We first learned about Movidiam, a global professional filmmaking network and project management platform rolled into one, from co-founder George Olver in 2014. Two years on, and one year since officially opening its public beta at Movidiam.com, Movidiam is very much a thriving community and production marketplace with more than 10,000 global freelance filmmakers, agencies, brands and production companies connecting and working together on a variety of short and longer-form content.
As Olver and his co-founder Alex Vero imagined, freelance directors, DPs, editors, motion graphics artists, animators and sound designers have created Movidiam profiles to share their work and were soon joined by agencies, production companies and brands seeking vetted creatives they could hire on a moment’s notice.
“With the growing demand for quality video across all channels, this really is the easiest way for any business to make content,” Olver told StudioDaily. “We are seeing top agencies, Fortune 500 brands and FTSE 250 brands, and producers from Airbnb, Skyscanner and Tesler all using it.”
Beyond the production and post market, he says, Movidiam “has raised the visibility of creatives to people who need to produce content for multi-channel needs but might not have commissioned film/content work in the past. More people need to make video than ever before, since it is such a great way to communicate in the Web era. We’re seeing a growing number of public relations firms using the site for their content needs, for example, and there are lots of software startups that are looking for explainer videos for their services. There are some really interesting brand documentaries and new styles appearing.”
The searchable Movidiam community pages, where freelance creatives post their porfolios and share feedback.
To this critical mass the Movidiam team has more recently added an expanded revision and project communications toolset, improved search by location filters, and a new encrypted payment system that simplifies the typical paper chase following commercial production. “Payments are a big problem in the industry,” says Olver, “and it gives people piece of mind when working together as opposed to worrying if they are going to get paid or not.”
The platform is also now offering a custom service called Movidiam Studio where, for an added fee, a Movidiam project manager guides clients through team selection and logistics from concept to final. “That project manager builds the best team configuration based on the brief or budget and charges a flat 20% fee of the total budget,” he says. “It’s a bespoke service; we only hire users on Movidiam and, importantly, we offer complete transparency on suppliers and costs.”
That combination of features has drawn creatives like Sebastien Chort, a VFX supervisor at Blur Studio who is also a still photographer, New York Times DP and journalist Jonah Kessel and Günther Gheeraert, a freelance film director and photographer based in France, to join the network. A longtime user of still and motion social communities like Vimeo, Behance, Flickr and 500PX, Gheeraert has found representation in new countries and new clients through the platform. Kessel sees a huge future in short-form documentary films and thinks Movidiam could help make more of those happen.
Movidiam is searchable by location, a timesaver for finding global crews and creatives.
Solworks, a production company based in Spain, is also a satisfied member. Within a week of signing up, they won a large commercial job shooting on the island of Mallorca with a director they had never worked with before. Dublin-based Mark Murphy, a composer, sound designer and foley artist who has worked for HBO and NatGeo, signed up last year and says he was immediately impressed by how he could both share files and schedule and coordinate projects in a single place.
Olver says that by using the Ember.js framework and running Movidiam’s infastructure via a number of server, transcoding, security and productivity Amazon Web Services (Olver launched the public beta at Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference last year), the Movidiam team has been able to develop — and continue to add features to — an immersive portfolio experience for members and a seamless upload and interactive experience for teams in production.
He says Movidiam is getting ready within the next three months to add more higher-level features required by creative teams, such as synching with Google calendars, the ability to export projects directly into editing and animation software, and integration with web apps and cheaper filesharing services like Dropbox and Drive. Those additions will likely affect Movidiam’s current pricing structure as well.
Although facing increasing competition from other project management platforms in the market like Kollaborate, Wipster and the hugely popular Frame io, which is now available as an extension to Adobe Premiere Pro CC and an Apple Design Award-winning iOS app, Movidiam’s wider, community-based approach may well be its strongest asset for future growth. Or as member James Yeomans, a director, DP and aerial cinematographer in London, calls it, “social networking with a purpose.”
