Today’s audiences see more content than ever on more devices and in more formats, including TV commercials, social media ads, short videos and more, but audiences typically do not stop to think about who is responsible for the content or how it is made. Waymack and Crew has been at the forefront of the market since before content was even called content, and it has done so from its own backyard.
Started in 1986, Dan Waymack’s company initially focused on local commercials for television, working with agencies around Little Rock. In 1999, the crew got a call to work on a U.S. Army account out of Chicago. Since then, the company has divided its time between the two cities.
“We didn’t need a whole lot more to make that jump because of all the creative work we’d been doing here,” he said.
He said there are a lot of creative companies in Arkansas, and working with them over the years has allowed Waymack and Crew to stay in business and to garner attention from across the country.
He said the firm is busier than ever but maintains the same great quality their customers have come to expect. Although Waymack and his crew are all over the map, he said he enjoys coming back to Arkansas, working in downtown Little Rock and seeing his large family in the Natural State.
Growing throughout the digital revolution, Waymack and Crew has built a name for itself as a production company, making the shift in recent years to focus mostly on content creation. The team still implements tools and methods of the past while pioneering new techniques and using the latest technology to make a product customers rave about.
“Production has changed, but it hasn’t,” Waymack said. “We still use cameras. We still edit. What we shoot, and what we edit on has changed drastically.”
One massive change that has caused upheaval in the digital content space is the availability of cameras and editing software. Every teen with a phone can put together a video and launch a social media campaign. The last editing system Waymack and Crew purchased, an Avid-based system, was $300,000. Now editing software can be found for free.
There are still major differences between the point-and-click smartphone method of marketing and the professional work done by Waymack’s team. The crew is able to scale the content to the needs of the client.
The company owns most of the equipment it needs, simplifying the process, but the decision was made out of necessity because there were not a lot of equipment rental companies around when Waymack and Crew was founded all those years ago. Arkansas still has limited resources in that area.
Some of the great gear includes cameras by Canon, ARRI and RED, a camera dolly with motorized jib arm, an underwater camera housing, several drones and gimbals, and a MotoCrane ULTRA camera car system mounted to a Porsche Cayenne nicknamed “the U-boat.” In the studio, the firm offers a 50-by-50-foot white cyclorama studio with floor, a 20-by-20-foot green screen and a 20-foot lighting grid with programmable board. For post-production, the downtown location has several editing suites, a voiceover recording booth, and access to Adobe Creative Cloud and Pro Tools.
Every day, Waymack gets to use those tools to tell the story of Arkansas, which he calls a “haven of big businesses.”
“We love working on Arkansas and promoting Arkansas,” he said. “That’s one of our favorite things to do because we’re bringing people here and we’re letting them know what’s going on here, and it’s a privilege to be able to work on parks and tourism and economic development and the lottery account and everything else. We get a chance to work on some of the things that bring people here and help bring money to the state.”
“We have the ability to work outside of Arkansas and it keeps us going,” he added, “but we keep coming back here.”
Waymack “wakes up in a new world everyday” and said his favorite project is always the one he is currently working on. The team recently wrapped on a Firestone commercial in Nashville, where the crew got to shoot a 90 miles per hour driving shot on a closed road.
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