For film studios, growth is on television, not silver screen

But many of the biggest film studios have turned their back on the silver screen and set their sights elsewhere - on the lucrative world of television commercials. And this means that client wishes, not the pursuit of art, sets the agenda for most film houses.
"lodz (film school) students are taught the art (of film making)," said Dean Bushala, president of Red Branch Productions, a U.S.-owned company with a subsidiary in Warsaw. "Personally I think this is good."
But he added that clients are more interested in cheap special effects and details that help sell their names.
To pick up that demand, film studios are increasingly focused on producing television commercials. Of the top 10 studios in Poland, four said that at least 80% of their business comes from producing commercials.
"There is much more money in commercials," said Tomek Szulc, vice president at Poland's leading studio, ITI Film Studio. ITI devotes almost 100% of its time to the field.
"Poland is a good place to be right now," Bushala said. "The commercials business is booming." Shooting a commercial, a week-long project, brings in about zl. 200,000-zl. 300,000 at Red Branch.
According to advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, reported figures show the money spent to put commercials on TV jumped 100%, from $255.7 million in the first half of 1997, to $511.7 million in the same period this year. Frederic Winckler, general manager at J. Walter Thompson, said that figure could be much lower.
The growth in the business of making commercials follows the overall boom in advertising. The top seven television stations drew ad revenue of more than $627 million in the nine months from January through September, an 83% jump compared to the same period a year ago when there were six channels.
But that's just a drop in the bucket. Poland is nowhere near where it should be, Winckler said. Per capita spending on advertising in Poland is at $22, seven times lower than the European average of $140. That leaves a lot of room for growth.
Leszek Rybarczyk, president of Odeon Rybarczyk Productions has put his faith in that growth. According to his projections, his company will jump from being the country's fifth-largest studio to one of the top three in no more than five years, he said. Odeon's revenue in 1997 doubled from the previous year to $2.28 million in 1997.
Commercials are the biggest thing out there, Rybarczyk said, and he plans to stay with them.
Also helping spur growth for film studios is a change in the advertising business. Six years ago, about 80% of commercials simply came from the United States or London, then had Polish titles tagged on or were dubbed in Polish, Winckler said.
"That doesn't sell as strong seeing Polish households and Polish people buying products," Red Branch's Bushala said. Polish companies now are looking to localize their commercials.
"Companies realize they need to get their names out there," said Dennis Harrington, a producer at the company. "The folklore of 10 years ago is that there were a few choices among many, many products. Now a company may have 30 breakfast-cereal choices. They realize they need to dump money into advertising."
But the changes won't go on forever. To Szulc and Rybarczyk, the swell of the last five years is receding. Producing commercials will cease to be a novelty and the industry will stabilize.
"It (growth) is maybe not so speedy anymore," Rybarczyk said. According to Szulc, the stabilization is already taking place, estimating his revenue will look similar to the previous year's. "It runs smoothly for us," he said. "It's not rising, it's not falling."
Apart from making commercials, the rest of the industry is fragmented and each production house tends to specialize in one area - documentaries, TV or feature films.
"One has to specialize to be good in something," Szulc said.
But Krzysztof Zanussi, director of Studio Filmowe Tor, warned against the trend toward specialization. "To do this makes work routine and banal," he said. "It is a bad trend." Using modern techniques and testing new methods can only improve a studio's work quality, he said.
Yet the newest project for studios in this already-segmented market is one that is only slowly creeping in: corporate videos. It is so new that no studio yet has a handle on who is creating them or how much they contribute to the overall business.
"A lot of companies are coming in to Poland, setting up quickly and they have little time available," Winckler said. "They need tools on how to deal with employees, how to develop policies."
Corporate videos can help to accomplish this. A chocolate company, for example, may put together a video for its investors on how it makes candy bars. The same company could also use a studio-produced video to train its assembly-line crew safety procedures on the job.
"Inevitably, this immature sector will grow," he said. Still, the market is too small for any one company to specialize in making them, Winckler said.
Red Branch, Harrington said, had not intended to do corporate videos. The company saw something that needed to be done, so they just picked it up. And while it contributes a good sum in revenue - each video can bring in about zl. 30,000 - Red Branch still does not put together many of them.
ITI does some producing for corporations, but for a select few companies, such as KGHM Polska Miedz and Telekomunikacja Polska (TPSA), Szulc said. When they started doing these videos four years ago, they did three, maybe four a year, he said. Now they do only one or two.
"Corporate videos are a world in themselves," he said. Companies who request them want cheap, quick products. ITI prefers to deal with high-end customers, he explained.
Zanussi conceded that money in this business is better in areas other than film making. But he believes that this can't be the only reason to be in film. "Our aim is to be present in cultural life," Zanussi said.