One Person Camera Crew - The growth potential

This product is great for small scale films. With the growth of niches on the internet like channels on youtube and other video sites, there are tens of thousands of people who want to make high quality movies. I think this could grow into a $100 million a year business.

One Person Camera Crew - The monetization

The product here is both the hardware and the post-production software. Depending on the feature set included, I expect that package costs could range from $5,000 to $20,000. The time to recoup the cost of the product could be around 70 to 280 hours of shooting, or about 4 short films.

One Person Camera Crew - The idea

The goal of this project is to reduce the number of people on the film crew to one person. I’ll take each job and explain how it could be automated or combined with other jobs

Lighting

A lot of lighting work can actually be done in post-production. With modern software like Lightroom and Photoshop, photographers can reduce or increase the effects of shadows. It wouldn’t be very hard to mark different areas in the scene or parts of an actor’s face as being the same color and locally adjusting the lighting to remove all shadows. If the camera is paired with a distance measuring sensor, like a Microsoft Kinect, then it should be possible to add additional light sources in post-production. We’ve learned a lot about subsurface scattering and can do a much better job of modeling the effect of light on skin.

Makeup

Like lighting, makeup could also be done in post-production. If the parts of an actor’s face were painted with makeup in a handful of keyframes, the software could track the person’s features from keyframe to keyframe and put the makeup on each in frame in between.

Audio

Cameras are getting smaller and lighter, that frees up weight for other things to carry. It’s possible to make a small backpack that does that work of a boom operator including making sure that the mic is always out of frame (if it’s controlled by software looking at the live camera footage). In addition to removing the need for a boom operator, it’s possible to do a little more with audio. If the cameraman is also armed (or decorated) with a set of microphones, then it’s possible to do better audio processing in post. With several microphones, one can determine difference sources of noise and select which one(s) we want to hear, or the mix of different sources.

One Person Camera Crew - The motivation

Making TV shows and movies is expensive. Even web shows might have a crew of ten people to set up the scene, the lighting, the sound, and the makeup. That all costs a lot of money. If it were possible to reduce those costs, you could make high quality content for niche audiences that make a profit.

Micro Meets - The pitch

Are you a Fran Kranz fan? Have you always wanted to meet Day[9]? How would like to have lunch with Levi Meeuwenberg? Now you can. Just follow your favorite people on Twitter as if you don’t already and when they come to your town, see if they want to host a Micro Meet. All you need to do to get a chance to meet them is to buy a ticket, it’s that easy.

Micro Meets - The hard part

Micro Meets really gains value as it gains popularity. The key would be to first go after more niche celebrities and their fans and show (using their testimonials) that larger celebrities would benefit from using Micro Meets.

Micro Meets - The growth potential

Time for some rough math. Let’s say there are 1,000 celebrities that sign up with Micro Meets and on average each celebrity does a meet four times a year. Using my previous estimate for the value of a meet to Micro Meets of $2,500, that amounts to a revenue of $10 million dollars a year.