As of January 8, Chris Crever will have owned the building at 2580 NW Upshur and Cine Rent West for 17 years. (Happy Anniversary to us! We will send ourselves a card.)

In light of that fact and because many people reading this don't know our origin story, we thought we'd give a you a brief history.

Like Hewlett-Packard, we can trace its origins to a garage.

Except our garage was bigger and nicer.

Philosopher George Santayana is famous for saying, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

Of course, he never actually uttered those words. So maybe we could say, “Those who do not look up George Santayana’s actual quotes are doomed to repeat erroneous ones.”

That’s probably not going to catch on.

Apocryphal or not, it is a good idea to look at the past and try to learn from it. So you don’t keep making the same mistakes. Because we all need to be making new ones.

Dentist: You may experience some slight discomfort

General Custer: Relax. Reinforcements will be here soon.

Director of Photography: Don’t worry. We’ll fix it in post.

If these statements all sound perfectly fine to you, you really need to read this article. And to be honest, we’re going to be mainly concentrating on the third misconception—fixing everything in post.

How often have you gone to check Reddit's main page only to come to your senses hours later, wondering where the time went?

Yes, you were lost in Reddit.

Well, tech company Anki teamed up with Weiden + Kennedy Lodge (and a bunch of other people, including us) to help their little robot Cozmo find his way out of Reddit with the input of millions of users.

A well-known fast food chain wanted to sell more milkshakes. Through extensive surveying they asked their target customers how they could improve their shakes. They made those changes to the recipe, but only saw marginal improvements in sales.

So they hired a team of marketing researchers to figure out why current customers were buying their milkshakes and hopefully discover the key to increasing consumption.

The researchers began by camping out at one of these restaurants for 18 hours a day. They wanted to observe when people were buying the shakes and then hopefully approach them to ask why.

Sumner Redstone knows a little bit about production. His billions in holdings include majority shares in CBS, Viacom, Paramount Pictures, and the National Amusements theater chain with more than 1,500 locations.

That's why we sat up and took notice when we ran across this little quote from him:
"Success is not built on success. It's built on failure. It's built on frustration. Sometimes it's built on catastrophe."

Just over a hundred years ago, if somebody asked you what you did for a living and you answered, "I'm a broadcaster." It could only mean one thing.

You scattered seeds for a living.

Maybe you were using some kind of horse-drawn farm machine to spread them out evenly. But it did not mean that you owned TV station.

How times have changed.

In 1951, author J.D. Salinger published his novel "The Catcher In The Rye." It was an immediate commercial success and then as it received critical acclaim it became an even bigger commercial success. 

But Salinger soon grew weary of fame. 

Faced with increasing public attention, he retreated to Cornish, NH where he remained in virtual seclusion for the rest of his life.

Is it possible that there's an optimal strategy for getting the most production work done in a day and ending up with a piece that's creatively brilliant?

You'd think that with the millions being poured into the study of business teams, somebody would figure out the secret formula for leading a digital production crew.

We've been able to work with some great clients on interesting projects lately. However, until they are finished and released, we can't show you stills or give out other proprietary information. So . . .

According to a recent survey by Wells Fargo, money is the last thing that people want to talk about. Their respondents ranked the discussion of death as difficult, but then ranked talking about financial subjects as even more difficult (by 16%).

Which is probably why funeral directors don't make a much as financial advisors.

In our industry, money is an especially dicey subject.

Professional actors have no trouble looking right into the camera as they talk.

But for regular people, the inscrutable black abyss behind the lens is disconcerting.

Which makes it a tough technique to pull off when you want to shoot real people talking without a script.

Unless you have an interitron.