KEY POINTS:
Ondrej Havas has been telling tales for most of his life and winning awards for them along the way.
In fact, the corporate video and TV commercial producer has been winning at least three awards a year in New Zealand or overseas since his company Omnicron started entering them in 1997, and this year has been no different.
Auckland-based Omnicron recently picked up Best Reality Series at the Air New Zealand Screen Awards for its documentary about West Auckland band Spacifix, which Havas manages, and the lead-up to the release of its first single.
Omnicron has also won several industry awards in the United States this year for the documentary Henderson to Hollywood, and for its information video for the Sleepmaker bed brand.
Omnicron has come a fair way since 1980, when 19-year-old Havas set up his company and bagged his first customer: Manukau City Council, which wanted a water-safety video.
Getting a foot in the country's fledgling film-industry door was tough, so Havas and a schoolmate pooled their cash and equipment and set up their own company, working from a rented villa in South Auckland's Papatoetoe.
It was also an expensive industry: video technology was new, and a VCR cost $2500. Government restrictions on importing meant many customers didn't have video technology, so Omnicron ended up importing equipment from Japan, the United States, France and Germany for several years.
Business boomed as corporations realised the power of video to get their messages across to staff and customers. Omnicron's early client list reads like a who's who of 1980s business high-flyers: Fletcher Challenge, Troy Corporation, Chase Corporation.
In 1986 Havas bought out his friend and ran Omnicron alone. When the stockmarket crashed in 1987, business slowed as corporates stopped spending, and the company "learned to be more efficient", Havas says.
In the 1990s the company started making TV commercials, which now makes up a third of the business. The rest is corporate videos and TV entertainment programmes.
They're mostly short retail commercials, and customers include Hills Flooring, Lighting Plus and Bedpost. Retail ads are exciting, Havas says, because of their immediacy.
"If you do a brand promotion for a bank, it takes a long time to know if it worked.
"If you do a retail ad focused on, for example, moving stock, you know in days. There's a real adrenaline rush to know you've made a difference to a client's bottom line."
Omnicron also wrote and designed its own software program, Mirobox, which allows users to produce their own presentations, including their Omnicron-made ads or videos as well as spread sheets and other graphics. It has been sold to two overseas companies and a number of local ones as well.
One challenge now is convincing people that even though the industry's entry barriers have been lowered, using the professionals is still worthwhile.
"Parents see their kids doing school projects and cutting together motion media on their laptops and think, 'why do the professionals cost so much?' The bulk of the costs are in the people and their skills and experience in telling a story."
Companies can sign up with Omnicron for anything from a Powerpoint presentation with a bit of video spliced into it, to a full-on video production.
Havas won't give figures but says Omnicron is "independent" and makes enough money to fund its own growth and development. In 2001 the company moved from the Papatoetoe villa to an office just off Auckland's Karangahape Rd.
Havas employs seven staff and as executive producer has a "floating" role, juggling about 10 projects at any one time and doing everything from scriptwriting to editing.
