BMF launches BMF Studios to provide full time photography and film services to clients
BMF is launching BMF Studios, an in-house photography and film studio to provide clients with full time film and photography services.
The 1200m2 studio is located in Sydneyʼs Chippendale and features four separate studio spaces.
The site will be staffed full time by photographers, producers and assistants and will be fully operational from September 2012.
BMF also intends to offer the space for dry-hire to freelance photographers and producers.
The BMF Photography Studio opens it doors with launch client ALDI. ALDI has partnered with BMF since 2002, during which time it has grown from under five
stores to almost 300 across Australia.
Says Jeremy Nicholas, BMF CEO: “Our clients require more and more high quality content to be distributed across owned, earned and paid channels. BMF Studios gives the agency the capability to produce video and photographic content for clients at scale and cost, while also providing the great
quality work they expect from BMF.”
BMF will officially launch the BMF Studios at an industry launch in July 2012.
38 Comments
Headline: “BMF launches the slow death of our industry”… Oh. I mean in-house studio.. Yes… ‘studio’.. Maybe ALDI should launch an in-house agency? And so the destruction of our industry continues.
It’s funny how “in house” is utter sacrelige when a client does it, but makes perfect sense when done by an agency.
I have no dog in this fight… but you can’t have it both ways.
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Just announced, BMF launches grip and lighting house to serve its already existing in-agency production shop . . . one high-placed insider notes that we may serve other production houses and agencies as well, down the line.
Breaking news, BMF launches dry cleaning and laundry service for agency personnel. They’re free to use whomever they choose, top management says, but of course they’ll want to exhibit loyalty to the firm.
There are unconfirmed reports that BMF plans to get into the financial services sector offering business loans to production companies, studios, photographers, and a host of other service businesses and creative industry players who are struggling through these tough, competitive times.
The Blog can be the first to announce that senior creatives are working on a slogan to cover the agency’s adventures into all these new business environments. One line that’s been testing strongly at the BMF carwash is “BMF, so much more than an agency”.
hmmmmmm
Hats off to BMF for getting themselves a shiny studio. Let’s hope they make a better fist of it than S2 did. It was always an awkward, some would say prosaic space for shooting, be interested to see what they do with it.
Enjoying some of the very well composed comments thus far, though i disagree that this somehow represents the death of an industry….unless you’re into shooting catalogues for Aldi.
Bring it on should be the mantra.
You can kit yourself out with all the fancy lights and c-stands you want but you still need talented people to create and produce the vision. That’s something that can never be dragged in-house, put on salary or killed off by the neo-social media shitstem.
So sharpen up people, thanks to the good folk at BMF the battle lines are now much clearer.
It’s OK to have your own print studio but not your own TV production facilities and staff? Well, get used to it. There are lots of agencies that already do production in-house. There are agencies that already have have their own studio facilities, equipment and full-time staff. Their are already agencies whose production arm does work for other agencies clients. Advertising is a business and many clients are as sick of wanky old school production companies and their costs as they are of wanky old school agencies.
“Wanky old school production companies”? There’s definitely more “wank” in advertising agencies than in a production house.
@ Get used to it.
No it’s not OK to have either, it just shows the contempt that most Agency’s have for their suppliers, I’m not sure why people are surprised by this!
The industry is changing and Agency’s are doing what they have to to maximize the profit, and if that means screwing every last penny out of their budget regardless of the spiral effect it will have on the industry then so be it.
Most production companies both TV and Stills in Oz have been screwed by Agency’s for quite sometime now, wether it be by being asked to produce work for next to nothing or work for free on scam ads for the award shows and egos and then having to wait 90 days to get paid.
It will also suit a generation of Art Directors who don’t have the first idea about craft
and think taking a picture is what you do before you go to the retouchers.
But my guess is that most of the work that will be done for ALDI is retail stuff that doesn’t require the services of bespoke production.
It seems that Ferrari’s F1 team have BMF to thank for putting the idea into their head,
Ferrari have decided to employ local Taxi drivers in each Grand Prix city to drive their cars. Well why not Ferrari is suppling the car, the technology and even the drivers suit, and what taxi driver doesn’t know to push an shove.
Then the ad agencies can move in and cut costs even further by doing it all in a Virtual environment, and save thousands of enthusiasts from the thrills of speed and noise of a real Grand Prix.
Thank the Gods for the likes of BMF, the future is clear, how did we survive for so long?
Don’t worry, we will fix it in Photoshop.
Good luck guys, that’s the lie that keeps on giving.
@Camera Obscura, that’s not a fair or accurate assessment. Producers are only as good as their suppliers and most good producers know that and do not deliberately try to screw anyone. Agencies rarely benefit from any cost negotiation as our costs have to be utterly transparent to our clients, usually the only revenue made is from head hours, not any imagined mark-up we put on photography. It generally works out to be in a $20k budget, $16k will go to photography, and $4k will go to production ie. retouching, internals etc. It’s generally a case of get the costs down for the client or don’t do the work at all and despite what you might think about agencies, most prefer to make good work than good profit.
I just rolled over an image a photographer took five years ago and had probably completely forgotten about completely and it cost the client $6k. Not bad for a day’s nothing. It’s than I make in a month, so please don’t cry poor.
BMF are showing initiative an age of procurement and ever-diminishing returns, probably so they can deliver on smaller, fast turn-around jobs and enable creatives to get work done that would otherwise be priced off the table by expensive photography. I don’t think anyone would assume that this will take an enormous chunk of business away from photographers or directors, there will always be a need for the high end product, too.
Good on you BMF.
We can only hope that BMF and the entire WPP group that started this trend continue on with what is a brilliant idea to include doing their own medical services in-house.
Why pay for professional services at all when you can get someone on a far cheaper annual salary to supply all of your needs, in-house plumbers and electricians for their site expansions, maybe in-house airline pilots and aircraft maintenance teams for their travel needs, in-house sports teams and musicians for their entertainment, and why not in-house telecommunications.
I can see it now, the BMFPhone, with service to rival Vodafone . . . well maybe in this case . . .
I always thought that S2 studios offered a great service. They came to the party on quotes, created a good atmosphere in studios, plus had a strong commited staff.
They turned a run down warehouse into the studio which BMF have now taken over.
As a freelance photographer it will be interesting to see how the two compare.
I hope they get the right people in to run it , with the proper experience.
This is the correct way forward. it means providing great content to clients at a lower cost to the agency, meaning more money on head hours, creative input and proper management while not effecting the content production.
This is the model adopted by many of the content rich agencies around the world, and it works for that type of model. R/GA is a prime example.
BMF has always been known as a content first agency, lots of video rich digital projects, great post print ads and tv spots.
On the flip side this is a great boost to the photography and video production industry as it means more full time jobs with security and it means another great location to shoot which is offset by agency money (read, not always on the verge of closing down)
I celebrate BMF for taking the plunge, its not cheap to set up. But i guarantee it will pay off in your bottom lines, but more importantly in your work
This type of move is rarely successful ….. Usually a giant waste of money. Many have tried and failed…. Good luck to em. The return of the “Full Service” agency.
@ PP
I think it’s a very fair assessment, Agency’s do ask suppliers to work for low budgets and they do ask suppliers to work for free and even in some cases finance work done for award shows or even Agency exhibitions such as the current show BMF have planned that I understand will be used to open the space.
Some Agency’s, maybe not yours (but I suspect they do), do make mark up on production and some even have an agenda to do so, I know I’ve worked both sides of the fence.
What worries me most about your post is that you refer to the 6K you just paid out to a photographer for roll over as “Not bad for a days Nothing” It shows the contempt and lack of respect you have for the people who’s services you use and to quote the fact thats more than you earn in a month goes to show you have no idea what it is to run a business (which it is why it’s more than you earn in a month) if you think all that money is going straight into the photographers pocket then you are almost as stupid as your grammar is bad.
Have a nice day @ BMF 🙂
Sheesh, what a bunch of haters here today.
If you knew anything about BMF and their long time client Aldi, then you’d know that they already do the in-house production for Aldi anyway.
So creating a new location to service this client properly (away from the other more ‘traditional’ parts of the agency) is actually a smart move if nothing more than to give this team the space and freedom to work properly and run this as an actual division of the company.
Opening it up to other clients should they want to participate in a service such as this is a natural next step and makes total sense.
@ Mickeyg
Speechless, your rationale is almost as bad as your grammar.
You must colour in for a living.
On the flip side this is great boost for people who have no command of the English language as they get to post here in a public forum.
I celebrate BMF to, mostly for giving a person like you a job, more power too them I say, another one off the streets 🙂
@Mickeyg
If BMF, in their infinite wisdom, think they can run a photography studio more leanly, more cost efficiently, with more work coming through the doors than a group of dedicated individuals who know the business, and who struggled to keep the doors open when every photographer and agency were free and encouraged to work there, as opposed to the more modern options of the same in Alexandria/Waterloo/Rosedale, all with more parking, easier access, better equipment support, darkroom and printing facilities, cool canteens next door, etc., then good luck to them.
This is another case, see every in-house production model you’d care to name, where either an inexperienced, or worse an experienced but retail agency producer(s) who thinks they understand the production business is hired on a salary well below that of their peers at actual production houses to administer a suit’s or an ECD’s dream of selling cost controlling to their clients, an exercise in the end that is always a failure and costs the agency far more than they had bargained for, because it’s not a business that they understand, and if they’d brought someone in who could actually run the place at a high standard, they’d have had to pay them accordingly.
There is a reason why the business structure of differentiating production from agency creative has thrived historically and why this new consolidation model of DIY is bound to go belly up, and that is plain and simply that the best people in the business will not support the work, the quality of the work will suffer, the clients will abandon the agency for another who can and will bring in the best, and so it goes. (see Plush, 133, and any number of others elsewhere)
Just as you would not want an average neurosurgeon, one incapable of competing with the quality of the best in the business and who works on salary at your business for all your employees exclusively to diagnose and operate on your brain tumour, you should not seek to internalize aspects of your business for cost effectiveness at the expense of quality. In the end, this trend will and is already showing signs of succeeding in lowering the standards of the work we create at large, as the best and brightest leave for more creative shores.
So BMF, how does it work with an inhouse photographer? Does the photographer continue to get royalities on images they have created or will you be demanding handover of copyright?
I just hope you don’t contribute to the further demise of our industry by undermining the value of photography, taking away copyright and giving away usage rights.
It’s a tough world gang. Everyone is expected to do more with less. Agencies now need to make bulk content for many platforms and this is how they do it. Get with the times and get onboard or get lost. Too many people in the film industry are overpaid and I’m not talking about top end directors or DPs but the massive chain of assistants who demand fees akin to an MBA graduate and five star meals thrown in. Harden up !
BMF: Let me get this straight, you ask photographers and alike who have made your concepts look great over the years, to contribute their work to your “Lets Walk the Dream” project over the past months, like it’s a collaboration, and then recently annouce that their work will actually be used in an exhibition celebrating the opening night of your studios, which in effect marks the end of work for them. What a celebration that will be. Whose dream?
Are you a teacher or just passionate about your obvious flair for grammar? Judging by the ‘smiley face’ at the end of each post (very grammar-forward in itself I must say), you are clearly very proud of yourself.
I’m not sure why though.
iobject, you are obviously underpaid for what you do. The people in the film industry don’t get super annuation, paid holidays, paid sick leave or any of these benefits that full time employees get. Also, half the time they don’t know where there next job is coming from….OVERPAID! Give me a break!
BMF are entitled to open their own studio. Agency’s have been doing it for years. Do you think BMF will charge less for these services than freelancers…..I don’t think so.
And yes it is a little rich of BMF to ask these photographers to produce these amazing images for free for a “Dreamers Exhibition” only to end up using the work to launch their own in-house photography studio…..hmmmm BMF don’t you think you should have consulted the photographers and agencies before you made this decision?
In-house production often struggles with getting and keeping talent. The best photographers / directors realise they are the value in the business and want to go it alone so they can get that value themselves.
If you have a lot of bread-and-butter catalogue shots etc, it can be cost effective. But then you are still likely to look outside for the big names if you have the budget and need a ‘wow’ job. Even if you have a wonderful in-house photographer, you will still sometimes want X’s look.
Offering it as space to hire is smart, and may make the difference between profit and loss. But then, if it ends up making money as a space and not so much as an in-house facility, then the question of ‘what business are we in’ raises its head.
The very best of Aussie luck to them though.
and guess what they are doing all on canon 5d (the mk 3 one)…
I don’t get the exhibition thing, so BMF asked a bunch of pro photographers to contribute images for an exhibition without saying what it was really for, and it turns out they are using now those photos as a way to launch their own photography studio?
Maybe those photographers should exercise their moral rights and withdraw the pics, or were they asked to waive their rights?
Lease the studio, buy some cameras, buy some lights and computors. Done!!
Have I forgotten anything???
Question to all you agency people. How many of you are going to be running your
stills productions through a studio staffed by full time BMF employees? Does anyone see an issue of real, or perceived client confidentiality with this?
hahahaha, Fair comment on the reuse of work to launch the studio but if you think $650 per day plus meals & OT is a fair for someone who’s main job is to push a dolly you might be a bit out of step with what skilled people charge in the real world. Have you ever heard of an apprentice wage ?
@ iobject
Apprentice wages are for apprentices. Yor point makes no sense.
Like most skilled jobs it’s not what you do but what you know.
And I hate to bring it up, but you’ve left out a word in your sentence.
Please think before you write.
@ iobject
You are an ignorant fool. There’s a lot more knowledge and skill required to be a grip. It’s not just pushing things.
Nice work BMF. Lovin’ how you get a professional exhibition launch for gratis and then segue that into a free promo for the launch of your studio where you are using in-house photographers.
Is there no better way to promote the agency and its in-house photographers than to use the skill, knowledge, artistic flair and industry reputation of respected photographers who will have nothing to do with Aldi and will get no work from Aldi.
One would have thought BMF could use their in house talent to launch the studio but I suppose you aren’t going to wow the client with an artistic representation of a bottle of soda water or an skilfully rendered photo of chuck steak.
I can’t really conceive of a way that BMF could more perfectly poison its relationship with its suppliers.
If I was one of the photographers who had been hoodwinked the lyric “Take this job and shove it I ain’t working her no more” comes to mind but, of course, BMF isn’t paying anyone for this ruse.
@PP your abject lack of knowledge of the existence, purpose and benefit of the (Cth) Copyright Act 1968 is incredibly bemusing.
Fair enough your client paid for a job years ago and just wants to keep on using the creative’s intellectual property for free in perpetuity. Obviously seems reasonable to you and your client. Why let the legal rights of photographers complicate matters?
Peanuts like you and the other agency trolls here need to realise there is a cogent legal basis why you can’t steal other people’s intellectual property.
If you can shoot it for less than $6K or if it isn’t worth $6K just don’t use it.
If it was so easy you would have got out from behind the desk, abandoned your apparently low paying job and drunk from the deep well of easy money in the world of photography to slake your greedy thirst to get something for nothing. But strangely enough – you didn’t. Either it isn’t that easy or you haven’t got the talent – each conclusion can be equally easily reached.
@Lawyer said. I think I have more direct knowledge of what @PP said stated in his message and yes I was pissed by the tone of the specific re-use comment by the blog troll.
However I have to say the agency involved in the roll over was very professional. They worked hard to track me down. Then approached me in a professional manner. They did not argue, cry poor, or try to screw down the price as is the form of many agencies in Australia.
The agency (not BMF) conducted themselves in a very professional manner contrary the almost general steal now and apologize later tactics of many Australian agencies. The actual people involved should be commended.
There are so many other agencies in Australia you should aim your guns at. I have another lined up for actions far beyond this right now.
Most post houses still have an in-house chef, a Porsche parked out the front and someone with a pony tail working there.
So I guess this is the modernisation of film and photography, bummer, I have no idea where my next free meal is coming from.
Damn, someone must have stolen my Porsche and Chef!
BMF it’s a dumb ass business solution – when the rest of Australian production industry and thats what it is, is outsourcing to low labour cost countries. Why set up a studio in Sydney? Offer some real cost savings to your client and do it in Vietnam before someone someone smart approaches your clients direct with a real cost saving solution and thats where this business is going. Our digital is being done in asia why stop with that?