RUN-OF-SHOW
By
Eddy Von Mueller
Creative Director
EARLY ADAPTOR
1976. America’s Bicentennial Year. In January, Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia was inaugurated as the 36th president of the United States (Carter was also a decorated Navy veteran with extensive experience on nuclear submarines, but hey, the whole “peanut farmer from Plains” schtick played great in rural districts). In September, JVC launched its new VHS system to compete with Sony’s Betamax, sparking the home video “format war.” In December, Ted Turner’s Atlanta-based WTCG became the first “superstation,” available to millions of viewers thanks to a stable satellite uplink and the rapid expansion of cable systems across the United States.
And in 1976 (in September, actually, the same month VHS made its debut), Atlanta Video was born.
AV is an Atlanta original: the first commercial video production company in Georgia and one of the first anywhere in the Southeast. You might say we’ve grown up with the video industry. Formats have emerged, evolved, and obsolesced (anyone remember ¾”? How ‘bout D2?). Playback and distribution technologies have come and gone. At every step of this long journey, Atlanta Video has stayed abreast of the latest innovations without ever losing sight of those things that never wear out: professionalism, visual impact, and effective storytelling. We’ve never been the biggest show in town (at least, not since we were the only show in town), or the flashiest, but Atlanta Video has staying power. What some people may not know about Atlanta’s oldest video production company is how committed we are to the region’s ever-growing community of media-makers and filmmakers. From its founding, AV has had strong ties to Atlanta’s powerhouse colleges and universities. Bill Brown, Atlanta Video’s president and co-founder, was a keystone member of the Visual Arts faculty at Emory University. I served proudly on the Emory Film and Media Studies faculty, and before that, on the Film and Video faculty at Georgia State. Over the years, countless aspiring creatives exploring careers in screen media got their first professional experience working as interns, crew members, and creatives on Atlanta Video projects. 70% of our staff started at the company as student interns.
There will be a lot of changes coming to Atlanta Video in the months and years to come. In addition to our decades-long commitment to providing competitively priced, state-of-the-art production services to commercial and institutional clients, AV now offers a select suite of creative and development services. We offer marketing and messaging support as well as scripting, previsualization, budgeting, and scheduling for documentary, episodic, and feature-length content. Atlanta Video will also be partnering this year with passionate local creators to produce original content.
It’s a crazy time in the media business. The pace of technological change continues to accelerate. The distribution landscape is being convulsed by rapid shifts in consumer behavior and delivery systems. Predicting the performance of everything from $200 million tentpoles to short-format streaming videos seems to get harder every day. But after nearly half a century, one thing is clear to all of us at Atlanta Video: the only constant in the screen trade is change. We’re excited to meet the new challenges and explore the new opportunities of this dynamic moment — and to help you tell your stories, share your dreams, and get your message out.
So if you need a seasoned team of production professionals to shoot your spot, or tech-savvy support to ensure that your virtual conference or meeting flows without a hitch, or if you have a killer idea for the next streaming hit, we’d love to be involved.