Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeff Granbery.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
This business found me, I didn’t find it. It grabbed me and took me for a ride and I’m still on it.
I was at a school assembly in the sixth grade where someone found me. The presenter could not get the VCR (a what?) to work, so he turned to the audience and asked if any of us could help. I volunteered, plugged in two cables, hit play and it worked. As fate would have it, John Ritter, who ran the film studio for the Irvine unified school district was in attendance, and was on the lookout for people with special talent, I guess that was mine in the sixth grade.
He offered me my first paying job ($3.25/hour!) as a video cameraman and I was the youngest employee of the school district to date. Moving forward I took photography classes in middle school and in high school and worked as a photo assistant for pros on the weekends.
People just kept coming to me and asking me to do more for them. By my Junior year I was working as a photographer and a videographer. It was unusual for someone to work in both mediums simultaneously, but it worked for me and it is one of the things that makes me stand out as a professional today.
You got to wake up and love the job. It isn’t something I try to do, it is a part of me. There’s magic in the pictures that continues to drive me.
Has it been a smooth road?
The challenge of photography and video is that you must continually reinvent yourself and re-tool your business. Trends change quickly. Our images must speak to the audience of that time. Rather than follow the latest fad, the best photographers create unique content that stands out and that creative inspiration must be regularly re invigorated and replenished.
On the business front, the rapid advances in technology have required that I constantly re-engineer the way I produce and deliver content. You can’t just learn the skills, sit back and do the same thing for the rest of your career. I have worked with film, HD, 2K, 4K 6K 8K. Each new advance means acquiring and mastering new equipment, new methods of storage and/or new ways of giving finished work to the client. Also, technology makes you faster, so you capture more and process more, which makes more work.
The key challenge, regardless of tools or process, is to deliver a message that is both human and pure.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Granbery Studios story. Tell us more about the business.
We are a photography and video content production group that specializes in commercial advertising and public relations.
I am most proud of our clients and our projects. Our projects are very diverse and I feel that they make difference. The quality of our work and our work ethic sets us apart from others.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I would say that LA is a great and a terrible place to start a media business. I say it’s best place because here in LA/OC, the business is everywhere. We are the home of movies, commercials and stars. With that said, the people who work to support the media, must demonstrate considerable skills and talent. Starting out in this area, within a whirlwind of ability and access, can at times be a roller coaster on the body and brain.
It can be challenging because you have a lot of people fighting for the same client/project. The amount of creative talent both in shooters and in crew here is like no other place. While this may be a curse for some, for me it is a blessing. I love my crews, no where do you find such hardworking people for a flash on a camera or a frame in a TV spot. You have to love that!
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
The big shift that I see, has already started. It’s is the change in how advertising is being done, which is a major focus of Granbery Studios. The current trend is lifestyle branding, where the product is part of your everyday life.
Print advertising and TV commercials are being replaced by new digital and social advertising. Everyone is still figuring out the best way to capture people’s attention in new and shifting mediums. In the early days of web content development, there was a huge push to fill it with images and any image would do. Now the images must be of a much higher quality.
Data storage is the new frontier. I haven’t delivered a CD or DVD in 3 years. Everything is digital but size of the files and the volume of image production requires massive amounts of data recording and it takes an enormous amount of time and space.
Researchers are searching for ways to build better storage systems. I am excited to see where this part of the industry is headed.
Contact Info:
- Address: 3189 Airway Ave, Suite 108. Bldg A. Costa Mesa, CA 92626
- Website: www.gstudios.net
- Phone: 949-515-0100
- Email: jeff@gstudios.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grancam/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/granberystudios/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/grancam
R) Gaffer Brian Rupp, C) DP Rich Schaefer R) Key Mike Flores, working the the shot
Image Credit:
©2017 Jeff Granbery_gstudios.net
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