Since my last post about Screen Yorkshire was very much concerned with the more traditional, established side of financing, I though I would like to write about something from the opposite side of the scale this time.
“Orillo was the brainchild of four graduates that decided that the traditional film industry wasn’t the rout they wanted to take. Although it was somewhere that we wanted to end up (…) we knew that we wanted to do it our way. And what that did, was lead us down a very windy path – half corporate, half pleasure, always trying to achieve industry standards.”
This is how Keenan Foley, one of York based Orillo Productions’ creative directors described his company when I had the pleasure of interviewing him in mid January at their “creative chapel” on Apollo way – an old church turned creative studio.
- The entire Orillo team out in force at one of their famous parties, Source: Orillo -
Founded in 2010 by four York St. John’s graduates of the BA in film studies, Orillo quickly found its niche in the market making corporate videos for clients like Jack Wills, Dulux, Mango Bikes and many others. When they were accepted onto a seven-month business growth plan sponsored by Goldman and Sachs, Keenan tells me that they “took a strong look at what Orillo was spending its money on back in 2013 (…) and the alarming thing was that in the second year of production we’d been spending about £50K on kit hire.” So Orillo decided to take an unusual step as a production company: Rather than hiring in equipment for individual jobs, they decided to buy “the whole kit and caboodle in order to own the whole supply chain.” This led them to work with Fineline Media, a company that specialises in financing production equipment for media companies ranging from start-ups to clients as big as the BBC. Now, two years down the line, Orillo owns their own studio space, lighting equipment, a RED Dragon camera with a full set of cine-primes, sound recording equipment as well as a number of editing stations. Keenan is positive that the gamble has paid off. The company can offer its clients a product made exclusively in house and entirely by the full-time Orillo team.
So, what does this mean in terms of independence in the filmmaking arena? Sure, in some respects Orillo is anything but independent. Currently they are solely reliant on their clients to finance projects. But the way they have reinvested profits to expand the companies productions infrastructure from A-Z, coupled with a healthy portion of passion and love for creative work, means that Orillo has plenty of opportunities to shoot projects on the side, like this music video for the song Foreign Tongue by York based band King No-One:
And there is more change to come, as Keenan assures me: “What will happen in 2015, like I said, we have this kit sat here, we’ve got a team that’s already been paid for in essence, (…) the building blocks are all there for us to actually start self commissioning films.” So I was of course curious to learn how they are planning to finance projects in the future and whether they are thinking of pursuing external sources of funding. “We have never dealt with any funding or secondary money stream (…) To me that is a little bit too far down traditional ways of thinking and actually (…) we want to flip things on their head and we want to be the people who are funding the films.” So, in a nutshell, Orillo wants to play “the waiting game”, creating revenue through their commercial projects and biding their time until they are in a position to make what they want, when they want and, most importantly how they want without having to compromise under any external pressure.
So what then is the price of independence in film for Orillo? Should their ambitions go to plan, it seems they might just have found a viable route here. The price for them would then simply be to hang on for long enough until they have created a base solid enough to support their own film making ventures.
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