I got a chance to talk with Project Manager Blake Barnett to explore the exciting community-oriented work he has been doing with his team the last few years. I’m continually impressed with these tools and resources and reached out to ask if he’d share about it here. I had the pleasure on speaking on a few panels he’s organized and loved the emphasis on sharing education, transparency, and culture shifts. Don’t miss out on what he’s doing:

Why did you start the shoots.video VIDEO PRODUCTION SERVICES directory?

We’ve always had some sort of an internal vendor list of various production resources and as we grew so did our database. In 2018, we thought to ourselves; Why are we hoarding this vendor list of vetted freelancers and wouldn’t it be more beneficial if everyone shared their referrals on an easily searchable database? We unanimously agreed that the answer was YES and moved forward with creating Shoots.video in hopes that others thought the same.

“Have you already added yourself as a resource in our production community? Our mission is to build a community where we all thrive together by creating more win-win relationships! We also strongly believe in the power of referrals and therefore encourage you to promote the rockstars of our industry by giving them a referral. To show our support we’ll be giving away a monthly $100 B&H Gift Card to whoever is at the top of our homepage leaderboard which is primarily based on giving and receiving referrals. Get started by referring a friend today!”

https://www.shoots.video/

How did that spawn the webcast?

Like many others, the webcast was spawned out of boredom when the pandemic hit. We had very little business for a few months and wanted to produce something. We ended up meeting a lot of great people and really liked hosting them so we kept going.

“We host either a crew chat or talk every Wednesday @ 4pm PT. On the chat’s there are not really any specific topics covered. It’s more of a virtual way to meetup for coffee/ cocktails with a bunch of us in the industry. Then for the talks we discuss a specific production related topic with a panel that is well versed on that topic. Plus we typically giveaway a $50 gift card. The overall goal of these and our shoots.video site is to encourage the development of more win-win relationships and to digitize word of mouth referrals.”

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What is a moment or episode that stood out to you?

I enjoy them all but the one we did on independent movie distribution stood out to me the most since I like solving problems and independent movie distribution is a current problem worth looking into solving. It’s a big one though to say the least and, at the moment, I have no idea where to start. I’m hoping by building a community we can team up and tackle the indie film distribution issue together.

What have you learned about yourself and your creative work by creating the shoots.video production community/directory?

As a production company we’ve learned to freely give out freelancer referrals instead of trying to take on every small job that comes our way.

What’s next for you and the shoots.video team?

Normally, this would be easy to answer but we’re currently more in the process of overhauling the site since we built it over many years and it’s a bit of a hodgepodge of features which needs to cleaned up before we can move forward with adding new features such as the ability to search by years of experience/types of experience.

Register To Watch Today’s Webcast HERE

Join us on May 4th @ 4:00pm PST as we talk with Daniel and talk about Vu Studios – a great resource for providing production companies, ad agencies, film producers, and corporate clients all things related to virtual production. As always please bring your questions so that we can learn together. And May the 4th be with you.

Bio
Blake Barnett is the lead project manager and co-founder of Shoots.video & BLARE Media. Originally hailing from Miami, FL which is probably why you’ll catch him more times than not sporting flip-flops for shoes, he has always been an entrepreneur at heart. After getting a BS from CSU, Fresno he engaged his entrepreneurial spirit and started up BLARE Media with his business partner Justin McAleece. From 2005 to present he has worked on thousands of feature, music, and corporate projects. When not putting miles on his custom BLARE bicycle he’s living & breathing all things visual.