FAYETTEVILLE - A bit of Hollywood rolled into town and set up shop last week.
The black 45-foot recreational vehicle and Range Rover that drove onto the apron of Fayetteville Executive Airport on Tuesday bore an ominous look, like something straight out of a Hollywood blockbuster.
But these vehicles don’t appear in movies; they provide the resources needed to complete them. Radar Mobile Studios created the rolling production units designed to make the post-production process cheaper and easier. And they are going to do itfrom Fayetteville.
The business has only been around a couple years and its RV has been fully operational for the past eight months. They were previously based in Utah.
Radar One, the RV, has four work stations that can be used for processing, editing, coloring and manipulating digital footage. Radar Remote, the Range Rover, has one work station but can go places the RV can’t.
Company officials introduced themselves to community creative and business leaders Tuesday. They also announced Fayettevillewould become the company’s new corporate, manufacturing, research and development home.
Daren Smith, Radar chief executive officer, said the first question he always gets asked is “Why Fayetteville?”
“It seems counter-intuitive,” he said. “But there are actually quite a few reasons to be here.”
Three primary factors were low overhead costs, the presence of major industries and a strong technology program at the University of Arkansas.
Lease negotiations are under way for a spot inside the terminal, but the company has secured land on airport property to build a hangar, said Jan Worms, Radar chief financial officer.
“We are not even negotiating a tenth of what it would cost in [Los Angeles],” Smith said.
Hangars are good places to park the high-priced vehicles because they don’t have to worry about security or bumping into something. Worms would not say how much each vehicle costs.
Fees for using both vehicles are all inclusive: $1,695 a day for Radar One and $795 for Radar Remote.
“We didn’t want to price this to only be used by the top 2 percent of filmmakers,” Smith said. “We decided to price it like we mean it.”
As filmmakers shifted todigital, the days of having to haul film rolls ended, but there was suddenly an enormous amount of data that needed to be dealt with. The digital images needed to be moved from the camera and are often too big to do over a network.
That means someone needs to run the camera to a postproduction studio and wait for a data wrangler to do his job. A data wrangler is someone who transfers the digital images and backs them up.
“We looked at these things and said there has to be a better way,” Smith said. “Post facilities have all the right tools, but you can’t take it to the set.”
Three things stood out:equipment, environment and location. Radar One and Remote addressed all those issues.
He said Radar One was called in to help when the Demi Moore and Miley Cyrus movie LOL fell two weeks behind in processing. Smith said they caught the film up in three days.
“Just being on set is that powerful,” he said.
At first Smith said they were just considering moving the manufacturing and research and development to Northwest Arkansas.
“We did our quiet expeditions checking out the area and decided ‘Why not move here?’” he said.
Northwest Arkansas’ central location was also important. Smith said he also wants to have offices in Chicago and Utah. The three locations place 75 percent of the country within a 700-mile radius, and what Smith said he considers “local.”
Worms moved to Fayetteville three months ago. She said Radar has eight employees and five will be based in Northwest Arkansas.
The number of employees will increase as the business grows. Worms said they are working with Innovate Arkansas and Waypoint Capital Management out of Oklahoma to get more investors.
Additional outside investors will help the manufacturing side of the business. Worms said no official numbers have been decided for vehicle or employee growth but said they are aiming for anywhere from six to 100 additional units and 15 to 50 workers.
“We have always prided ourselves on being money smart,” she said.
Smith said he could put as many vehicles as they can build to work immediately.
Once manufacturing begins workers at all levels from general laborer to information technology specialists will be needed.
Jeremy Dean, director of marketing and public relations for 5 Star Productions in Fort Smith, completed two projects using Radar in the past two weeks. 5 Star Productions does national projects, and he said clients want to see the work as it goes. With Radar they can see it and edit in real time.
“This is a game changer,” he said. “For so long we had to go to LA, New York or Miami.”
He said Radar’s rates are affordable and something that can be built into their pricing structure.
“You can turn projects around so fast. It saves us money in the long run,” Dean said. “The faster you work the more productive you can be.”
Matt Dromi, co-founder of social media firm modthink, left the production industry because of all the time spent dealing with technology issues. He was an adjunct instructor of digital media arts at John Brown University from 2004to 2006.
“It became an IT exercise and I want to be creative,” he said. “I have several friends who have given up video production for the same reasons.”
He said having a way to avoid the data dump could help the area grow in media production.
Chung Tan, Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce manager of economic development, said Fayetteville has a strong creative ecosystem.
“We have people here but they just aren’t mobile. This solves that,” she said.
Smith also sees potential.
“We thought maybe, just maybe there is a market here. We are testing the waters and maybe this becomes a great market,” he said.
Here are some facts about Radar One:
◊45-foot coach
◊Full post production facility
◊4 work stations
◊30 terabytes (30,000 gigabytes) computer capacity
◊1,600 megabytes per second data capacity
◊Power independent with ability to run off batteries for 7 to 8 hours
◊Instant access to video
◊Data backed up in three locations
◊Key card entry
◊Interior and exterior security cameras
◊Daily rental fee of $1,695 includes fuel mileage, driver, data wrangler, software and hardware
◊Satellite and 4G capacity.
Business, Pages 55 on 09/30/2012