Patrick Hughes is co-founder and production director at Visual Post LLC, a startup media firm in Pawtucket. Hughes talked with Providence Business News recently about starting a company in a recession, the graphics industry, and the business of MySpace.
PBN: What is Visual Post? What do you do there?
HUGHES: Visual Post is a video production, motion graphics and graphic design company. We service traditional media formats – such as television commercials, promotional videos, event production and training videos – but we also service new media formats, as well, like video podcasts, product portal landing pages, animated ad banners and straight-to-online promotional training videos. We also have a Web component, so we do animated Flash banners for companies for different Web sites.
We’ve also kind of come into a different niche market where we’ve created MySpace layouts for corporations – we’ve worked with Hewlett-Packard, Bosch, BET, and it’s been a great expanding market for us.
And lastly, we just create stunning visual effects with the motion graphics component of our company. Motion graphics is any type of title animation, logo animation – whether it be the informational graphics that you would want a user to see – that’s animated in a particular style. It’s just a nice way of putting together information that is tied in with whatever the theme of the production is. I’d say that our motion graphics component is what separates ourselves from other video production companies in Rhode Island. Having that, as well as the video production side, kind of make us unique in our market.
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PBN: Tell me a little about the background of you and Tyrone Campbell, your co-founder, and how you came to start the company.
HUGHES: Tyrone Campbell and I both are from East Providence. We’re actually a year apart – I’m 25, he actually just turned 25 – so we’re both young guys, we both grew up in East Providence. We both knew each other growing up – we were casual friends in high school, knew similar people – and we both ended up going to New England Tech, because they had a three year’s bachelor’s program in video production. You know, I always kind of knew that, hey, Tyrone was really good, and – not to boast – but he thought I was really good at what I did, too, and we always said, at some point, let’s collaborate on a project. So that conversation was started.
He ended up working for a couple of video production companies. I was working at a public television station out in Taunton, and I didn’t really like the public television atmosphere. I wanted to be doing more creative, more substantial projects. So I called Tyrone up, and I said, hey, are you still interested in maybe doing something? And in April 2008 we started Visual Post and moved into the Hope Artiste Village in June 2008.
PBN: You picked quite a time to start a company. What’s that been like, starting a business in a bad recession?
HUGHES: We were definitely confident in our skills for starting a business, but it was definitely difficult in the beginning. We knew we would have to be a lean company – we knew we couldn’t be spending all kinds of money on equipment and office space.
We found that the Internet was one of our saving factors because Internet advertising and creating Web video for companies’ Web sites and stuff like that was a cheap, effective way for companies to do advertising without having to spend the media buy dollars, and so that really helped us.
We have a special skill set here at Visual Post, where we know how to translate a company’s Web site into a MySpace page, and so that kind of blossomed for us. We built a relationship with a couple of California companies, and now they come to us exclusively to run these marketing campaigns for these large corporations on MySpace.
Obviously, starting our business in April 2008, you know, all of our business was word of mouth. My business partner has ties to the entertainment industry, so we were doing a lot of club commercials, working with a lot of entertainment artists and the like. And then people started to hear about us and we started to get the local businesses.
But at the same time we were doing Web stuff and promoting ourselves as a one-stop shop for video, graphics and Web, and it just really helped us because we were so well-rounded that we were able to take advantage – when, maybe, one of our services wasn’t doing so hot, we were able to incorporate our Web component and really put that together.
PBN: Is Rhode Island a good place to be headquartered if you’re a media company? Is it tough, or is it maybe easier nowadays because of the Internet?
HUGHES: I think Rhode Island is a great place to be a media company. We’re right in the middle of Boston and New York, so if you work both those markets you can definitely get some work.
I think that the Internet does help. It takes a certain type of person to be able to generate leads in business from online contacts; you really have to have your act together to go at these larger companies that are in different states, because they have to believe in you, they have to have faith in you. So making sure you have great phone conversational skills, maybe. You work for 80 hours straight to get the job done ahead of time; maybe you take a little bit of a price cut for the first projects or so. You just have to be tech-savvy enough to know where these companies are, as well as use social networks – Twitter, MySpace, Facebook – to really just contact [clients].
PBN: Are there any projects you’re particularly proud of or ones that have been interesting?
HUGHES: We’ve worked with MetLife not to long ago on a conference video. It wasn’t a public type of demonstration video. We edited it and put some motion graphics in. … We met them through another business contact. We had done some Web work with this gentlemen, and his brother had actually worked for MetLife and it was just kind of a referral. They loved us because we were economical, very competitively priced, and it just kind of fell into place for us.
That definitely stood out to us, that that’s the direction we want to head in – working with more corporate-type video, and doing more big business video. We find that we can bring stunning visual effects and animation, as well as great-looking video production and graphic design to these large corporations, so that’s really what’s exciting us now. •
