ideas better.

Canva’s research shows today’s businesses are operating in a newfound visual economy, where shrinking attention spans and an explosion of digital content have led to a demand for compelling, shareable visuals. Employees and customers now expect a brand's content to be as visual and digestible as what they see across social media platforms.

As a result, there are significant business opportunities for those that embrace a design-first approach by empowering everyone in their organization to design, leading to the ability to produce tremendous levels of quality content at scale.

“As business leaders navigate a changing economic environment, visual communication can help brands get ahead,” Canva CMO Zach Kitschke said.

“From helping win new customers, to attracting and retaining talent, to marketing in a way that breaks through, visual communication has never been more critical to unlocking better communication, collaboration and creativity,” Mr Kitschke said. “Today, capturing anyone’s attention can be fleeting so great design can be make or break for organisations who strive to stand out in this new visual era.”

Canva’s methodology

Canva commissioned the Morning Consult company to survey 1,600 business leaders in marketing, sales, human resources and commerce who have knowledge of company revenue goals. This group also influences their organisations’ audience engagement strategy, as well as how internal teams communicate with each other, other teams, and the company at large. Specifically, Canva surveyed 850 business leaders in the US, 375 in Australia, and 375 in the UK.

www.canva.com

About Canva

Launched in 2013, Canva is a free online visual communications and collaboration platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, documents, websites, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage, and audio clips, it is a platform that aims to allow anyone to ‘take an idea and create something beautiful’.

ends

By Leon Gettler, Talking Business

E-LEARNING is a growth market for videographers.

Adam Grusauskas, who runs the commercial video production company K5 Creative in Victoria, said e-learning really took off during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns,

When it’s not doing e-learning, K5Creative helps small to medium sized businesses expand their brands through videos and photography for their websites and corporate material. These can also include instructional or tutorial videos which businesses use to teach their customers.

K5 Creative’s main clientele is medium sized businesses, which have recently included Renault dealerships.

But e-learning is now a big focus for the company and the creative sector as a whole

“If the recent pandemic has taught us anything is that people still want to learn and they’ll be doing it online,” Mr Grusauskas told Talking Business.

“We’ve got businesses making transitions from solo enterprises into franchising and they want to teach franchisees how to do business their way,” Mr Grusauskas said.

“We’ve also got some childhood learning so I suppose educational content around literacy and numeracy.”

E-LEARNING REALLY TAKING OFF

Mr Grusauskas said e-learning was now a big growth sector for K5 Creative.

“People have been in lockdown for so long, especially with the childhood learning. Parents are pulling their hair out and staying at home and doing home schooling, and some parents are good teachers and others nay have forgotten a little bit since they were at school so there is definitely a market there for people wanting their kids to get up to scratch and not fall behind since they’ve been home schooled.”

He said a lot of the work is done with teachers at learning centres, where people come in for education. The learning centre teachers use video as they realise that not everyone can visit the centres.

“It’s about breaking down the lessons into what skills we can teach the children,” Mr Grusauskas said.

“It could be handwriting, for example, so recognising the letter is one thing, writing it is another thing, staying between the lines is another thing,” he said.

“So each building block of the learning process builds on the previous one and if you know what that process is, it provides a fun and instructional way for kids to do that.”

Mr Grusauskas’s business, which is based in the Melbourne suburb of Dromana, is expanding fast. It is now bringing more people on board to edit videos, allowing Mr Grusauskas to go out and build his customer base. 

It is also expanding geographically, covering south-east Melbourne and the CBD down to the Peninsula.

NEXT STEP: LEARNING ABOUT REAL ESTATE

K5 Creative is also expanding into commercial real estate.

“If you can imagine people who want to invest but don’t have the time to get to investment properties to have a look at them and see what’s what – and what they’re getting for their money,” he said.

“We can provide a walk-through of the property with an agent and show people around without them having to leave their home. It’s a good way to see what investors would like to purchase, and perhaps by the time they talk to the real estate agent, I would say they are a warm prospect.”

He said this was another growth market for K5 Creative.

He is working with agents and is also planning to expand that side of the business to the US next year.

www.k5creative.com.au

www.leongettler.com

Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness.

https://play.acast.com/s/talkingbusiness/talking-business31-interview-with-adam-grusauskas-from-k5-cr

ENDS