Today we’d like to introduce you to Curt Fetter.
Dvee Media Productions was officially formed and founded by Curt upon the completion of their first independent video project on March 5th, 2000.
The Dvee creative team (at that time, just a group of professional friends) was hired to script, film and create a surprise honorary 21st birthday video to be viewed on the TV Monitors in a stretch HumVee limousine in San Francisco in route from the airport to the extravagant birthday party gala.
He came up with the idea of a Birthday News Network (BNN) broadcast in honor of the birthday girl to be shown in front of her 10-15 closest friends in the limo.
Curt borrowed and utilized a genuine Jim Henson Sesame Street Muppet that they named Dan Lather to anchor their news broadcast. Dvee Media was provided hundreds of family historic photos to use along with access to interview family, friends, and even the cute family dog to create a humorous spoof Pets.com commercial in between the BNN news segments!
The video was a huge success and established a springboard for Dvee Media to purchase its own video editing and filming equipment for producing videos for Corporations, Non-profit Organizations, and Small Business.
After graduating from Berklee College of music (1992) with a dual degree in Music Synthesis and Music Production/Engineering, Curt started his professional career as a music producer and co-founder of the local rock band FLY. Fly was his creative outlet to write, record and perform his original rock music while honing his skills in recording and editing music and audio.
At the height of his band in the mid to late 90’s, Curt was also involved in producing music videos, live local concerts and events, Editor-in-Chief for a Boston music “Fanzine”, creation of local band compilation audio CDs and interactive CD-ROMS, as well as design of music industry and music artist Websites.
By 1997, Curt was working as a corporate video editor for a downtown Boston, Newbury Street video production company. Here, he combined all of his skills of audio, video and multimedia together to form the creative foundation of Dvee Media Productions.
Working inside a corporate video production company, he learned that overhead costs often caused production companies to be dissolved and go bankrupt. Early on he realized his unique business model. Dvee Media would forge relationships with local creative crew/design talent as well as brick and mortar production resources instead of investing in a full time work force and a huge production video/audio studio that would require a lot of overhead and capital to maintain on a daily basis.
In the 15 plus years since its inception, Dvee Media has successfully produced to its clients’ exceptional delight, every project Dvee has been hired to create.
Dvee Media Productions creates high quality Tradeshow presentations, videos for national and regional Sales Conferences/Rallies /Galas, Point-of-sale Kiosk Product videos, videos for E-learning, multi-level and multi-lingual Interactive video series, Audio Books, TV Commercials, Event documentary, Non-Profit PSAs/Awareness/Fundraising presentations, videos for Museums and Visitor Centers, as well as Training presentations for Publishing and Technology Companies.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The hardest part with the Dvee Media concept is that we were not blessed with a big “client list” to start with and sell our production services to. We have to constantly hunt for, network to find, and often when we find them, compete against established production agencies with a LOT of cash and persuade our prospect clients to work with us!
We have to always convince a prospect that we are “big enough” and established enough to work with them. Once we get through all of that, our clients are really happy they found us – or often, we found them!
We usually save our clients a ton of money they could waste on an established and bloated creative agency. As well we save and avoid many production hassles without sacrificing anything on quality for the project. We become our client’s partner and they often consider us to be their in-house video production team. We become their go to video/media experts!
When you first look at Dvee Media as a business structure, you see pretty much a Sole Proprietor type of business on the surface. Then what is realized, Dvee Media has a tested and dedicated, configurable, expandable creative team behind us that I have developed over the past 2 decades! Dvee Media and its services can be expanded to almost any level as well as contracted in size and scope to provide services for smaller projects as well.
A smaller struggle is constantly keeping up with talent and technology, AND constantly selling and finding new prospects. Dvee Media Productions is all about working on the projects. When my team and I are designing and creating, it is often difficult to keep up marketing and prospecting.
So for example, when I finish a project, I find myself sometimes saying, “Uh oh, now what? I have to sell my services again!” I am in the process of trying to build a more ongoing selling routine for Dvee Media even while we are making videos. So we have more constant work instead of what I call a “feast and then famine” business routine.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Dvee Media Productions creates videos for Fortune Corporations, Non Profit Organizations and Small Business. We creatively consult with our clientele at every stage and provide all production expertise, crew, logistics, management, resources and equipment for any size video production.
We work with our clients from conceptualization, production budget, scripting… through filming and production… video edit and graphics/animation post-production… AND, we provide distribution of the created video(s) to a viewing audience, through traditional media outlets and modern digital and social media channels.
What sets Dvee Media apart from other video production companies is that we have a configurable and scalable creative solution. We are not limited to only our in house equipment, personnel, and resources. We have full access and negotiating relationships to all the best New England based studios, creative agencies, production crew, graphic and animation designers, acting and voice talent, and specialized equipment we could ever need.
For each project, we customize and put together only the resources required within the budget the client is seeking. This business model has made it possible to lower costs on many of our productions when comparing other solutions “apples to apples.”
One of my proudest case study examples of how the Dvee Media business model succeeds was when a new contact of mine wanted me to propose a video budget for an ESL project for National Geographic Publishing. The project consisted of over 100 subtitled videos in 2 languages with 8 multilevel Interactive DVDs as a video companion to the printed ESL courseware.
The publishing company had already chosen another video company, but they wanted to see what I would have quoted to get an idea as to our capabilities for the future. Due to the configurable Dvee talent and network, I was able to put together a budget (without really trying) that would have saved the publisher more than $50 Thousand Dollars! Needless to say I got a quick phone call after they saw my proposal and they gave us the contract. In the end, client was ecstatic with our work after we completed the job.
In most cases our clients know their own business and they do not know what all it takes, or all of the costs associated to make a video. Often they do not have a skilled and knowledgeable full team in house to make it happen. We become their expert production team to figure it all out and make their video production a success.
What were you like growing up?
I grew up in a suburb of Reading, PA in the 70’s and 80’s.
As a kid, I was into everything including every team sport, music, cub/boy scouts, gymnastics, dance, fishing, bowling, just goofing around and rock n’ roll. My gang was also into firecrackers like crazy! I can tell some insane stories about how we used to even explore the water runoff sewer system under our neighborhood streets. My mother was not at all happy with me when she found out about that particular escapade!
Even way back in my elementary school years, I loved producing live shows and movies. I even had a starring role in a neighborhood vampire movie we made borrowing our parents’ film cameras. The older boys in the neighborhood needed a young kid to be a vampire victim. I was very happy to oblige. We had a lot of fun making my ketchup “blood bag” to pop when the king vampire killed me before I could place the stake in his heart.
Often over my younger years I was involved in making videos. If we had a school project, it was almost a guarantee that we would make a video or film. The first film I ever fully edited was a 10th grade history project reenactment of the Spanish American War. I actually was the one to edit the footage with a razor blade and splicing tape to put our project together. I never thought at the time that this would eventually be my career 20 years later.
When I was a kid, I was also an entrepreneur. I started a bird pet shop business with my mother. Even that young, I loved having my own business! We would breed, raise, and tame canaries, finches, parakeets, cockatiels, parrots, etc. At one time over the years, we had more than 100 birds for sale in our basement. For a kid, I made some good coin selling my bird babies!
Later as a teen, I fully got into music and I put a rock band together. We performed live gigs at churches, recreation centers, the malls, public pools, and school talent shows with several songs by The Who in every set. Eventually I started making my own 4 track home recordings of my original songs.
Because of the technology of tape recording and synthesizers, I desired to go to college in Boston at Berklee College of Music to study Music Production/Engineering and Music Synthesis. At Berklee, I learned how to professionally record and edit music and audio, which was the foundation and a natural beginning to adding pictures and video to my audio editing skill set.
Contact Info:
- Address: Boston Metro and New England
- Website: www.dveemedia.com
- Phone: 781-209-1985
- Email: curt@dveemedia.com
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/dveemedia
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/dveemedia
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dveemedia/
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