The house Hemmings built
Published Tuesday July 20th, 2010
Telegraph-Journal
Saint John, NB
By Zoe McKnight
(Pictures by Kâté Braydon/Telegraph-Journal)
It’s mid – afternoon on a Friday in July. The sun warms the Kennebecasis River and shines on the back porch of Greg Hemmings’ cottage. His one-year-old daughter Kaya chews on his cell phone, his parents just arrived for dinner and his wife, Jessica, is inside getting ready for the evening.
It’s a family affair at Hemmings House.
Greg, 33, and Mark Hemmings, 36, are the brothers behind Hemmings House Pictures, a Saint John media company. Mark was an established commercial photographer in his own right and Greg operated a film and television production company. The two merged in 2009 to create a multimedia enterprise. It is the largest of its kind in New Brunswick, but still in the expansion phase. Unlike many small ventures that might hope to make it in the big city, the Hemmings are rooted firmly in place.
“We’re always looking for more ways to bring work here. We want to become, and I say this in a nice way, a media empire … simply because we want to hire people, keep people in business, keep Saint John vibrant, and to have people doing what they love here. Plus make a decent living for ourselves,” Mark says.
“Why not go to a market that is a cool place to live, like Saint John, that has very low overhead … and find your niche there? I’m glad we did because we’re actually expanding while other companies are decreasing.”
The 12-member staff divides its time between advertising photography, television production, short films, documentaries and ‘filmmercials’ for the web. They have licensed shows to CBC, Bravo! and Rogers Sportsnet, and have filmed professional wrestling, arctic climate change, classical music in South America, New Brunswick bluesman Matt Andersen and the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra. Just to name a few. The company has won numerous awards, most recently at the nextMEDIA Interactive and Pilots Awards at the Banff World Television Festival in June.
The Hemmings brothers fell into the media business separately but together. In 1997, a summer job took Mark to Japan with his grandfather’s slide-film camera and he came back with remarkable pictures, even though he had no experience with aperture or shutter speed.
“So I said, ‘OK. I will become a photographer then.’ And a couple of weeks later, I was working in the movie industry as a photographer. This hardly ever happens, but I was thrust into working as a professional almost immediately.”
Around the same time, Greg ran into an old sailing buddy during first-year university. That buddy happened to be Andrew Tidby, who was attending film school at Niagara College in Welland, Ont. He inspired Greg to join him.
“I got in and I found my passion,” Greg says. Later, he and Tidby formed Hit! Media, a precursor to Hemmings House Pictures before it was incorporated in 2005.
Today, Hemmings House has ad clients all over the world including car companies, Olivier Soaps, NB Power, Irving Oil Ltd. and Saint John 225. Mark alone has worked in 15 countries, and has made countless return trips to Mexico, Hungary and Japan, where there is a satellite office. But most staff are from New Brunswick and trained in-house. Producers even make an effort to use local composers in soundtracks.
These days, Greg leaves much of the actual filming to Mark and other videographers. As CEO, he focuses most of his energy on attracting new clients. A recent graduate of UNB’s exclusive Wallace McCain Institute entrepreneur and leadership program, Greg says he has learned how to properly run a business.
He credits his “true-blue entrepreneur” father with instilling in him an independent spirit.
“I never in my life ever thought I would work for somebody (else),” Greg says.
When asked if he has ever considered leaving the Maritimes for more bustling locales, Greg was emphatic.
“This is where we all wanna be. That’s it.
“If there’s a need here, which there is, then we found our niche and there’s no reason to go to the big cities,” he says. Everyone at Hemmings House feels the same commitment.
Steve Foster, 26, producer and manager at the Saint John office, agrees.
“We’re in this for good, one way or another. I don’t mean in this industry. I think we’re in Hemmings House for good. There is a certain culture here that can’t be replicated that is hard to define. But there is certainly something special here and all of us share it,” Foster says.
Hemmings House Pictures recently moved into newer, more professional digs on Wentworth Street.
The space still has that new-office smell with a freshly-painted black, white and lime green colour scheme.
Framed prints of Mark’s photographs lean against the walls and are stacked on tables. A large print of a cameo silhouette rests by the door. Awards and trophies are displayed on a side table in the studio. Light stands and softboxes are carefully arranged as if a photo shoot were just interrupted.
There are lots of windows, tiny potted plants, and Macs with 20-inch screens. The outside is nondescript. The inside is warm, practical, arty.
It’s almost as if there is an esoteric quality to the Hemmings House culture.
“No one here went to school for this industry, except for Greg, yet we all do it professionally. It feels like there is something more, something worthwhile here… I think there is a reason we are all here,” Foster says. They are more like a family than colleagues, he says. It’s not unusual to find them at the office on holidays.
One cameraman used to hitchhike to New Brunswick from Prince Edward Island to volunteer on shoots.
To Greg, workplace culture is a huge part of creating and retaining talent. All his life, he says he has encountered the attitude that “you can’t get good quality production here.”
“I’m talking about my industry, but there are so many other industries that suffer because of this attitude … and that has to stop. If our customers dry up because of that attitude, then we will collapse and there won’t be any creative workforce left.”
At the cottage, patriarch Don Hemmings says brain drain is a problem in this region.
“Those willing, keen bodies have been exported out of the Maritimes since the Maritimes was invented,” he says.
“It doesn’t take rocket science, in today’s wonderful digital era, to operate out of the Maritimes.” And there is not enough of that, he says.
Ten years ago, Mark says he heard “the faint whisperings of digital,” the mobility of which allows anyone to transfer images and sounds instantly. Saint John’s lower cost of living and smaller media market means that Hemmings House Pictures can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond than Toronto or New York City.
And with the advent of digital cameras that shoot both still and moving images, the market is changing to the advantage of small shops that, at one time, would find it impossible to finance a television-quality camera.
This gives small production companies a foothold in the TV and advertising industry and makes the “big guys” nervous, Mark says.
Digital technology means that Hemmings House can, and does, make pictures with one foot in Scotland, Japan, Transylvania, Venezuela or the arctic and one foot in the Bay of Fundy.
And despite all the globetrotting, there is no intention of leaving home for good.
“I love Saint John. I don’t know what it is … I never want to live anywhere else but here,” Mark says.
“My destiny is here. And I don’t know what that is yet. But something is pulling me here and keeping me here and it’s a good thing.”
