Bill Darby, founder of  iMOVIEi and Innovatrs entrepreneur, tells us about his life in the unpredictable world of film production.

Bill’s career path has been detached from corporate employment, having started out as a freelance Film Location Manager in 1987. After running a freelance production agency in the early 1990’s, Bill pooled his resources into forging an online movie information company, which would cater for members of the industry itself.

iMOVIEi is a new concept in online movie business resource, which is both a database for all types of production information and a promotional platform for movies, movie locations and for the businesses and people that make them. Bill hopes that iMOVIEi will help members of background production teams gain greater recognition for their work, beyond a brief mention in the closing credits.

Innovatrs: What made you do it? Why did you take the plunge, become an entrepreneur and give up that cosy corporate job?

Bill: I’ve been a freelance Film Location Manager since 1987, so I didn’t have to leave a cosy corporate job, and I’m kind of used to the uncertainty of not knowing where the next pay cheque is coming from. But still, I was always contacted by someone, be it one of the big US Studios, or an independent producer, and therefore I wasn’t really working for myself, I was working for them.

If you’re any good at what you do, you can make a good living working as a freelancer at the nuts and bolts end of physical film production in the UK,  but you lurch from contract to contract, so its rags to riches and back again whilst you wait for next job to come in, and you become an expert at churning 0% credit cards during your down time. So it has been great, I was reasonably successful, I had fun, but all the time I was conscious of a need to do something else, to make a mark, to build something more solid.  

Innovatrs: What was the original @ha  Idea and how has it evolved?

Bill: At first the idea was to create a simple database of UK locations that had been used in movies – it’s a simple fact, the same locations get used again and again for very good reasons – they’ve done if before, they can support a large film unit, they might be  close to the studios, or other great locations and they look good.

And the availability of broadband changed the way a Location Manager works.  When I started, research on a project was done in a library. Sometimes you’d just get in the car with an Ordnance Survey map. There were a few location agencies – libraries you’d visit and go through files of photographs – but they were full of locations you’d never use.

The idea evolved because it had to. When I researched the market and looked at revenue models, it became very clear there was a niche in the provision of online movie information that needed to be filled. Nothing on offer had been built with the industry in mind, people are badly served by poorly categorization and no-one was offering the businesses that supply film production an opportunity to capitalize on their movie credentials.

The earliest idea was quite parochial, but it ended up highly ambitious, global and hugely scalable.

Innovatrs: What were your first steps after you fleshed out your @ha idea ?

Bill: The first step was to raise the seed funding. I put in some cash myself, and then bootstrapped the business through friends and family. I then contracted a marketing and branding consultant.  We worked together to decide on a name and logo, and then mocked up a few pages to give an idea for the look and feel we were after. We looked in detail at the competition to see what was done well and what was done badly. After about four sessions together, spread over a month or so, we put together some user journeys, built a presentation,  and invited a select group of top level digital agencies to tender for the contract.

Innovatrs: What was your first crisis or hurdle?

Bill: Finalising the scope of works before the job went into the studio. It took much longer than anyone expected.  The delivery of the data needed to be simple, but the functionality was complex, so setting it all out on paper was a challenge.  And we never really succeeded either – the build was quite organic – as we got deeper into the development some the ideas changed and others developed, all of which had a detrimental effect on schedule and costs. This wasn’t unanticipated – when you build something from the ground up it always takes longer and costs more than you think.

Innovatrs:  Is this your first business? Did any past experiences or good advice help you navigate the entrepreneur’s road to masochism?

Bill: No – I ran a freelance production crew agency in the early 90’s. It was moderately successful in that we had some good people and got them quite a lot of work, but had a number of partners and it never made any money – we shut it down at a loss in 1993.  Some of them then did their best to avoid paying any tax, so the Revenue held me liable. It took me at least three years to sort it out.  I’m looking to offload 20% of the company to an investing partner at the moment, but I learnt to be careful about who you work with the hard way.

Innovatrs: What big ol’ failures have you had in the past and how have they helped you get to where you are?

Bill: Later on I optioned a script I thought I had a very good chance of getting made into a movie. I hawked it around all my contacts, worked with the writer and tried to get it off the ground, but it never happened.  It wasn’t a massive drain on my resources in a financial sense, but it was hugely costly in terms of time and effort.  So you need to be very careful about your choices. If you start something up, make sure it’s something you believe in – it has to be the idea that keeps on coming back to haunt you – because once you commit, its going  to be there, every moment of your waking day (and some of your nights) for a very long and lonely time.