Rental Homes: An Option for Industry Growth

Carlos Congote: Basically the rental house is concentrated in cinema cameras, which are used almost exclusively, in the production of commercials for TV. In addition, we have trucks, transportation, power plants, lights, tripods, Mini-Jib, Grip equipment, all the electrical equipment, thousands of meters of cable and tramoya equipment, such as cranes. It is mainly dedicated to serving film production, because the television production houses here in Colombia, for the most part, have their own equipment. Although they have slowly realized that it is more expensive to have equipment than to rent. This is a global trend. The costs of maintenance, spare parts, bulbs and additional accessories are very high when the equipment does not work permanently. My rental house, unlike the rest of the world, rents equipment especially to the TV commercial production houses because they are the ones with enough volume and budget.

TVyV: Why did the idea of setting up a rental house here in Colombia arise?

DC.: I bought equipment because the rental houses available did not have the level, the seriousness in the handling and maintenance of equipment, nor the vehicles to get the quality that I needed when filming. When buying my own equipment I didn't have to depend on what was on the market.

He has been forming this rental house for three years, dedicated to consolidating it and having the best possible infrastructure to offer other possibilities to our industry.

Our reality is that film producers don't have enough resources to rent equipment. This has led us to work together with the producers of films and feature films, following a model in which the production company orders a series of equipment, evaluates the total cost of production and we participate as co-producers according to the rental value of those equipment. If, eventually, any of these films produces utility, this would allow to recover the investment, which is unlikely, but all this is necessary to do because it contributes to the development of the film industry, where all of us are and we want to benefit.

It is an initial step, to give a hand to the industry to try to develop, grow and, likewise, that it can produce more films, that there are more directors, technicians, actors, more people knowing the medium and that they learn to distribute. I do believe that each of the films that are made is a link in the development of the industry.

C.C.: They are up to any part of the world, the only problem is the budget, sometimes there is not enough money to have certain equipment that is needed, but in our rental house we have some of the best equipment in the world. For example, we have an ARRI 435ES camera, the most used for the production of commercials. It is the best camera in Germany, with the best optics and the best accessories. On the other hand, we have a 16mm ARRI SR3 Advance camera. We continue to invest because we believe there is a market and needs to cover.

C.C.: Regarding film production there is a new camera that ARRI launched, called ARRICAM, it is a combination of the MOVIECAM and the ARRI 535, they merged the two cameras into one, after the purchase of MOVIECAM by ARRIFLEX. It is a wonderful camera for working with direct sound, designed to shoot feature films but in Colombia, at least, the advertising industry, which is where there is more volume of work, does not require filming with direct sound because it frequently uses the resource of dubbing.

TVyV: What resources should a rental house have?

C.C.: In our case we are a relatively small house compared to the competition, but at the moment, to respond to the market, we have equipment to provide four simultaneous productions of good level. We have seven cinema cameras, 500 kilowatts of light between HMI and Tungsten, two large power plants, one of them soundproofing 150 kilowatts and the other 100 kilowatts. We have a film studio and vehicles, the latter is what makes the difference. We take the equipment ready to work on because they are vehicles of 8 to 12 tons, designed for this work. There everything is at hand, available quickly and easily.

At NAB I closed a business with an Italian company to buy a remote control head, which has very good resistance, the way it is operated is supremely simple: it is controlled from a tripod on which a monitor is located and the camera is remote on a crane or wherever. Here there has never been such a sophisticated device, I think that as soon as a cameraman uses it he will not want to use anything different again.

C.C.: Have only equipment in optimal conditions so that when a director or a producer requires it, it will not give problems in the filming. We have managed this rental house assuming that problems can occur and we are prepared to attend to the failures that may arise in a shooting. That has been, basically, our strategy, a result of my experience in the direction of commercials.

TVyV: What other sources of work do rental houses have?

C.C.: I'm developing the sales part. At the moment I am starting with clients in Latin America and I have clients in Central America, I am opening a whole field of action different from that of the rental house, in addition, as I have been in this for so long I know many suppliers and that has allowed me to be the distributor of 45 brands of equipment for Latin America at this time.

C.C.: There is a large industry in some countries, Mexico is a giant of production, Brazil is even bigger, Argentina has a lot of production, Chile too, it does not produce as much as Colombia, but it has very good movement.

If we remain focused on what are rental houses, each of the countries has to have its own equipment because it is too expensive to transport equipment from one place to another. As for film production, the distribution part is the one that has to move more within Latin America since we are from the same culture, a common language and the same audience, but speaking specifically of rental houses there are no possibilities of consolidation or common work, each country requires its own home and in that sense I think it is possible.