As Standby Productions turns 7 years young, I thought I’d take a step outside the business and look in at what an incredible year we’ve had 2017-2018.

Firstly, let’s give a massive congratulations to the crew at Standby; including our fantastic new additions this year, Chris and Ellen, who joined in July. Without this amazing team of talented people, we wouldn’t be able to have achieved what we have. They make coming to work a pleasure and work so hard for all the right reasons.

 

Chris joined after freelancing with us for a short while, to help launch our new offering Standby Social – creating monthly content for our clients. We launched this offering a year ago and it has been a huge success with 8 clients on-board taking the offering to full capacity within its first year.

Ellen also joined July, as our Producer, and hit the ground running from day one. She has helped streamline our pre-production process and pulled together some of the biggest projects we’ve ever taken on. Ellen has truly made the role her own and continues to improve everyday and has become an integral part of the team.

Shortly after Chris and Ellen joined, Standby had its first ‘away day’ event over in Chester that was a huge success. We developed our processes, worked through our SWOT analysis and then concluded it by going out for a ‘quiet’ drink.

In May 2017 we took on one of our biggest productions, for The Co-operative Bank. We produced over 15 individual films for the bank, with the hero TV Commercial being the icing on the cake. The advert was shown on all the major TV Channels, along with covering all of their social media activity and online presence with the content we produced too.

 

One of the most successful productions we’ve ever done has to be for Jordan Wylie, producing a heartfelt film about the Chennai 6. The film helped Jordan gather pace and interest, which in turn led to the release of the Chennai 6. To be part of such a campaign is wonderful, but to have such success off the back of it is just incredible. A huge shout out must go to our Director, Ashley, who made this happen, filming and editing a beautiful film.

 

Another exciting production we produced this year was for New Era and Manchester United, producing 2x promotional films for the New Era x Manchester United headwear range. Working with elite footballers has always been an aim of mine and it couldn’t have gone better. Despite filming all the content in the most manic 53-minutes of any shoot, it all came out amazingly well and the completed films have been a huge success. The content was also picked up by the Manchester Evening News who ran an article about films just before Christmas.

 

We then move onto our latest TV Commercial for Hotter Shoes. A brand new client and a very exciting concept to execute, following a 3-stage pitch process. We’re all super proud of it and it was a real team effort to produce this one; Rich for developing a great client relationship, Ellen for pulling a large shoot together in Spain and Jack for his post production work.

 

To top the year off, we’ve also had a record-breaking year financially, beating our annual sales target by over £100k!!  

What else can I say except that I am so proud of the business and enormously thankful to the people within it. Although we’re 7 years in, this is still just the beginning and with the crew we have there is nothing we can’t achieve and there is so much more to come!

Bring on 2018-2019!!!

Simon Owen, Managing Director