Panelists
Transcripts from Talk
Sarah Marince:
Hello, everyone. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to Crew Talk brought to you by shoots.video. I’m Sarah Marince, and I’m very excited to be your host today. And we have two very awesome guests with us on the panel today. We have JJ and Jen. Hello. So let’s just take a second and you can kind of tell us who you are, where you are and kind of what you do. JJ. You want to go first?
JJ Englert:
Sure. So I am JJ Englert. I’m the founder of industry jump and jump studios. I’m also a film producer. I spent the last 10 years in Los Angeles and now I am in New York in upstate New York.
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. We are glad to have you. Thanks for being here and hello, Jen. Hi. How Are you?
Jen Prince:
I’m an indie filmmaker based out of LA and yeah, I make independent drama and comedy feature films.
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. Well, I have my list of questions as always, but just a note to our viewers. If you have any questions throughout this crew talk, you can drop them in the Q and a box and we will definitely get to them. But JJ, why don’t you tell us a little bit about industry jump and jump studios?
JJ Englert:
Sure. Yeah. So industry jump is a community for content creators that are looking to learn new skills, grow their video business with new gigs and then manage the video business and the jump studios side. And so we originally started about three to four years ago, really just focusing on the hiring side. I felt a lot of that pain points as a producer, I was doing 20, 30, 40 videos a year doing 20 to 40 crew members for each video. So staffing up was really hard for me finding that CR or value verified crew member, valuable crew member in whatever state I was producing. And so I even initially turned industry jump as a hiring platform and then just content change throughout the year ways content was made with the content creators and you know, the types of contents and content becoming king and just so much content needed that we’ve kind of shifted towards that content creator, that video business owner that is either a solo operator or was working with a small team and they go out and shoot me 5, 10, 15 videos a month for social media videos, branded videos, web content.
JJ Englert:
A lot of the content that you see that are powering ads are being shot by these kinds of creators and businesses booming for them. And we are trying to help them grow the video businesses and give them the tools they need to succeed.
Sarah Marince:
Very cool. That’s awesome. Can you kind of walk us through like how it was heard? Like you got the idea and you’re like, okay, I want to make this happen. How do I do this? And just from start to finish, like how long has it taken,
JJ Englert:
Dude, it’s been so hard. So I started as a filmmaker, right. And I was just like, I just want to put together a small little platform. But I don’t know anybody that can build it. So I started finding some people and I eventually found person who was an ex Microsoft engineer. And he’s like, okay, I can build this for like 50 to 60 grand. It would be like six to seven months. And I was like, oh, that’s quite expensive, but maybe I can make it happen. And I made it happen. I raised some money from friends and family and we, you know, spent six to seven months building it and it was like 30% done. And we’re like, oh my God. And it’s just got into like the snowballing thing of just raising more money, building more stuff. But we did it because we were finding success in it.
JJ Englert:
Like we were talking with creators and they could use, you know, the solutions we were building and we saw a lot of promise in it. And I just love that tech side of it. You know I became a filmmaker personally to bring ideas to life, to help people you know accomplish what they want to do. You know, and to like feel real motions with my movies and whatnot. And so one of the things I found with technology is that if you create something like for a movie, for example, most likely they see a once and maybe a second time that they love it, but that’s it. But with technology you can create long lasting impact than a daily basis or weekly basis. And I just love that part of it, you know, being able to help people on that daily basis pursue their dreams within the film industry, because that’s also my dream.
JJ Englert:
So I just kept getting deeper and deeper into it. We raised some money from investors. We raised a little pre-seed angel investment round. We got into an accelerator in San Francisco. And so now it’s three and a half years in. We have a large community of content creators over 5,000 across the world. We have a podcast called learn videography where we teach content creation and how to grow video businesses. We have an online mentoring suite where you can reach over 60 different mentors in all different areas of filmmaking to learn at 18 or directing a producing. And then we just launched jump studios, which is a project management platform. And at the earliest stages, now it’s a video review suite. So you can upload a video, send it to a client, be a review link, and then your client can just click anywhere on this screen, leave notes to be a time code and you can communicate that way. And so it cuts out all the emails back and forth, all the phone calls of like, Hey, I want to change this and whatnot. And it makes it really quick and easy to deliver a video. And then once that video is finalized and ready for delivery, you can just send them all the final assets in one presentation link. So we’re finding a lot of success with jump studios early on, and we’re really excited to see how content creators can use it for their business.
Sarah Marince:
Awesome overview. Thank you for that. And congratulations on just launching jump studios like it just launched last week, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So cool. So Jen, when you’re hearing about this and you’re hearing everything that industry jump and jump studios can do, what goes through your mind? Like how does that excite you? Well,
Jen Prince:
A lot, I mean, both sides of it are exciting because one thing I’ve found in trying to find qualified crew people, and I just made a film in Texas. I went back home to make a film. I really liked a filmmaking and get an out of LA and working with local crew. But you know, there’s not a lot of great avenues for connecting with professionals. And you end up resorting to weird Facebook groups that you heard about through some strange network, you know, and it’s like, it’s, it’s a mess. So I really am excited about the possibility of also, you know, connecting dots with people that are great, that are vetted. That’s awesome. And then on the other side of it, you know, delivery, we, we do do some editing in my, in my work where we do smaller projects and have to deliver to clients. And, you know, there are starting to be more tools for better managing that, but when you have a team and lots of different versions flying around, it’s really important to be able to see each person’s comments, separate them, have the time coded comments is saves so much time. Sometimes you get comments back and they’re just like you know, can you change this here with no reference? So sides of it are extremely valuable for different reasons. So I, I find that really compelling.
JJ Englert:
It’s funny you talk about the hiring side and I felt the same pain points as a producer on, but Highwinds really difficult in the film industry. It’s so personal, it’s so relationship based, you know, and so when we put together jumps industry jam, we really wanted to do you know, create trust within the platform. So the people that you’re hiring for the first time, you can trust them to show up and that they know how to run a generator or et cetera, you know, because it’s a really high pressure situation that us filmmakers are in. So we’ve always put trust. First, we have a strong review system. We have a strong transparency throughout the whole platform, but we’ve still had a hard time with it because at the end of the day, filmmakers just want to hire who they know, you know, and if they don’t know anybody, they will trust a referral of someone that they wanted to hire their referral.
JJ Englert:
And then you just go referral the referral, the referral. And then it’s like, well, three vouches down. I found this person and I hope they work out. And most times they do, but I would like to see more from the film industry of being able to hire just the best talent in the area. Not because you know of them, but just because they’re the best for the job, you know? And I feel like we’re still not getting there. It’s, it’s more about who, you know, still, rather than this person, well-qualified, it has great credentials, but I don’t know him yet. You know,
Sarah Marince:
What is your vetting process for the site?
JJ Englert:
We don’t personally vet everyone, but we do have a profile review and scoring system. And so those that have more credentialed, more reviews, better reviews, a lot of different things go into it, get ranked higher and we can easily show you kind of who’s the most qualified for this job. Right? And so there’s also with the review system, we verify all the identities of the people that are leaving the reviews and whatnot. And the review system is quite in-depth. So we don’t personally do background checks, which I’d love to do in the future, but we do have an advanced, like algorithm kinda giving you the best shot of the talent in this area for this gig and show them the user, what kind of videos they’ve worked on the budget for those videos, what their roles were on those videos and
Sarah Marince:
A lot. So someone’s profile page and we’ll get into, you know, joining the site and all that. But if you go to someone’s page it’ll list, you know, photo credits, examples of work, all of that is right on there. Yeah.
JJ Englert:
A quick bio links to the personal sites that I am be an MDB, the resume. And then all of the videos that they’ve worked on the roles on the videos, the video budgets that they worked on, and then the reviews who reviewed them, you can even contact the reviewer to inquire about the review they left about that person. And then we have an overall profile score, which kind of sums it all up to let you know like how this person is. Well-Rounded.
Sarah Marince:
So say I joined and my score, I don’t know, is it based on like one to 10? Is that how you score
JJ Englert:
It? It’s a zero to a hundred. Everyone starts at 75, 75. Yeah.
Sarah Marince:
So if everyone starts at 75, like how do I raise my score to 85?
JJ Englert:
You just complete your profile. You add more stuff to your profile, you add more videos, your resume, each element is a factor towards that algorithm. There’s a lot of folks that join and they don’t do anything with their company profile. It’s just empty. And then they’re like, why aren’t we getting hired? And it’s like, well, no one knows what you can do. You know, they don’t know your credentials, they don’t know your background. They don’t know the videos you’ve worked on. And it’s hard enough to get hired online as it is. So if you are going to join a hiring platform for the filmmakers out there, you really need to spend the time to get set up. Right. and you know, really make it. So when a random online person finds your profile, they have everything they need to make that hiring decision. And that will get you in a good place. And I will say that it’s great to be on as many of these as possible. I know shoots video has a similar hiring platform. The online exposure can never hurt, you know, the SEO ability of it is awesome. Being in those networks is great. You just need to have your hat in as many rings as possible to get that opportunity. And so join them if you can. And if you’re looking for work
Sarah Marince:
And it makes sense to have your profile filled out 100%, because then it makes it easier for whoever’s looking at it. You know, they don’t have to go searching to other websites or, you know, contact like everything is right there. So that absolutely makes sense. I know you were maybe going to show us, like screen share with us to kind of walk us through the site.
JJ Englert:
Sure. Would you like to see, I have jump studios set up. Is that cool?
Sarah Marince:
Yeah, let’s check it out. All right. Cool. I’m excited to see that.
JJ Englert:
All right. So this is jump studios. Can you guys see my, yep. Awesome. So here is a video that we one of our crew members put on or community members and they said we had the right to share in. So this is within the video review suite. So they uploaded this video. It’s video version one, the video is in progress. And so far we have some comments on the right-hand side and so we can play this video and then we click anywhere on the video, right. And say well maybe let’s, you know, lower the light over here. Right. And then we can just, that was then left. As you see over here, it’s per the time code. It’s also showed up on the time code right here. And so you can go right back to that and say, Hey, right over here, lower the light over here.
JJ Englert:
And then your client can just, you know, respond back to that. They can thumbs up, thumbs down it, they can mark it as complete and your client, they don’t need a profile or an account to sign in or to do anything. They don’t need to pay anything. All you need to do is you send them the link. They click anywhere on the screen. They leave their name and their email address, and then they press enter. Their comments are left and you guys can go back and forth on this. And the only time we emailed them is when you respond to their comments, the let them know, Hey this person responded to your comment or they completed your comment, or they uploaded a new version for your review. So this is the, one of the things that I love about our platform is it has version control.
JJ Englert:
So, you know, we’re right now, we’re working in a rough cut, but we want to get this video to a final cut. So we get comments for the first video. And then when we’re ready to give them maybe a fine cut or that final cut, we upload that new version. Right. And then it will be marked as version two. And then at that point you can toggle between each version of that video. So if, for example, maybe you cut out something in version two that the client really loved. They can just toggle back to version one and say, Hey, bring back time code 30 to 35 in version one, put it in version two and get me version three for a final stuff like that. You know, so there’s a lot of things that go in, goes into this that it just makes it really easy for the client to kind of communicate what they’re trying to say.
JJ Englert:
Just by leaving, you know, any kind of drawings on their screen, or you know, kind of communicating what they’re trying to say in a really easy to use manner. And of course it’s desktop, it’s mobile. However, your client wants to review your videos. They’re important part is that they can get your comments really quickly because the faster you can turn around a video, the faster you get paid and the faster you can move on to more work. So there’s a huge opportunity here to, you know, increase the speed of your post production, timeline and workflow. And then I’ll get back out of here. And so this is a review suite, right? And then I’ll get back into our profile page. So here’s the projects page within the projects page, you can create review links, which is what I already showed you.
JJ Englert:
And then you can also create presentation links. So I can go over here, create a presentation link. And what this essentially means is that I am ready to deliver this final video. And I can send the client one video, 10 videos, as many things as I want with one link. And I can just either copy it or I can email it to I can email it to them and I can also custom brand this so I can change the brand new here. I can add my logo here. I can change the title here. And then I can also add watermarks to the video. So if I want to add my company watermark to the video, because maybe they haven’t paid yet, and I want to protect it, I can add my own watermark to the video. If I want to make this content not downloadable yet I can remove the download ability. So this is a great instance of like they’ve approved all of your assets, but they haven’t made the final payment yet. So you can send them a presentation link with a watermark on completely branded, show them all of the assets. And then as soon as that invoice has made, we can allow downloads to happen. And then they could just download everything with one link, one download, and they have everything right there. So really simple way to streamline your delivery in a really professional manner once they’re ready for that.
JJ Englert:
So that’s a lot about what we have live right now. It’s our review and presentation system. In the future, we are going to make it more of our CRM aspect where we add, you know, central records for clients and leads. We’re going to have an invoice in a system, so you can invoice your clients and get paid and then monitor how much you’re getting paid and, and, you know, your business income and stuff like that. And then finally have a library of pre-made video contracts. So we’ll have over 10 different contracts that you can choose from for your video business, whether it’s a production agreement, a retainer agreement and just make it really easy for you to, you know, take that client from lead to invoicing the contracts to final video review the final video delivery to payment, and then, you know, move on to the next one.
JJ Englert:
So a lot of what we’re doing with jump studios is just helping you run your video business to be more effective, more streamlined efficient. So that way that one video business owner feels like maybe a team of three or four or five, and they can start to grow their operations and focus more time on selling and getting new opportunities, growing the revenue, rather than the busy work of being on client calls for video reviews, all of thousands of emails back and forth. Did you get my invoice, all that kind of stuff. So there’s a lot of cool things that we can do at this level to increase efficiency. And like one really simple example is once this invoice is paid automatically make that Pinal presentation link downloadable so they can download the assets, you know, like really simple stuff like that, that we can do just by connecting all the systems together, to let everyone know like, Hey, final payment, good. Here’s your download link. Here you go. You know? And so that’s the kind of stuff that we’re working on now to help content creators kind of run their business better.
Sarah Marince:
It seems like you thought of everything, you know, watermarking the video, you know, taken away or giving if it can be downloaded or not. And then for the invoicing and the contracts thing is brilliant because not everyone knows how to write a contract or have one written or you have to pay someone else. That’s a great idea.
JJ Englert:
Thank you. You know, we’ve done a lot of research and we’ve interviewed at least 70 different content creators of just how they run the businesses. What do they do? What do they not do? And so many content creators said, I don’t do contracts yet, but I really want to, I just don’t know how to, I don’t have the money to pay for it. I don’t know how to set it up in my business. And we want to help these folks create a long lasting business. We want to help them stay protected. We want to help them grow a healthy business, that they can create a lifestyle, a lot of and unique contracts in place to do that. It’s just a matter of it’s, it’s a video business, you know, it’s a business, you’re running a small business. And so we wanted to enable content creators to be in a position to do that. And so one of the things that we’re doing in this contract suite is we’re not only giving them the templates, but we’re trying to give them the explainers of when to use each template of, Hey, this would be really good in this type of situation, maybe a crew of five or less or budget of this. You should look at this template, you know, not legal advice, but just recommendations from critter to creator and how they should approach their video business.
Sarah Marince:
That’s great, Jen. What are your thoughts on what you just saw for the site and everything?
Jen Prince:
I nerd it out a little bit. I love that you can you know, highlight or draw on the video, the exact spot referencing that’s. Yeah, I just was going over like reviewing a color correction with a director and, you know, we had to get so detailed in our description because we were trying to do it all virtually and not on the phone and just with notes that tool would have made a really big difference and is unique. I mean, that’s not something I see with a lot of the interfaces that I use. So I loved that. And like you said, being able to toggle different versions and not have to go three pages back to a home screen and find it differently that can get, I mean, that adds up in time. It really doesn’t, it can cause great confusion. So anything that makes communication like that more specific and clear is, is going to streamline the whole process.
Jen Prince:
So I loved that. And I, you know, and I agree with the contracts piece of it. I think one of the things that’s good for both parties, you know, both the client and the person or the, is that when you’re in a, when you’re in a business, that’s small enough that you’re one-on-one with individual clients and it’s sort of in a freelance kind of model, it ends up being easy for the easy to get taken advantage of whether or not, you know, that’s the intention people, they, they they push boundaries. And so I think having this sort of third party, that means that your contract, that just the, the, that little step of making the client feel like, okay, I’m not going to get my assets. If I don’t, you know, pay the long time, it just gives it just that extra little legitimacy that makes people behave themselves.
JJ Englert:
Yeah, it’s tough because it is that relationship business. A lot of our clients, we like to think of them as friends that we know well and whatnot, but there’s a lot of money involved and when money’s involved, it gets tricky. And we want to be able to keep these clients for a long time. And so a way that we do that is we communicate well. We set expectations and we deliver on our promises. And then, and we outline all of that in a contract and a scope of agreement, you know, and if you don’t, there’s chances for miscommunication, there’s chances for things to happen that you don’t want to happen. And then not only do you lose that client, but maybe you lose out on opportunities in the future. And it’s just so hard to get clients these days. You don’t want to lose them. You want to, you want to, you know, keep them around. You want them to refer you, you want them to make, you want to make them feel like a superstar, you know, and as a one man band that has to do at all, it’s really hard to make them feel like a superstar. But if we can automate some of these things and put a personal touch to it, maybe you can make them feel a little bit more like a VIP.
Sarah Marince:
So quick question on the invoices, when you open that feature, will you be able to make them customizable? Like you can put your logo on the invoice.
JJ Englert:
Of course, the cool thing is like, once you set up your branding, it’s just displayed on all of your documents from your video, review, your contracts, your brand, your invoicing. It’s just, we want everything to show like, Hey, I’m a professional company, start to finish. We want to deliver that experience for our creators. And it’s a big ask. It’s a, it’s a big thing to do. We have a lot of work ahead of us. But we’re really passionate about, and we’re in a position to deliver it. So we’re, we’re optimistic for the future. And at this stage, you know, we are open our beta is open for you just to start using a video review suite. It’s super affordable. It’s a great way to get started. And also the thing I like most is like, we really want your feedback at this stage and we are in an opportunity or a place to implement your feedback and to help us all kind of do this together and to make a really cool platform together, you know, by content creators for content creators. So I don’t think there’s a lot of opportunity in this space to normally do that. And I I’m, I think we’re lucky to be able to do that.
Sarah Marince:
So I have so many questions. No, I guess we’ll start out with, so say you want to sign up what is the fee, if you want to tell everybody, and then is it yearly monthly? How does the membership
JJ Englert:
Work? Sure. so right now we have a free plan, a monthly plan. And then for the next 15 days, we have a lifetime plan that we’re offering. So it’s free to sign up. It gives you five gigabytes of videos that you can upload. And 25 gigabytes in the archive archive is like, once you finish a project, you can archive it to save it for your records. For monthly it’s a 50 gigabytes of active and then 250 gigabytes of archive and that’s $7 a month. And then for I think the growth plan, which is 1250 a month at this stage then gets a 250 gigabytes of active and 500 gigabytes of archive. And then our lifetime plan, which is we’re offering for the next 15 days, it’s $99 for life. And it comes with 50 gigabytes of active 250 gigabytes of archive. And that means every time we push a new updates, you’ll tap. When we introduced the invoicing, the contracts, you get access to a no additional fees, you’re good to go for life. So that’s something that we’re doing to help get early adopters on board to help us grow this thing bigger and better, and to get feedback from them. And just to kind of have everyone have us kind of a seat at the table. So we’re really excited about
Sarah Marince:
That. How can people give you feedback? Is there, are you reaching out to people who have signed up or is there a way people can write into you?
JJ Englert:
Yeah, of course. So every new user that signs up, we automatically, we send them an auto email, but it just drops my personal email and my partner’s personal email and just say, Hey, anytime you want to get ahold of us, please do we have a live chat as well on the website. So and then, you know, we have our podcasts and we talk through with Lauren videography. We talk about a lot of the the benefits of jump studios, but also just how to run that video business. And we’d love to talk to as many listeners as possible, and we have our Instagram channels industry jump and jump studios. And then people can always find me on Instagram at JJ angler. Again, like, you know, this, this sort of thing doesn’t happen just by one person. It really takes a community. It takes a ton of people coming together. And that’s what we’re looking for. So if you’re interested in the platform, if you want to help us build it or have thoughts of what we could do or what content creators are missing, let us know we’re here.
Sarah Marince:
So when you say content creator, my mind automatically thinks of like the people, you know, on take talk YouTube, you know, the people who are doing it all day every day and like the talent people, like not, I’m not really thinking about like, oh yeah, who filmed that, but they need all of those people and they need lighting. They need people to film it, you know, scripts, whatever. If I’m talent, a talent for content creation, is it a benefit to sign up on your site to find people, to help build whatever I want to film? Yeah. I
JJ Englert:
Think you could do it on the flip side. So if you wanted to hire contractors to film stuff for you, but then have them use the video review suite to make it really easy for you to approve those videos, then you can get it as well. But we’re really focusing on the folks that are running their solo video business right now. Again, they, they do 5, 10, 15 videos a month for events re real estate wedding web videos. Like there’s just so many types of content being created right now. And content is king and you just need more than it of it than ever especially short form. So we wanted to make it really easy for you to make a lot of it really professionally really quickly.
Sarah Marince:
Okay, cool. So who do you see the most of in content creation? Why do you see like the most like wedding videographers or like who, who do you see the most on
JJ Englert:
Your site right now? It’s music, video videographers doing a lot of music videos. Maybe that’s just cause that’s where my following comes from. I, I was a semi-popular music, video producer, and some of our investors are influencers. Have you worked with like Jacob Olin’s as a music video realm as well? So maybe that’s just where our audience comes from, but music videos is very popular for us. After that, it just goes into commercials online web videos. And then I think tertiary is like real estate and wedding, but all of those industries, like anytime you need to make a video and turn around to a client for client work, like that’s us, you know? And so that’s kind of everything these days. So I’m really bullish on the consecration space and really excited about it.
Sarah Marince:
I have to ask you now can you name drop some music videos that you
JJ Englert:
Kalani Major Lazer, Mac J, yeah, I’ve done. I’ve been in the room with some great folks. And so it’s been, it’s been an honor. Some of them have been really crazy. I have stories for days of what’s gone on. But yeah, I’ve, I’ve really enjoyed my time in the music scene. And but I also made feature films as well. I have a feature film on Netflix called faith hope and love that I co-directed and co-produced and then some commercial stuff for like mission possible that I did with paramount and some other stuff.
Sarah Marince:
That’s awesome. No, those are some big names that you dropped there, so, yeah, that’s pretty cool. So one of my questions that I have here is does industry jump sync with jump studios? And if so, can you explain how, yeah,
JJ Englert:
So right now they don’t at the moment, there are two different profiles, two different communities, but the idea is that if jump studios turns into what we think it will be, then it’s all we’re going to rebuild it together and it’s going to sync together in a very cohesive way. But being so new that it is, we just wanted to keep it separate. We wanted to make sure that we just put those features first, test it, once we validated, then we’ll bring it all together.
Sarah Marince:
What’s your favorite or favorite features on for jump studios?
JJ Englert:
Yeah, it’s definitely the video review, you know, like it’s weird because that was the hardest thing that we had to build. Like video review on a technical standpoint is very difficult. You know, you have to upload the videos, you need to process them, you need to encode them and then you need to play them back without buffering. So you need to match your internet users speed and then give them a playback file that matches that. So we render out like a seven, 20 version of 10 80 version, all that kind of stuff, and automatically replay that back to the user. And then the whole annotation part on screen, having those pixels and coordinates for those things. And then the time code is very difficult. But we knew that if we could do that, we could deliver on the rest. So we just wanted to make sure that we could deliver on the video review and we did. And so now we feel like it’s not downhill, but we have a good advantage to get to the rest of it. Yeah.
Sarah Marince:
Jen, when you, you know, saw the site and the features and stuff, were you like, oh my gosh, that’s everything I need and you know, everything I would want, like for video review and everything, are there other features that you’re like, oh yeah, they should do that too.
Jen Prince:
Well, I mean, I, I review right here. I did have a question about if I could explore like all the notes in a written form, you know, in some sort of PDF or Excel or something. Yeah.
JJ Englert:
That’s such a good question at the moment. No, but we have a plan for two stages. So the next stage that we plan to do is yeah, just a PDF. And then the second stage is a premiere file and you just bring it right into premiere and all it’s kind of right there for you. That’s the goal. And that’s what we’re working towards. I’m not quite there yet, but that’s where we want to get to. Yeah.
Jen Prince:
I mean, I, I could that often after I’m working with someone giving me notes, then I want to have a list somewhere that I can go back and forth. You know, if it’s not a ton of notes, it’s not a big deal, but if you get something where you have like, you know, 50 things you’re trying to address, then having some way to see that. So that’s cool. I mean, the second stage sounds really cool. Yeah,
JJ Englert:
Just the comment quickly that the notes thing is hard because so much of it is visual. You want to be able to show them where those annotations are, you know, so when we do notes, we also want to almost do screenshots with those notes. So you can just print it out of the screenshot with the visual annotation and then the actual tax, you know, because if you just bring it down to a spreadsheet, it’s like, shoot, I lost that visual indicator that they gave me. So we really want to like redesign that and just make it so easy to just like, Hey, print out your notes, give it to your editor, or just email it to your editor or whoever, or that you could just invite your editor to that project. They can just go to that review seats. You see it for themselves, right?
Jen Prince:
Yeah. That’s, that’s really great. Yeah. That was the only question I had as I was looking at otherwise. I felt also your lifetime price sounds pretty amazing. So I think that’s, you know, I think you’re also, it’s, it sounds like you’re sensitive to, you know, people that are needing this are, are needing, they don’t have, you know, $10,000 to throw into, to
JJ Englert:
Roping with them. Right. There’s some other players in this space. But they focus really on the enterprise clients, they focused on the studios, they focused on large contracts. And they just, they all on building with the individual content creator in mind. And that’s where we are really focusing is just that individual content creator, those solar ops, or just small teams and how can we help them. And then we’ll grow into more of a team-based group based system, but really just focusing on that solo creator at the beginning, making it affordable for them, making it really simple for them to use, you know, a lot of creators that we’ve spoken with. They don’t use a system yet. They might use Dropbox, they might use a Santa, they might use QuickBooks. I mean, we use PayPal cash up. So many things, all, not think together, they don’t communicate.
JJ Englert:
They they’ve made their own system. They Frankenstein their own system. Right, right. And that works for them. But that, that doesn’t really work in the long run. Like when you go to onboard a new employee, how are you going to teach them how to do all this stuff and whatnot. And so by doing that, you’re not positioning yourself to scale. And what’s the point of working so hard. If you’re not going to grow your business to get to somewhere, maybe bigger and better, or to get a better lifestyle or a better work-life balance, you know? So you want to lay that foundation now, so you can build a profitable business company that you don’t have to be on set every single day for, or you know, that you can hire other team members and they can get onboarded really quickly and just start helping you.
JJ Englert:
And so we want to help creators have the foundation to do that. And a lot of the things that we’re doing now is to be able to seamlessly hand over these projects, to them, add new people, add contractors as having them jump in, get going, deliver what they need to and then get going. And that’s just a, you know, a more of a scalable system. So we’re trying to help in that regard. It’s a lot, it’s a lot. And we have to do a lot of education. You know, that’s one of the things we really want to focus on is a lot of how to videos, a lot of webinars, a lot of live trainings of just, you know, teaching people how to use it. Hi, how to run that video business. That’s why we have the podcast. You know, we talk about how to get paid, how to use contracts, how to do corporations for your business, what kind of business banking should you do? There’s so much that goes into it and it’s not the sexy stuff, but if you want to succeed as a video business owner, you need to know the business and the, the, the quicker that you can know the business, the better you can become with it, the easier it gets. And then the more you can focus on the creative. So that’s why we try to teach a lot with the podcast. And then we build a lot of the tools that go with.
Sarah Marince:
So a quick question about the invoicing feature that’s to come now, and when you said QuickBooks, it made me think of this is it will there also be a feature where they can be like they can set up their banking or whatever. So they’re paying you that.
JJ Englert:
Ideally that’s the goal, right? We want to make this as easy as possible. I can’t, I don’t want to promise everything because it takes a lot to build everything, but we would love to be able to integrate with QuickBooks, you know, how that very seamless we want, if there’s ways that we can automate or help streamline this process, we’re going to do it. So we’re looking into all of those things. We just don’t know exactly what we can deliver on that front at the moment, but that’s our goal.
Sarah Marince:
That’s pretty cool. And then I was also gonna ask, oh, your timeline of like what you would ideally like it to be for the next few phases.
JJ Englert:
Yeah. Great question. So we want to have everything live before end of the year. The full platform, bells and whistles before end of the year, you know, shooting for like a November, December, maybe even a little bit earlier release of everything. And, and then spend, you know, the winter for filmmakers that time is really kind of slow. And we want to spend that time educating, onboarding, getting everyone ready for that next push going into spring and summer and whatnot. So that’s our plan right now. But technology is really hard quite frankly, and we have a small team and we will do our best to get there. Like if you look on a webpage, it says like fall ish or September S you know, like we just, don’t, we’re trying to under promise and over deliver everything we do, you know? And so a part of that is just being really transparent, just communicating where we are. We have a live roadmap of what features we are doing next, what features are in progress. And then you can suggest what features you want and you can vote on it. So just making that available to the public, because again, this, this takes a lot of people to make it happen. So I’m trying to be transparent trying to have everyone at the table and, and to get this going.
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. So we’ve been talking a lot about jump studios, but there’s also industry jump. And so what is the benefit of having a profile on industry jump?
JJ Englert:
Yeah, so, you know, industry jump the hiring side is slowed down since COVID, unfortunately it’s starting to come back and start to get more popular. I think right now the biggest thing with industry Jeff is as twofold. We have a community of over 5,000 professionals, right? And it’s an open community. So you can look up any of those professionals and reach out to them and connect with them, set up phone calls and network with them, right? And that’s an under utilized tool that is really helpful for building your relationship and your network as a filmmaker. And that network is so much about who we are and the jobs we get. So that’s one of the things I love is just how easy it is to connect with any community member there. And industry jump is totally free. You can create a free portfolio, you can connect to people for free, you can hired for free.
JJ Englert:
And then the second thing that I just love is our mentoring suite. So, like I said earlier, we have over 60 different mentors that teach all aspects of filmmaking from very small, to very big. And we have a sinked video chat system. So you can just hop in a video chat room with your mentor via industry job. And some of the sessions are free and some of them are paid. Some of the paid sessions are like a dollar a minute or $2 a minute. You just set a timer. And at the end of it, it’s automatically billed to that mentor. And all the payment is really quick and easy. So the mentoring is huge too, because we’ve seen so many of those go on to create real relationships where maybe they’d mentored with someone twice, and then that person invited them to shadow them on set.
JJ Englert:
And then they became their assistant and they worked with, you know, real relationships happen like that. And as young filmmakers looking to grow into new roles or positions, or to see what a career outlook might look, we have some phenomenal people like people that have won you know, VMA awards as mentors right now this year, just want to VMA or warden and producing or cinematography or directing, you know, there’s great talent there in all levels that you can access for very little money. So that’s, I think probably my favorite aspect right now about in this jump is just the ability to connect with other filmmakers in the talk shop with them and to learn from them and to create relationships with them.
Sarah Marince:
That mentoring program is really, really cool, and probably extremely beneficial to filmmakers getting into the industry. That’s that’s great. Right. Question for both of you. Sure. What are your thoughts on the future landscape of the industry? JJ, we’ll have you go first?
JJ Englert:
I think content is going to just continue to go up. I think you need content everywhere. You know, brands that we’re seeing now, creators of delivering all kinds of assets tic-tac or you know YouTube shorts or Instagram reels and Instagram posts and Facebooks, and all different kinds of added dimensions for different kinds of ad placement. Like the, the list for deliverables now is just getting longer and longer. And that’s great. I mean, you can deliver a lot more content and make more money. And I think that’s where it’s going. You know, a lot of media I think, is going to continue to be short form, and I think it’s going to get real personal. I think some of the, the Polishness of having a 20, 30 person crew is going to go away and it’s just going to be someone talking in front of a camera, you know, and it’s just going to be real relationships trying to sell stuff or advertisements or whatever it may be.
JJ Englert:
I think we’re going to see less polished, but more content on the short form side. And then I think on the law informed side, I think the big, big studio films for the most part are going to go down and then long form like Netflix VOD stuff is going to continue to boom. And that race is kind of just getting started. So I think the short form low budget stuff is booming. I think the middle you know, I come from the indie world of like really micro budgets of like $500,000 or less for a feature. I think that will continue, but I’m afraid for the world of like a million to 10 million. I’m afraid for that world. That’s really tough right now. It’s hard to get your money back there. So I think it’s going to be really short form low budget stuff. And you’re just making a lot of it or that Netflix, HBO, Showtime, 60 million, a hundred million dollar series online, and then a studio flick for like blockbusters. That’s my idea.
Jen Prince:
I like that. I think that you know, I think if what you, as a creator, if you’re interested in making things that are really polished, I think if you’re really interested in, in craft, you know, I think the thing that’s great about where we’re going is that there’s an appetite for short form, which means that you could take less investment, less money, make something really polished that has someplace to go without it having to be well, if I want to do that, if I want to do really outstanding craft, I got to have the money to span 90 minutes, you know, and that gets really tricky because there’s less and less appetite for it. So I think on the other side of what he’s saying, I mean, I agree. I also think that if what you want to do is, is polished and you know, high level craft, you, you have new ways to distribute that that make it possible.
Jen Prince:
And I think that, you know, the, both things you’ve talked about with mentorship and with the becoming more personal, I think we’re going to see more and more diversity of content. I mean, a voice that previously there wasn’t space for because the gatekeepers, the people that were making decisions where my authentic and what they thought the world should see now there’s a demand at every level to, to see and hear from everybody. Yeah, if you have something to say, I still think at the end of the day, you need to have something to say. But I think the door is opening finally to more people. And, and I would say that one thing about your hiring platform, that’s also exciting is that it does help eliminate some of that gate keeping to make people that are truly qualified that are invisible at the higher levels because of our biases become visible. And that’s a mandate of mine as a producer, is to make my crews look more like the world and not just like Hollywood. And so I think, you know, any platform that expands that is, is going to look more like, I think what the industry is going to eventually catch up to.
JJ Englert:
And just a quick note on that. I think one thing that we didn’t talk about is just the, the cost of gear is just getting so low that the barrier for entry there too is really easy. And so you have a ton of creators with a huge platform. I mean, you can go viral on Tik TOK and like 10 seconds these days, and then access to phenomenal gear shooting 4k six K eight K for content creators. I don’t think there’s a better time right now. Like this is the time. And like, you know, one of the most popular things that kids want to be these days are you tubers, like, you know, it’s like a top five career. Like I want to be a YouTuber and, and you can be a YouTuber. That’s the cool part is there’s, there’s an opportunity for everybody in the content space to create their own voice, to create their own avenue, their own path. You know, like I was seeing something other day, like the second most famous Tik TOK or all he does is he creates kind of like funny faces of watching other tic-tacs and like, almost like a meat, like a lion
Sarah Marince:
Angry reactions. Yeah.
JJ Englert:
People love it. That’s fantastic. If that makes you happy, do it, you know, you’re creating content, you’re creating a future for you. So there’s a million things that you can do. One of the things I always go to this example, cause I love it, but like five years ago, a TIF, one of the best films there was, it was just a screen recording of a teenager going through a breakup with his girlfriend. And there was a little bit of a live chat on like a live video feed of like a Skype. But most of the film just happened on like Facebook, social media, a screen recording. They didn’t use any real cameras other than their laptop to film. And they told a phenomenal story, like a really good story through that device. And so it’s like, you don’t need a really fancy camera. You don’t need a lot of stuff to tell a good story these days. It’s just important of how you tell that story and the story that you’re telling. And I think content creators have an abundant amount of opportunity to do that and, and a stage to get it out there. And I’m really excited to see kind of what happens in the future.
Sarah Marince:
That’s awesome. And yeah, the, the guy you were talking about in tic-tok is very funny. He just like does three reactions to every video. Well, we’ve covered a lot today and thank you both for being here. And is there anything that Jen or JJ you wanted kind of that we didn’t talk about or didn’t cover?
JJ Englert:
If you are interested in learning more about me, check out to learn videography podcast, we have over 40, maybe even 50 episodes now they’re hour long episodes and we’ve interviewed like everybody, but then we also go into lectures of each subject of like how, you know, the best gear for video businesses and how to find your niche and how to break through and so many different things. And so that’s something that we’ve been working on for the last 12 months. We’ve put a lot into it. We shared as much as possible, and of course it’s free. It’s a podcast and all avenues of apple podcast, Spotify, et cetera. It’s called learn videography, check out. I think you’ll enjoy it. If you’re looking to build a business, the content creator, and then of course, head on over to jump studios at IO slash lifetime to get a lifetime deal for the next 15 days for $99 for likes.
Sarah Marince:
And where can people find you on Instagram
JJ Englert:
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, JJ. This has been wonderful. And Jen, promote yourself a little bit. Where can people find you?
Jen Prince:
Oh, sure. I think you can find me at metamorfic.com with a F not a pH metamorphic that’s where you can find links to my features. I’m also Jen not been on Twitter
Sarah Marince:
Grading. That’s awesome. Well, thank you to all of our viewers who are here today. And if you want to check out this episode or past episodes, you can head over to the shoots.video YouTube page as always I’m Sarah Marince voice actor, and you can find me at SarahMarince.com and we will see you all next time. Thanks JJ. Thanks Jen.
