"I'm Jim Dodson. I was Vice President of Production at Twentieth Century Fox, and I produced for Netflix. Today I make video ads for consumer brands that were never able to afford one."
Until recently, a good sixty seconds of film meant a crew of forty, a week of prep, and a budget with six figures in it; the price of doing it properly, and I spent years learning how to spend it well.
I've run production alongside Keanu Reeves, Stephen Gaghan, Steven Soderbergh, the Hughes Brothers and John Davis. I produced and directed second unit on The Night Agent, which became the #1 most-watched Netflix series in the world.
I produced episodes of A League of Their Own for Amazon, directed The Other End of the Line, and wrote, produced and directed Behind Enemy Lines 2, which went on to be the highest-grossing action title produced by Fox Home Entertainment.
The Night Agent · Netflix / Producer, 2nd Unit Director
A shot that used to need a location, a permit and a day of setup became something I could build at my desk and finish before lunch, and it happened inside of about two years.
The first thing I noticed was that none of my instincts became obsolete. Where to put the camera, how long to hold before you cut, what a product looks like when it is actually lit. That knowledge simply stopped requiring forty people to execute.
The second thing I noticed was who stood to gain from that. Small companies, mostly.
The crew was always the expensive part. Take it out and the craft becomes available to companies that could never get near it.
Real revenue, real customers, packaging somebody agonized over. And an entire marketing presence made of still photographs, because film was priced somewhere they could not reach.
Those companies already did the hard part. The product exists, the label is right, people are buying it. What is missing is 15 to 60 seconds of it moving, and getting it no longer requires a budget conversation.
That is the whole reason StoryScience exists. I wanted to point studio craft at the people who were always priced out of it.
One visual moment from your product, built into a short spot and delivered in every aspect ratio you need, vertical and widescreen both.
See Quick Ads →Narrative films with talent, written and produced for launches and brand campaigns.
See Bespoke Work →"If your product only exists in photographs, I'd love to make it move."