DEBORAH GOLIAN-CASTRO : New Look in Image Industry : High-Tech, Multimedia Specialists Take Care of Business

In the pre-video age, the chairman’s speech to a company meeting was a pretty straightforward affair. Prepare a few transparencies, turn on the overhead projector and start talking. A trade show exhibit could be handled with a brightly colored, well-designed booth. Expensive film productions were strictly reserved for television commercials.

But today, in the era of VCRs and MTV, a broad variety of multimedia technologies are assuming a greater role in many areas of company operations. High-tech slide shows with an accompanying soundtrack--known as multi-image presentations--have become a staple of sales and marketing meetings, as have corporate videos. Trade shows often feature elaborate extravaganzas combining still pictures, videos and live entertainment. Videocassettes are becoming a major tool for getting a message across to customers.

As the image technologies evolve, becoming cheaper and more effective, the range of possible uses will continue to expand. But they won’t all come cheaply. Companies that want to get the biggest bang for their video buck will have to choose carefully among the many new image options, and find ways to reuse expensive film and photography for multiple purposes.

In a recent interview, Times staff writer Jonathan Weber spoke with Deborah Golian-Castro, executive producer at the Santa Ana production firm Visual Dynamics and president of the Southern California chapter of the Assn. for Multi-Image International, about some of the new possibilities in image technology.

Q. What do businesses use video and multi-image slide shows for?

A. Meetings are definitely a growth area. Meetings are more and more becoming meetings of entertainment. Companies don’t just bring people together and have people make speeches, they also want to entertain their employees and salespeople to get the message across.

Q. Do you mean internal company meetings?

A. Yes. It could be a sales meeting, a meeting of manufacturers’ representatives or a companywide meeting to motivate all employees. Most often, though, it’s sales or marketing oriented, trying to get people excited about next year’s product or about some new development in the company.

Also, companies that put a lot of money into multimedia extravaganzas are looking for a further return by finding ways to integrate different types of media that can then be taken out into the field. For example, if you make a videotape to kick off a yearlong sales campaign, it might also be taken out into the field by sales reps. That’s much more common now that companies have VCRs available in the office.

Q. What are some of the new media alternatives that have been developed in the last few years?

A. Many companies have gotten interested in rentable meeting media. People can spend a few hundred thousand dollars on a meeting that will happen for one or two days, and they’re looking for ways to inspire and motivate everybody but not have to invest so much. The solution that has been developed is rentable modules that can be played in a meeting and customized for a particular client’s needs.

Q. What’s a module?

A. Especially for large meetings, companies will often create a multi-image show, which is a multi-projector slide presentation using anywhere from three to 30 projectors with an audio track. Video quality still isn’t up to the standard for large projections; there’s nothing like 35-millimeter slides.

Now, we and other companies have libraries of rentable multi-image modules that have a generic theme, such as “sharing the vision” or “excellence” or “goal-busters.” These modules have slots in them, and we as production companies will customize them by inserting certain photos with your people or your product into the slots. So it looks as if it’s an original show, but it’s really a piece that has been shown to other organizations.

Q. How much do you save doing that? What would be the price of a module as opposed to an original show?

A. An original might be $100,000 apiece, and renting a module might be $15,000, plus the cost of equipment and customizing.

Q. Has this concept been accepted well?

A. Definitely. And we don’t create all the modules ourselves, and neither do the other producers. We’ll look for modules that have rentable possibilities, and we serve as distributors for modules that are made by other companies.

Q. If I paid for a show, I don’t want you to go out and resell what I’ve paid you to do. How does that work?

A. If we thought it was a show that had rentable possibilities, we would discuss that in advance and make some kind of arrangement for a royalty. You might get about 10% of the rental price and could make a return over time. Maybe you could get half of it back over three years.

Q. What are some uses of other video-oriented products, like the stacks of television sets that you call video walls?

A. In the past, meetings have used mostly multi-image. But we’ve found that now there is an increasing demand for multi-video. It operates on the same premise--manipulating multiple images to create something exciting to motivate an audience. The walls have been most effective for large meetings and trade shows. You can put a video wall in a 10x10 booth and make it very attractive. And you can change out each screen, or you can make it one giant video picture. There are a lot of ways to configure it.

Q. How much does that cost?

A. If you were going to rent a 16-monitor wall at a trade show, maybe $18,000 to get something up and running. Then you create the software. If a company has existing video footage, we can take that and cut it up a lot of different ways, or integrate it with 35 millimeter slides. You could be showing a product in one corner and live motion in another. It affords you a lot of opportunities.

Q. What are video newsletters?

A. It’s another way to bring people and messages out into the field. If the CEO has a message, what better way to do it than to be living and breathing on the screen. The way we’ve done it is in a Johnny Carson-type format, with scripted questions and people from the company as guests on the show. You can hire just one person to be the host. We can cut away to clips, of a new product or anything else. Or you can also have a studio audience where people respond spontaneously. You can do this for as a little as $5,000.

Q. Is this a substitute for regular written newsletters?

A. I don’t mean to imply that video newsletters will take the place of written letters, but more and more people are used to receiving information in the same way as when they go home and flip on their television. They like the fast-paced format, and to be able to get information quickly and visually. It provides a different way of communicating.

Q. What other different ways of communicating are coming along?

A. Video usage in direct mail. A company might make an offer that says “please send away for your free video tape that can tell you more.” We do some fancy packaging to get the customer’s attention in the second phase of the direct mail piece, which contains the video. This has been used successfully by companies that don’t have a very large sales force.

Q. How long have people been doing this?

A. I first heard of it about three years ago, with the car companies. Now it’s filtering down to the mid-size and smaller companies.

Q. What are some of the other areas where image technology can be useful?

A. Trade shows is a big area we get involved in, and we’re not just talking about video playback or multi-image, but also live talent. Over the last year, in response to people’s need for more intimacy, there have been a lot of ideas that use live talent that’s interactive with the media--combining multi-image with video playback with live talent on the stage.

Then there’s also the interactive TVL type of program.

Q. What’s TVL?

A. TVL is a system made by the same people who invented AVL, the computer programming that drives a multi-image presentation. Rather than having simple speaker support slides, the TVL technology allows you to computer-generate text, graphics and visuals in an exciting manner. It’s like you might see at the Academy Awards, where they take live video from the audience and show the person who won, and then they bring up graphics about who they are. It allows executives a lot more flexibility in making changes to their presentations. It’s a more dynamic way of doing speaker support.

Q. How would you put together such a program?

A. You would hire a company like ours, or a staging firm, and we would rent the equipment. We still do story boards for the whole meeting. If we were recommending that as a meeting solution, we would have someone who would design what images were going to come up where. It adds that Hollywood, show-biz feel.

Q. Does the kind of meeting presentation a company does vary according to what industry the company is involved in?

A. It has more to do with what the end use is going to be. Sometimes, we’ll do a multi-image and it will never be shown as that; it will only be shown as a video. But because of the type of product, it doesn’t need to be demonstrated with live motion. And maybe they have some existing photography and we can build on that.

Q. What technological trends will bring further changes over the next few years?

A. Being able to have good resolution in a small portable screen will make it much more accessible and create even a further market niche for video. A hand-held monitor that you can take out on sales calls. Hi-8 is a pretty good format and not that expensive. With all those 8-millimeter camcorders, every kid is going to grow up with that as a tool, we are going to see such an explosion of talent. And sending tapes to people will be a natural thing. Pretty soon people will be sending video direct mail like they send out brochures. People will have stacks of videos in their in-basket.

Also, there’s more tying in of computers with video. Interactive video is still expensive to program and install for training purposes, but it will become something very affordable.

Q. What’s interactive video, and how would it be used for training?

A. The user would have a video image and be able to select the subject, and the program would ask questions and explain a process and branch out based on the answers. It’s being used already, usually with laser disk technology. But it’s very expensive to create an interactive training program for your company--several hundred thousand dollars. In a few years, as more software is developed, it will get cheaper.

Q. Is high-definition television technology having an impact yet?

A. It’s still too expensive. You need not just the projection and monitors, but also the production equipment. It’s still cheaper to do film than high definition. There are quite a few new 16-millimeter film stocks out there that look almost as good as 35 millimeter; you have to have a very good eye to tell the difference. Video is the delivery system, but that’s not necessarily the medium it’s shot in. We shoot 16 millimeter in film, then lay it off to videotape, and do all the editing on video. The final edited piece still looks like a film.

Q. How much more expensive is that than video? Are many companies using that?

A. In the corporate market, maybe 20% is done that way. Sixteen millimeter is affordable, maybe 20-25% more expensive than video. People are so image conscious now that things have to look like what they’re used to seeing on TV. That’s why we can convince clients to go that route.

Q. How have some of these changes affected the Assn. of Multi-Image International?

A. Multi-image had been an emerging technology and art, and now it has found its place in the market. As the market has evolved the AMI membership has evolved, and we found that our producers couldn’t just call themselves multi-image producers because 50% of the business came from video. AMI was basically a multi-image organization, but we can’t be that because the industry isn’t like that. The producers who do multi-image also do video, and now people are doing a lot of hybrid presentations that use live motion and multi-image effects to create a whole different animal.

So now the organization cooperates with a sister organization, the Assn. for Visual Communicators, which was primarily oriented to video. The two groups feed off each other, using the same mailing list and publishing a joint newsletter.

Q. Who are the members?

A. Producers, directors, writers, educators, anybody who has anything to do with the media and putting projects together.

Q. What do you do as head of the local chapter?

A. We try to provide continuing education for the membership in terms of new technology. We have workshops on specific subjects, and meetings that keep everyone up to date on what everyone is doing. We have the Gold Tour of award-winning multi-image shows, which go to all the chapters.

Q. What is the relationship between the multi-image people and the video people?

A. Within the organization, there’s a lot of bantering regarding who we are. But if we just catered to multi-image, it would be very small. So, more people are saying, let’s broaden the scope. The corporate market has grown substantially recently, so there’s just a lot more opportunity for everybody. We have seen people coming from the film arena getting into corporate video. There’s just a huge market for it. Before, the technology was too expensive and there weren’t enough ways to get the image out because there weren’t VCRs in the offices. Now, everything is primed.

Q. Is much of the activity in Orange County, or is it really Los Angeles-based?

A. Orange County is definitely a growth market, but Los Angeles still has the strongest base of opportunity, and a very strong talent base.

Q. Has the business developed differently in this area because it’s the image capital of the world?

A. This market probably is a different animal in that respect. A few years ago, at the peak of multi-image, there were a lot of large shops with heavy equipment investments and heavy personnel investments. But with the freelance talent base in this city, it didn’t make sense to have a lot of people on staff. And people got really enamored with the technology and invested heavily, spent a lot of money, and then found it went obsolete so quickly they couldn’t make the money back. Now, everyone goes out of house for editing and talent.