Dan Thomson took a chance at the age of 46 when he decided to shut down his company and go back to school.
Flash-forward nearly 10 years and it most certainly paid off for the Sudbury native.
Always drawn to filmmaking as a youngster, Thomson attended Laurentian University for a bachelor of fine arts degree in 2002.
Now, as owner of Image Video Productions, he's offering his services to several clients such as Vale and the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra.
“Today we are reaping the rewards of that because we have a viable business and are going to take it to our retirement years,” said Thomson. “But there were times when you spent all of your money on equipment and there was nothing coming in on the other side. It was tough.”
Before Laurentian and Image Video Productions, Thomson ran a fairly large mining automation company, but made the decision to dissolve it and sell its assets.
He felt that the market, at that point, was so strong, he couldn't compete any longer.
When he decided to go back to school to study music and theatre production, Thomson and his wife understood the risk he was taking.
“It was about as far away as I could get from mining automation manufacturing,” he said, laughing. “But she's a wonderful wife and I love her dearly.
“She was very supportive and she felt that I needed a change as well, and supported me in my creative efforts.”
Thomson graduated in 2006 with honours.
“I felt like I actually have an education and background in what I wanted to do,” he said.
Image Video Productions offers a wide range of services including training videos, commercials, infomercials, coverage of sports events, documentaries and interviews.
Thomson played with the idea of wedding videos, but quickly realized that even though he can do them, it wasn't his background.
He decided to focus more on the corporate arena.
While Thomson was in university, he began writing service manuals for a mining company to make money on the side.
“I've been writing service manuals for a number of years, and because of my technical background, it was very easy for me to look at certain things like machines, and know how to talk about it and describe it and then translate that into a video,” he said. “That's the art, we write a script and then we take a look at that script and ask how are we going to make that visually appealing and make people watch this and not just fall asleep.”
It's important to make interesting videos rather than just getting the information out.
To promote his services and showcase his capabilities to potential clients, Thomson re-launched an interactive website.
“The first thing you see is me coming out of the corner of the website saying 'hi,'” said Thomson. “And that personalizes it. It says to people that there's a real person behind this website.
“I think that one little piece of video has gotten us more business than anything else that's on the website.”
His home-based business includes a state-of-the-art basement studio in his home and an equipment trailer for location shoots.
In all, Thomson estimates he owns more than $120,000 worth of equipment, including a track and a dolly, wireless lavs, an audio mixing board, shotgun microphones and a boom pole, two preview monitors, a teleprompter, and 2000 watts of AC lighting.
“In a small business such as ours, my experience taught me that I simply need to own my own equipment,” said Thomson. “That's what we've been doing.”
