Passive Income For Video Producers w/ Pat McGowan of BlackBox

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past… well, ever... You’ve probably realized that our industry is going through some pretty major changes. A lot of these changes are scary to us as filmmakers and video producers. Budgets seem to be getting smaller, and it gets harder and harder for us to stand out from the hordes of insanely talented filmmakers that we often find ourselves competing for jobs with.

Pat McGowan is a filmmaker with over thirty years of experience in the industry and has watched these shifts take place over time and adapted to them along the way. He’s the owner of inMotion, a film house based in Ottawa, Canada, as well as his new service BlackBox.

He’s watched what he calls the commoditization of video content take place, with giant companies taking a major stake in content production and consignment. Pat realized that there had to be a way for the average video producer to capitalize on the ownership of the content sitting on their archived drives, and earn some passive income in the process.

He created BlackBox as a way to help video content owners streamline the process of contributing to stock footage companies, taking care of the entire backend process, and allowing content creators to do what they do best: Create. Great. Content.

Have you ever tried getting into the stock footage world? Was it successful for you, or was it not worth the workload that came with it? Let us know in the comments.

In this episode:

- What Pat sees as some of the challenges presented to us as filmmakers in the coming years
- How we might rethink our service offerings as video producers so as to remain competitive
- Some of the benefits of getting into the stock footage, including everyone’s favorite, passive income!
- Not sure what types of footage to contribute to stock companies? Pat’s got some tips for you

Quotes:

“We are expected to create content in some kind of a business framework, but it’s really on spec, there’s very little preorder going on these days.” [10:50]

“I think a lot of video producers are probably not aware that they’re sitting on potential passive revenue that is sitting on their archived drives, or on their server right now, or even on that job that you’re going out to shoot today.” [23:37]

Links:

Blackbox
inMotion  

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