Sean Bell, The New Yorkshire Production Department, New Yorkshire, United Kingdom
By Jerry Vigil
Most RAP Interviews about someone with their own production business start out with a story of a career in radio. Sean Bell started as a club DJ then worked his way into an ad agency and a production house before launching NYPD, the New Yorkshire Production Department. In a few short years, Sean has grown his business very well, and his work is heard throughout the UK and in many other countries as well. This month’s interview gets an inside look at NYPD and the services it provides. There are lots of similarities to US-based one-man production shops, but there are some differences, too. And though more and more producers exit radio stations to launch their own production house, it appears there’s still plenty of work out there, thanks in no small part to a world getting more and more connected with the Internet. Be sure to check out Sean’s demo on this month’s RAP CD!
JV: How did you get started in the business?
Sean: Well I always had an interest in music having worked as a club DJ. I started in the nightclub when I was 17, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do as a career. In 1988 I managed to work my way into an advertising agency, which had an in-house production facility, which was quite unique at the time. I was working as a production assistant looking at radio commercials, TV commercials, and corporate video, that sort of stuff. I stayed at the agency for three years, and I was still DJ-ing at the same time.
Then I took a job DJ-ing in Greece for what I thought was going to be one year. I ended up staying out there for about three years. That was on the island of Corfu. When I came back from Greece, the ad agency I had been working for before had folded and gone bust. The person that I had been working for started his own production company, and I starting doing some freelance work with him. The company was called Pentagon, and they just looked at doing radio and TV commercials, no print advertising. So I did a lot of freelance work with them and also managed to get in with the BBC producing drama and documentaries for the BBC at a national level.
I worked in that freelance capacity for three or four years. Then in 1996 I went to work for Pentagon full-time as a producer for them. I stayed there for three years before leaving and starting NYPD.
JV: What made you decide to go out on your own?
Sean: The reason I left Pentagon was because when we had ISDN facilities put in at Pentagon, I started dabbling as a voice-over artist. When I was working as a voice artist my boss at the time was quite happy to turn the blind eye to me popping into the studio and voicing occasional scripts during the day while also picking up a wage for working at the production company. But it became a little too much too often. And although he was happy, some of the other staff were — quite rightly probably – saying, why should Sean be able to earn his own money during work time. So it was stopped. The company was going to get bought out and the new people didn’t understand radio. They were just looking at new media. There were a lot of things at that time that all pointed for me to leave and go to work for myself.
During that time, after doing freelancing all of those years, I actually tried my hand at radio presenting as well, and I very quickly established that I was not a good presenter, which I find kind of frustrating because as a club DJ I’ve won awards and I’ve been around the world and I do a really good job. I’d do the mixing and talking and even make my own sweepers and stuff to use in the clubs and everything would be perfect; but to sit down in a radio studio and present a radio program, I just couldn’t do it. So I decided my passion lay within radio production, which obviously is where I went in the end. So NYPD was established in April 1999.
JV: What services did NYPD initially provide?
Sean: I started off just doing radio commercial production. When I left Pentagon — because they weren’t going to support the radio side anymore — there wasn’t a problem with me taking the client base from Pentagon. So when I set up NYPD, I already had three clients, which was a nice position to be in. NYPD, being an independent production company, can supply commercial production services to the small stations who don’t have their own in-house facilities because it would cost them too much to have someone in house and to buy the music license and to invest in the studios and so on. There were a lot of small stations in the country across the UK, and that was the market I was aiming at. So I started off just doing radio commercial production.
JV: How’s business?
Sean: At the moment, I’m supplying to fifteen radio stations across the country. Now, I don’t get a job from every one of them every day. The way that I’ve built my business is that I’ve managed to get my foot in the door with the radio station, and there’s no contract or formal agreements or anything like that. It’s just the case that they can put their work to me if they want to. So it’s up to me once I’ve got them as a client to make sure I look after them and service them well because if I don’t, then there’s nothing to stop them from going elsewhere. I’ve got clients right from the top of Scotland down to the south coast and east to west as well. I can pretty much drive anywhere in the country and pretty soon I’m going to hear a commercial I’ve either written, voiced or produced.
But I also work with clients abroad. What I’ve done is sat down when I have spare time, and I’ve gotten on the Internet and looked for ad agencies and production facilities and establishments like that — anywhere where there’s the English language. I’ve emailed them and maybe asked them if they wanted to hear a short mp3 demo which can I send out to them, or I’ll drop a copy of my demo CD in the post to them. I’ve gotten work from all around the world. I hit the Asian market, Bangkok and Hong Kong and places like that, and I’ve gotten work from them. There are a lot of English-speaking radio stations in Europe, in France and in Spain, and I’ve managed to get with many of these stations, whether it’s for voicing or producing or whatever.
JV: Sounds like you’ve been marketing yourself the old fashioned way of knocking on doors with a good amount of determination.
Sean: A lot of it is word of mouth, or if it’s a station which I see is going to be launching, then I get in touch with whoever is the appropriate person at the station and offer my services. Salespeople tend to move around from one station to another anyway, so if a salesperson moves from one station, then hopefully they might take my services with them to a new one. So I get work like that. I get referrals. In fact, just this last week I had a station manager from a Scottish station call me. He rang me and said that he had been talking to a station manager from somewhere else who had recommended he speak to NYPD for his commercial production. So we sent the details off to him along with the demo CD, and hopefully in the next week or so they’ll be another station that we’re supplying our services to.
JV: So once you come to an agreement with management, is your relationship mostly with the salespeople?
Sean: Yes. I work with the salespeople on a day-to-day basis. Once the management is happy with what I’m going to supply, happy with the prices and such, then they just leave me to the salespeople. The salespeople can put the work where they want. They can ring up myself or someone else. I’m always one of a small number of freelance suppliers at each station. I don’t work with any one station where I handle all of their requirements, and I really wouldn’t really want to be in that position. I am simply one of small number of freelance suppliers they can use.
With most of the stations they usually have three commercial production facilities they use, and when the sales exec makes the sale or has the potential client interested, then they’ll brief me if they think it’s something I’m going to be able to look after for them, or they might go to another one of their companies if they think they’re going to be able to handle that particular client better. It depends on what style of commercial they’re looking for or what they are looking for at the end of the day.
JV: It seems in the U.S. that most radio stations will out-source their imaging and have somebody in-house to do the commercial production. But it sounds like there is a lot of out-sourcing in the U.K. of the commercial production and maybe not so much of the imaging. How do you see that?
Sean: All of the stations I work with have somebody to do the day-to-day imaging in house. The commercial production gets outsourced. But these are the smaller stations. The stations that are in the big groups, they all have internal production facilities, internal hubs for their group.
Although having said that, there is kind of an exception. Back in 2001 most of my business was coming from four stations, and then one of the stations was sold into the CN group. Then the week after, the CN group bought two more of the stations. So in the space of about three weeks I lost three of my four big clients, which obviously you can appreciate was quite a shock. We were invited to pitch for the commercial production contracts. I think there were about twenty different companies that went to see them. But in the end, what the CN group decided to do was to set up their own in-house production departments. So they had somebody in-house producing and imaging, but they had a freelance pool of writing talents and I was part of that pool of writers that they would call on. I was just writing but wasn’t doing any of the production, except if somebody was off ill or if they got under a lot of pressure and couldn’t cope, then they’d put it out to myself or somebody else. This went on for about two or three years, and in the end, they decided they were happier with what myself and two of the production companies were doing for them. So they actually scrapped their in-house commercial production department, and myself and two other similar-sized operations are now handling all of the work for the CN radio group. They’ve got about nine stations across the U.K.
JV: Are the larger groups in the U.K. purchasing up all of the small stations and groups like they did in the U.S. during our consolidation period?
Sean: I think it’s something that’s happening slowly. There’s always more stations being bought by the bigger groups, and now we’re moving into a situation where the bigger groups are deciding to merge as well. I do see that being something that could happen in the future, so I’m very conscious of not having all of my business just in radio commercial production, which is why I’ve decided to voice a lot more as well. And I do writing too, including magazines articles and such.
I used to do a lot of location sound recording for television and film and corporate video and so on. I very rarely take any of that work on anymore, maybe a day or two days a month perhaps, just to get myself out and about for a change of scenery from the studio. But I’ve always got that that I can fall back on to if I want to, because I do see the radio market is getting smaller and smaller. The bigger groups are buying up the small stations.
JV: Do you think you will be out of radio business eventually?
Sean: Well, at the moment I’ve got investments in three new license applications, so that will see me through, and if we’re successful in all three licenses, that would be probably a five to ten year opportunity for me. So that’s going to keep me in radio for quite a while.
I’m also going to carry on voicing because all the voice-over talents in the U.K. are freelance, so I’ve always got that I can work with. And I do a lot of commercial production for advertising agencies as well. So that will always keep me in the radio production area.
And with the new digital radio stations sweeping across the U.K. now, there’s more opportunity for niche markets. One of the things I would like to do in the future is a lot more drama and documentary production, which I used to do for the BBC. With digital broadcasting coming in, I’m hoping that there is going to be more opportunity to do that in the commercial arena. And the other thing I want to do at some point in the future is live program production. Not as a presenter because I can’t be a presenter – I’ve tried and I know I can’t do it. But I would love to do actual day-to-day producing of a live program – probably a breakfast program because I’m naturally an early riser. I enjoy early mornings and the breakfast programs are fun. And I mean doing this alongside NYPD. That’s what I would probably find myself doing in some point in the future.
JV: Do you find that you have a lot of competition?
Sean: Alongside myself, I would say there are probably around twenty maybe twenty-five other established commercial production outfits across the country. I’ve not had a quiet period for well over eighteen months now. It’s been really, really busy. So if there is a lot of competition out there, then I’m certain it’s surviving. I’m not going out of my way to advertise and to attract new clients. I do a bit of cold calling for new stations, and like I say, I’ve got work coming through when people move from one station to another, from referrals and so on. So as far as competition goes I don’t see any particular competition because it’s not affecting me. And of the twenty-five or so outfits out there, there’s probably about ten of us that I would say all get on very, very well. Although we’re all in competition, we’re not in fierce competition. I’m not going to go after their clients, and they respect me and they’re not going to come after my clients. We work alongside each other rather than against each other.
JV: Tell us about your studio.
Sean: My studio is actually based at home now. We moved in July and after we got the house straight and ready to live in, we then turned our attentions to moving the business from where I’ve been renting for the last three years. What I’ve got is a double garage which we’ve converted into the studio. I’ve got my office, my mix-down room, and then a separate voice-over booth as well. It’s all very convenient working from home.
This has been the fifth studio I’ve designed and built, each being an improvement on the last. Acoustically, this is the best yet, and when in the booth, you can’t hear the neighbor’s burglar alarm that annoyingly goes off at around 11am most mornings. Though the booth is mostly used for my voice-over work, it’s big enough to seat two people comfortably, which is very useful when interviewing for a project such as a business program or training presentation. I’ve completed programs distributed on CD for clients including the Nat West Bank and our National Health Service. There’s a decent amount of office space at one end of the room, then an equal amount of production space for mix down. Being in the same room is far more productive.
The studio is centered around a stand-alone Apple Mac G4 with a built-in CD-R running Bias’s DECK 3.5, routed through a Behringer 18-input desk. I have Sony Mini-Discs, twin CD players, a Philips stand-alone CD-R, Alesis compressors, Zoom outboard effects, one Technics 1200 turntable, and a Pronto ISDN codec. The codec is used for voice work – either voice’s coming into my studio or for my voice going out to other stations or production facilities, though most finished commercials are now sent to the stations by MP3. I also use MP3 extensively for work being sent to clients outside of the UK.
Also in the studio I have a Revox PR99 and a B77, but I won’t part with them. In fact, when I had a computer crash once, I wheeled out the PR99 and mixed “live” and mastered onto ¼-inch. I learnt my craft on a ¼-inch machine and can still edit the balls off a mosquito! Having the studio at home is great, especially during extremely busy periods if I need to get in early in the morning or work late through the night or across the weekend. It means I still get to see a lot of my family, and it’s also handy for when I need to wheel my children, Jacob (7) and Phoebe (5) into the studio. They’re already proving to be cracking little VO’s and are used by some big production facilities. They’ll have their own demos on the new NYPD website that will go live early in 2005.
JV: What’s a typical day like for you?
Sean: I usually drop the kids off at school at 9:00 in the morning and then I’m back in the studio by ten past nine. I tend to write in mornings through until about lunchtime and then spend most of the afternoon producing. And then if someone wants me for voice-over work, then they just ring me. The term we use here in the U.K. is “fax and dial,” which basically means fax the scripts and then dial up the ISDN. They’ll ring me, I’ll jump in the booth, voice a script, and then go back to whatever I was doing, be it writing or producing.
JV: What’s your basic approach to producing a commercial for one of your stations?
Sean: One of the things I’m very serious about with the salespeople is when they supply me with the brief. As well as wanting to know the client’s details as in what the offer is or what the purpose of the commercial is, I’m also very attentive to what I refer to as the housekeeping, which is the details such as how do we actually mention the client’s address in the commercial, for example. Is it on an industrial park? Is it alongside a particular landmark or something like that? So we try to get the exact information the first time. I also want to know if we’re restricted to writing a 30-second commercial, or perhaps I can go to 40 seconds, because here in the U.K. most of the ad time is sold in 30-second blocks, whereas I know in the states and Canada and elsewhere around the world, you maybe sell them a minute long. I don’t want to go off and write a commercial that’s forty seconds long and put three voices in it, and then after that the salesperson comes back to me and says, “Oh, I forgot to tell you… actually you’ve only got one voice and it’s got to be twenty seconds.” So I look for that information beforehand. I always want my housekeeping information because then it enables me to give the salesperson, and in turn the clients, exactly what they’re looking for far more efficiently.
JV: Generally speaking, what’s your primary focus when creating a commercial? Do you focus more on the writing or the production or the voice-over?
Sean: When I’m writing I tend to have an idea who I’m going to get to voice it, particularly if I’m writing something with characters or situations and scenarios. In that case, I’ll always have the person in mind that I’m going to get to voice it. And here in the U.K. there are probably around 150 voices on ISDN, and I work with most of them throughout the year. I probably tend to work with the same 50 voices on a regular basis, but I also know that if I need something a little bit different, I know where I can go to get a different foreign accent or a specialized character or something like that. But I write with the voice in mind. I love the intricate production — the sound effects that just polish the commercial, the background music that just works with the commercial. That’s the sort of thing I like to play at.
I’ve invested in a lot of different SFX libraries and I really love to use them where I can. There are several basic yet comprehensive libraries plus specialist collections from the Hollywood Movie Studios, Lucas Sound, Hanna Barbera and so on. Also, all of the music I use has been brought in on a copyright free basis. There’s a massive collection, with many specialist styles and genres – ideal for the theme park sound design — and knowing the libraries as well as I do, it never takes long to find the right piece that just sets the finished spot off.
JV: What’s one major thing you’ve learned about working with radio stations as a freelancer?
Sean: At the end of the day I have to deliver the quality, and I have to be very, very patient with clients and salespeople because there’s nothing to stop them from turning around and taking the work elsewhere if they want to. So I have to deliver. If they had their in-house commercial department then they could come in and say, “That commercial is rubbish,” and I could turn around and say, “Well you don’t know what you’re talking about,” or we could have an argument about it. In my situation, although I won’t let the sales exec walk all over me, I still have to make sure I meet the needs and requirements and deliver the goods to them, otherwise there’s nothing to stop them from taking the work elsewhere.
JV: Is fast turnaround time a major request from stations? Do you feel that you’re given a reasonable amount of time by the stations to do your job?
Sean: I think on the whole I’ve probably made the situation worse myself because I always like to deliver a fast turnaround. At the end of each working day, if I finish at 6:00 in the evening and I’ve still got three or four commercials to write, then even if I don’t write them in the evening I’ll be thinking of them so that I get them turned around quickly the next morning. So the clients get used to having a quick turnaround, and then they begin to think that’s the normal way of doing it, which I sometimes find a bit frustrating because everybody will ring you and think they can go to the top of the pile because they’ve gotten theirs turned around quickly in the past. When I was at Pentagon, the production company, we used to say we are now living in the age of the never satisfied customer because technology allows everything to be done so quickly. We used to say to clients, “We can make changes to your commercials really quickly,” but now I think that’s almost inviting people to look at reasons to want to have the commercial changed quickly. But I tend to turn around commercials quickly. Briefs will always get turned around into scripts usually within the same day, and then in the afternoon we’ll plow through and produce a good number of commercials and get them turned around equally quickly.
JV: So it’s not unreasonable for a spot to be turned around in a couple of days?
Sean: Oh yeah, usually a maximum of a couple of days. There are occasions when a radio station will ring me and say, look we’ve forgotten that this needs doing or somebody else was looking after this and it hasn’t been done. This commercial needs to be on air tomorrow; can we do it? And obviously there are certain times that I can fast track a commercial and get it turned around within two or three hours, but I can’t allow clients to believe that that’s going to be an everyday practice.
JV: There are a lot of voice-over talents around the world now, and a lot of people with decent home studios equipped for the voice-over business. Supply is up. Have you had to cut your voice-over rates to remain competitive?
Sean: No, not at all. I had a situation recently where there was a new production facility that had just set up, and they’d gone to one of the stations I was supplying to and undercut me by twenty-five pounds sterling per spot, and the radio station said to me, “Look, we can get this twenty-five pounds cheaper; what can you do about your prices?” And I said, “Absolutely nothing.” I’m not going to get into a position where people are lowering my prices. I’ve got loads and loads of work. So I’m not desperate. Obviously, I didn’t tell them that, but I’m not desperate for the work. If you start to go down that road, then I think it’s a slippery slope; whereas I stuck to my prices, and they stayed with me. In fact, this last month I sent letters out to all of the stations telling them I’m making a slight increase in production costs as of the first of January. I’m not asking them can I, I’m telling them I am making a small increase in production costs. Here in the U.K. voice-over rates are set by the British Actor’s Union Equity. Equity increased the voice-over rates very slightly, so I’m putting my rates up accordingly.
JV: What kind of voice-over rates does a talent make in the U.K.? For example, how much for a commercial voice-over that runs in a major market?
Sean: Say for example the commercial is for a radio station in London. The top stations in London would be attracting fees around about 90 pounds [approx. $173 US]. Then you drop down to the next bracket which is round about 60 pounds, which is still some of the equally big stations in London but perhaps more niche music or something like that. And then there’s another London bracket, which is down around the 50-pound mark. Then the majority of the other U.K. radio stations are around 20 pounds per voice, per script.
JV: You’re doing some in-store production as well. Tell us a little about that.
Sean: The in-store production is actually very simple because it’s a very straightforward message with straight voice and music. There are no character situations. There’s no need for sound effects. There’s no need for clever writing. It’s a very quick and simple sort of thing. I write and produce and voice in-store commercials and in-store messaging for quite a few national clients all around the country. It’s a weird sort of effect when you’re walking through a major store and all of sudden you hear yourself trying to sell barbeques or some other product.
JV: Well, are you making more money that you’ve ever made in your life?
Sean: Yes… at the moment. These last eighteen months have been quite busy, and there’s absolutely no sign of it letting up. We’ve got work lining up. I’m just about to hit the season when I do a little theme park sound design because, unlike in the States and other places around the world, we don’t have the nice weather, so they’re only open across our summer months. I start working on theme park work in January/February and deliver the audio in late March, early April. It’s a very seasonal thing, but that’s going to be a big part of my turnover for the early part of next year.
JV: You sound like you’re really enjoying your work.
Sean: I’ve always used the expression that I don’t have a job; I have a well-paid hobby, because I absolutely love the production work I’m doing. I love writing. I love the production aspects. I love voicing. I’m getting paid good money to do it, and I get the satisfaction of doing it.
JV: What’s down the road for NYPD? Do you think you’ll expand the company as business grows?
Sean: No, definitely not. I did actually go to a position about three years ago when I had somebody working with me. This was up until that point when I mentioned the radio stations had been sold and I lost all my work all of a sudden. I did have someone else working with me, and although the guy was very good at what he did, I was never comfortable being an employer. I have no intentions of developing NYPD to be a bigger organization than just me alone. There is only me here as a writer and producer and voice-over. By the way, I don’t tend to voice my own commercials either. I must emphasize that. And on the demo I’m sending for the RAP CD, my voice only appears on there once, on the Sussex Safety Cameras 10-second spot. As a rule I don’t voice my own work. I only voice for other people.
But no, I’ve got no intentions of developing NYPD to be a bigger organization. It will always be just me doing this.
The only other thing I would like to do is work as a Disney “Imagineer,” sprinkling the magic across their parks, or perhaps work in American or Canadian radio. From a creative point of view, there are some excellent Disney Imagineering books, and American radio seems so much more vibrant than most UK radio. Since becoming a RAP member, I’ve made many great like-minded friends around the world
JV: Any advice for people thinking about leaving a radio station and starting their own production house?
Sean: Well it’s easy for a lot of people to do now. When I did it, it cost me somewhere in the region of about 10,000 pounds to set up. And you can do that now easily for maybe 3,500/4,000 pounds for a setup at home. But you’ve got to be able to get the work. There are an awful lot of people out there now. You’ve got to be able to get enough work to keep going. Thankfully, I have enough work and in fact I’ve got more than enough work. Why? I must be doing something right, and probably because I enjoy what I do, I make the extra effort. But you know, there are a lot more people coming and going these days, so you’ve really got to put yourself out there and deliver the goods at the end of the day.