Although the notion of shooting original stock may be offensive to purists who feel that archives should chronicle the past, new footage looks as though it might become the backbone of the business for the major players.

Both London’s Getty Communications (controller of l.a.’s Energy, New York’s Fabulous Footage and London’s Tony Stone Images) and Kodak (which controls the Dallas-headquartered Image Bank and New York’s Archive Photos/ Archive Films) have made the commitment to expand their archives, not exclusively through library acquisitions but rather through original material shot specifically for them.

The new footage comes from many sources. Some originate from producers who are working on commercial projects on spec, or have extra footage from work-for-hire jobs. Other footage comes from cameramen who take advantage of time they’re spending in studio on other projects.

The vast majority of the original work, however, comes from cameramen and producers who have a direct relationship with the stock houses, and work specifically to fill holes in the collections.

Energy, for example, has had the good fortune of being able to turn several Tony Stone photographers into cinematographers, shooting moving images with the same sensibilities they have brought to their stills work.

‘The great thing about that,’ explains Energy cofounder and ceo Jan Ross, ‘is that the good ones really understand the need to be extraordinarily creative. Those are the images that, when you have them in your catalogue, really stand out from the crowd and generate the revenue.

‘They have a good background in terms of what works and what doesn’t work in the stock photo imagery, which is a much bigger industry than the stock footage industry. It is [however] a good way to understand where stock footage is going to be in another five or seven years from now. It’s going to be on a real upwards swing. We’re going to see the revenue from stock film maybe even eclipse that of stock photos,’ says Ross.

Original stock is attracting some big-name contributors, and that’s good for producers.

‘We believe that in our case,’ points out Andy Roeder, owner of the Toronto franchise of the Image Bank, ‘[people who use the new footage in the library are] getting stuff from us that comes from directors and cinematographers that they can’t even book within the next six months, let alone undertake the budget implications of hiring someone that good.’

Rounding up images… and paying the price

The approach the Image Bank takes to original footage is representative of the way most companies are conducting their search for new stock.

The Image Bank works with a group of cinematographers who film assigned projects, pitch ideas and offer footage they’ve already shot. Every month the stock house sends out a newsletter and a want-list, encouraging its filmmakers to fill the holes it’s identified.

Submissions are accepted only on high-quality 16mm or 35mm film, unless the footage is extraordinary. If accepted, the footage is sent to Kodak for a scene-by-scene color correction and mastering to D1 or pal. (As pal has a much denser image and a broader aspect ratio than ntsc, all dubs are done from the pal original.)

Cinematographers must submit a negative of the film and a 3/4′ reference reel. All location and talent releases have to be secured before the library will consider it, freeing the stock for use on anything which can’t be considered derogatory or defamatory.

In the few instances where releases haven’t been secured, the Image Bank burns that information onto the reference reels along with the timecode.

Once the film has been mastered and cataloged, drop frames and reference material are sent to offices around the world for potential licensing to clients. The filmmakers always retain their ownership of the footage.

As it is for historical material, the library is also cautious about new material it secures.

‘There’s the tendency to want to put everything into the library,’ says Roeder, ‘and because it’s such a cost-intensive process to digitize the material, there has to be some pretty strict editing criteria to the process. That’s part of why we don’t consider any video submissions. It can’t go to any commercials or any features because it doesn’t edit into anything that’s been shot on film.’

Although the Image Bank wouldn’t reveal the exact terms of their agreement with filmmakers shooting footage for them, other sources indicated that it basically falls to a three-way split between the stock company (which represents the images), Kodak (which masters them) and the cinematographer. The deals are for exclusive representation, and generally last between five and seven years.

Money matters

Even though shooting original footage can be an expensive proposition, the genre is doing so well because there are financial benefits for all concerned.

For filmmakers like Derek Case, co-partner in Toronto’s Magic Images, who shot footage for an international agency (see top right), their investment might be returned slowly over half a decade, but that income is coming from multiple sales to international clients.

More importantly, perhaps, the cost of the footage to producers is a fraction of what it would cost to shoot it for themselves.

Most shots (a sequence up to about 10 seconds) range in price from $300 to $3,000 for one international non-commercial use.

If a producer wanted an establishing shot of something like the New York skyline, for example, they would have to rent the helicopter, find the equipment and secure the permits before they could even begin filming.

Case points to an example of a high-speed sequence he did for a corporate client of a tennis ball hitting a racquet at 500 frames per second. The corporate rate would have seen him charging about $40,000. A stock house might lease the same footage for about $3,000.

The other advantage of a stock shot library is selection. Why send out a film crew every night to capture the perfect sunset when a library can offer a selection to choose from on 35mm film?

Making the most

of the medium

The majority of originally shot material is obviously aimed at corporate clients. With licences topping the million-dollar mark for commercial applications, it’s not hard to understand why they’re the target of choice for stock libraries. Producers, however, can be the unwitting beneficiaries of this change in library strategy.

With their main client in mind, most of the original footage is designed for multimedia or corporate accounts. The advantage of this is that there is a huge array of topics and footage available for producers.

‘People don’t tend to phone up and say, `I would like a beautiful soccer shot, or a wonderful goal or a wonderful save,” explains Case. ‘They’re much more `I want an inspirational shot’ or `I want something indicative of despair or achievement or mild failure.’ ‘

For producers who know what they want, that selection can mean fast, inexpensive footage to fill holes, or be used as an affordable source for otherwise expensive effects.

The growing awareness of original stock footage is good news for producers, and it’s destined to get even better.

‘The photography division is really a mature market,’ explains Roeder. ‘People know what’s available and they’ve been using it for awhile and the material has gotten great. For photos, it’s about market share. With film, it’s more about expanding the market. It’s about educating clients.

‘There’s still a lot of clients who don’t realize they can come in and sit down and brainstorm while looking at all our footage. We can get involved a lot earlier in the process. It’s not like they have to make up the creative around the footage – they come in knowing what the creative is, they just have to work on the execution. What’s interesting is that they’re finding more than they expected.’

– What’s hot in new stock footage? Or is it?

The biggest trends in original stock footage only marginally mirror those in archival material. The most obvious demand is for images that can be used to represent the turn of the millennium. There is also a large demand for industrial and agricultural imagery.

Somewhat surprisingly, however, considering its traditionally short life span, one of the greatest areas of demand is for lifestyle footage.

Lifestyle imagery is one area where the Image Bank is especially hoping to flesh out its inventory.

‘It has just managed to move out of the risk area,’ offers Andy Roeder, owner of Image Bank’s Toronto franchise. ‘We’re seeing a lot of our growth in this beautifully shot, but seemingly short life-span stuff.

‘Traditionally it has been hard to get a return on [lifestyle footage] because there are shooting styles that change, and when you’re shooting people there are haircuts, and clothes, and a whole bunch of things that can date the material. Whereas if you shoot hockey or swimming, it’s not going to date over five years,’ says Roeder.

‘But the lifestyle stuff has become so incredibly good, and the returns there [have grown]. The industry is mature enough now that it can support a return on historically short life-span content. This is not filler stuff anymore. It’s cutting-edge cinematography by people who are top-caliber artists.’

Regardless of its popularity, it is hard to debate lifestyle’s short endurance. Even Roeder admits that there is little reason to digitally master lifestyle sequences that are over five years old.

That opinion is shared by Frank Golomb, managing director of Germany’s Central Order stock footage library.

‘Think about lifestyle shots. It’s totally impossible to use last year’s fashions or street scenes. No one is using a New York shot, even if Park Avenue still looks like it did in 1992,’ says Golomb.

‘A big portion of contemporary material is not – how I call it – qualified for storage. It has to make its money in only a few months. It’s useful again when it becomes archival, but to be really archival, it has to be decades old. Every investment into a contemporary film includes the risk of acquiring stock that is unusable for several years very soon after an acquisition.

‘No one is interested in the news from the day before yesterday,’ says Golomb. ‘These old news clips might meet their audience again, but only when they’re 20 years old.’

– The hired guns: Derek Case

Derek Case and his partner Bob Perks founded Toronto-based Magic Images when they discovered they were both shooting for the Image Bank independently.

Case’s specialty is food, time-lapse and special effects images. He has been shooting for the Image Bank for over five years, and estimates his annual investment in original stock footage, not including the equipment which he already owns, at over $100,000.

Most recently, Magic Images shot footage of football clubs in the u.k. The shoot was a convoluted mess of rights issues, with clearance having to be granted by players, teams and leagues.

The headaches were worth it, however. Sports images are one of the strong performers in the field, as they have international appeal, can be used in a multitude of applications, and are often used as metaphors in productions.

‘You have to understand how stock works,’ explains Case. ‘It is quite a different market. It isn’t what you think it would be. It has to be general. It has to be good. You want to try to make it as non-anywhere as possible to get worldwide sales. You have to be really careful to get releases and everything. It gets quite complicated.

‘There’s no point doing something that doesn’t get you many sales, so you really have to understand what will sell a lot. There’s no point shooting something randomly.’

– Watch out for flying cows

Martin Lisius, cinematographer and president of Texas-based StormStock, spends a lot of time waiting for the worst to happen. StormStock is a stock house that specializes in originally shot, high-quality images of severe weather. Like any producer dependent on the whims of nature, shooting the worst Mother Nature has to offer requires patience.

The storm season Lisius shoots lasts between late March and early July. His main haunt is Tornado Alley – a long stretch of middle-America which includes Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas and South Dakota.

Lisius and his crew might manage 10 tornado chases a month in the spring, but of those, only half will yield footage and most of that will be of storm clouds or lightning. On average, he manages to capture one tornado every 30 trips, which represents most of the season, with about 20,000 miles worth of driving.

Being in the right area at the right time involves a lot of weather divination. Lisius does what he terms long-term, short-term and now-casting.

Long-term forecasting is done a few days before the expected event, simply to find out what severe weather patterns are forming and where they might appear. Short-term forecasting is done the day before, and the morning of the event, and generally narrows the target zone down to a radius of about 100 miles. Now-casting is typically done in the mid-afternoon of the day, and shrinks the zone to the location most likely to produce a tornado or super-cell.

Information comes from basic sources such as wind direction or barometric pressure, as well as more modern sources, such as radar and satellite imaging.

This year was especially successful for StormStock, as they managed the rare coup of capturing a monster tornado on 35mm. The mile-wide tornado was found in Spencer, South Dakota. ‘To our knowledge,’ asserts Lisius, ‘nothing like that has ever been shot in the world. There’s only one other tornado that I know of that was shot on 35, and it was a little bitty, low-contrast [tornado] way off in the distance, that content-wise didn’t really have the impact. This is the first good tornado on 35mm.’

All his experience with extreme weather manifestations has also helped Lisius do more than just build a repertoire of tornado footage.

‘Several times, we’ve quite possibly saved lives,’ he says. ‘We’ve had people pull up that were planning to drive into a tornado. It happened at Spencer. Some guy was heading westward towards it. He stopped where we were. It may be hard to believe, but he wasn’t even certain it was a tornado. It’s a mile wide, right down the road. You can’t miss it.

‘The bigger tornadoes don’t have the classic shape. They look more like wedges. They’re wide and fat, and they look like a big cloud on the ground, which is essentially what they are – but that cloud is rotating at three hundred miles per hour.’

– What they want

What will be the most popular themes in stock footage in the next few years? A survey of stock houses asking what producers have been asking for, yielded a few disturbing results:

Historic Films: Fetish (breasts, penises, bondage… )

Fringe: (L.A. Confidential, sleaze… )

Film Bank: Live murders (the Film Bank represents the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department)

Archive Films: Before they were stars (lots of celebrity and politician death-watches)

A version of this article also appeared in RealScreen.