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The Crews Control Crew Spotlight is on Accord Productions
With more than 23 years in the video business, Max Wyler’s Accord Productions has become one of the most comprehensive production facilities in South Florida. With the ability to produce TV shows, corporate training videos, and TV advertisements—in both short and long format—Accord is a leader in shooting film and creating programs for TV, marketing, and the Web.
“Our goal is to provide the best production and post-production professionals with the latest tools to exceed our clients expectations,” says Max, who is known throughout the industry for his joyful spirit and competitive nature.
As President of Accord, he leads the administrative aspects of the company. But then, production is in his blood. “I grew up mastering my craft,” says Max, who admits to learning from the bottom-up—from grip to lighting director, producer to director for television commercials, live sporting events, and industrials. His six Telly awards, and two Vision awards, are testimony to his expertise.
Andrea Keating: Tell us a little about your company. Exactly, how large is the empire you are building?
Max Wyler: Accord Productions is the mother company that does production and post-production services for entertainment, corporate communication, marketing, and Web video. Under this umbrella, we have The Beach Channel (channel 19) on Atlantic Broadband and channel 982 on Hotwire Media systems, which is a channel accessible to 125,000 households and 10,000 hotel rooms that is targeted toward tourists and locals looking for stuff to do, and places to try.
USAfootage.com, our stock footage company, deals primarily in HD footage of locations in South Florida. We have 37 employees, 12 edit rooms, and five shooting crews.
All of this is housed in The Accord Production Center, which is a 41,000-square-foot facility that we own. We also rent space to 19 other independent production-related companies.
Andrea Keating: What type of equipment do you have in house? And what trends do you see for the future in terms of equipment?
Max Wyler: We have all the latest cameras, Sony F3s, Sony f900s, F800s, Ex3s, Cannon 7Ds and 5Ds as well as Panasonic HDX-900s and HVX-200s. They all can be used with onboard recording or can be mated with Pix-240 tapeless recorders.
We have all the ancillary stuff too, Jimmy Jibs, teleprompters, HMI lights, Kino-flos, Arri lights. In post-production, we offer both AVID and Final Cut, with eight Final Cut rooms and four Avid rooms.
We offer After Effects and audio services as well as closed-captioning, subtitling, and translations, and we also have all the old and new tape formats (including HDCAM SR and D5) to move tape footage to digital formats for use in post-production.
Andrea Keating: How did you hear about Crews Control? And how long has Accord been working with us?
Max Wyler: One of the Crews Control team members called me 19 years ago, and the rest is history.
Andrea Keating: What did Crews Control do to help make your video project easy, professional, and successful?
Max Wyler: Crews Control has good crews all over the world, so projects that require multi-city shoots are not a problem. As far as projects where we are the crew in South Florida, Crews Control clients are great companies to shoot for, the Crews Control Production Managers do a great job asking all the right pre-production questions so that our crews can get the shots that their client wants.
Andrea Keating: What are some of the details of a recent project that stand out in your mind?
Max Wyler: One of our clients handles duty-free shops in airports around the country and needed shots in several airports. We booked everything with Becky and got the footage from the various Crews Control crews from around the country. Then we edited and delivered a nice product to our client.
Crews Control is an extremely well-run company, which offers us access to their great staff, great clients, and represents very good crews.
Andrea Keating: Would you recommend our services to a colleague?
Max Wyler: You bet. In fact, I have recommended many of our clients to Crews Control—including our biggest customers.
Accord Production Center
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