When fires and explosions erupt, most people take off lickety-split. But Phil Bates sticks around to film them — and has a blast doing it. “It’s a dream job,” says Bates. “I get to fly around the country in Learjets and helicopters and direct the best New York and L.A. crews on these really exciting pyrotechnic film shoots.”

As CEO of Artbeats, a small southern Oregon company that supplies motion graphics and still clips to agencies, special FX studios and movie heavyweights like Lucasfilm and Disney, Bates is a pro at capturing fiery imagery that fuels the action in films, trailers, games, multimedia, commercials, training videos and TV shows.

“Our products provide a true solution for our customers, and it’s very hard for our competitors to copy us.”

A small player in a hotly competitive field, Bates took huge risks to carve out his market niche. “Early on, our customers suggested we focus on pyrotechnics,” he recalls. “That turned out to be the right strategy for us, because pyrotechnic film shoots are expensive and difficult to stage, so it’s not feasible for most people to do it themselves.”

Furthermore, “if you want high-quality images you have to shoot live, on film — it’s the organic nature of fire. That might cost you $20,000 for a one-day shoot. And that’s assuming you can find a place to shoot and get the crew and the permits and the insurance and so on. So our products provide a true solution for our customers, and it’s very hard for our competitors to copy us.”

Scanning Marble Slabs

While Artbeats earned its place on the map by supplying pyrotechnic images, the company didn’t start out with a big bang. Bates founded his shop in 1989 on a Mac Plus with the simple aspiration of marketing his custom clip art more effectively than his former employer had. He turned his knack for drawing nature and technology backgrounds into .eps files he sold to DTP customers on 3.5-inch floppies.

By 1992, when technology advances let Bates progress from vector- to pixel-based images, he began sourcing his content from more, well, concrete materials. “First we bought slabs of marble and granite and scanned them into our Macs,” he explains. Soon he branched out into other natural and man-made textures, including leather, fabric, paper and wood, using Photoshop and Freehand to manipulate the scanned files into useful backgrounds. “The textures sold really well because they’re so generic — our customers use them in a million ways.” says Bates.

Around the same time, the Bates family moved from their hometown of San Bernardino, California, to a 30-acre former llama farm in Myrtle Creek, Oregon. Artbeats has thrived there, now employing 18 people — including Deborah Bates as bookkeeper, 24-year-old Sarah as receptionist, 21-year-old Ryan as webmaster and 17-year-old Heather as a rotoscoping specialist on the production team.

Ahead of the Wave

In 1995 Bates dramatically changed his company’s direction. “We had been doing still images for a long while,” he recalls. “But I was the only creative guy, and I was so picky about quality — I spent so much time on each image — that we only came out with about one product a year. Our competitors, like PhotoDisk and Corel, started releasing texture libraries like crazy, and the perceived value of our product was going down. We were losing market share, and we needed a new idea.”

Clearly, DTP technology was revolutionizing communication. “Freelancers could now do typesetting,” Bates says. “You had the tools to do quality work for less money. You could build a whole magazine on a computer!” More importantly, he adds, “I realized that this same revolution was going to happen all over again — with video. And at the time, very few people saw that.”

Bates’s brainchild was to replicate his Artbeats formula for a market that didn’t yet exist. “I thought I could do it all over again,” he says. “If I took what I learned from building our still image library and applied it to a moving image library, I’d be able to ride another wave — only this time I would stay ahead of it.”

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