Business blazing a trail in video production
If you do good work, people will notice.
Ryan McIntyre, owner of Perspectrum Studios and CineSpeed, has come a long way from his high school days of making skateboarding videos with his friends, as he now owns two video production businesses that have produced work for many large businesses and corporations across a wide range of industries.
“We do work all around the country,” McIntyre said. “We are trying to set ourselves apart differently than a regular production company. We try to do all the specialty stuff. When a TV show, commercial or movie comes in, we can be that specialty arm instead of having to hire out of New York or Atlanta.”
McIntyre started Perspectrum Studios in 2015, two years after graduating from Butler Senior High School. It is based in Jackson Township.
He said his early days behind a camera for money started in high school, when parents of some lacrosse players who knew he had video experience approached him about making highlight videos of their children to send to potential colleges to get scholarships.
“Nowadays, there is automatic stuff they are doing, but back then, I was all they had,” McIntyre said. “I was recording games and started getting better cameras. Then I started doing videos for the school. Then I started doing videos for small businesses and weddings.”
After high school, McIntyre attended Butler County Community College to pursue a degree in mechanical engineering but quickly decided that path was not for him.
He moved to Los Angeles for about a month to see what the video production life was like out West, but ended up coming home and was able to obtain an internship with Pittsburgh-based video production company Animal Studios.
McIntyre then decided to go out on his own and started Perspectrum Studios, initially finding work in the real estate space, capturing drone videos and traditional videos for high-end properties real estate companies were trying to sell.
“Real estate was one of the bigger clients we did early in the life of the business,” McIntyre said. “We did 360-degree drone stuff for them. We would make these minute-and-a-half videos of high-end listings just to draw people in. One we did was a $10 million listing.”
After having a steady stream of revenue for the business, McIntyre said he was able to expand by purchasing better equipment, which in turn helped him take on different projects for other clients.
“I would say the work with Nemacolin opened up national clients,” he said. “We did 15-second reels for Home Depot rentals that people saw on Amazon. We did that slow-motion stuff with stump grinding, jack hammers and stuff like that.”
Slow-motion videos have become one of McIntyre’s specialties and are mostly handled through CineSpeed.
McIntyre said he created CineSpeed in 2020 for insurance purposes because he was originally doing slow-motion projects through Perspectrum, but after one of his projects involved using explosives, the cost of his insurance for Perspectrum increased.
“Slow motion is something we like to do, but it’s not everything we do,” McIntyre said. “We do a variety of things, and I would like to keep doing the specialty stuff for the bigger productions, but we do full videos for everything.”
Today, some of McIntyre’s clients includes names such as Red Bull, GNC, Greyhound and even Neflix’s “Full Swing” series, where the opening credits feature a slow-motion shot of a golf ball being hit by a club at high speed, which was shot by McIntyre.
“We shot that in Connoquenessing,” McIntyre said. “We asked a local golf pro to take some shots, and we made a TikTok out of it. The main creative from ‘Full Swing’ reached out five months after seeing it on TikTok. They asked if they could just license it off of us.”
McIntyre is always looking for the next niche in the video production world, which right now includes using his new “motorized control arm,” which he said is essentially an industrial robot arm that is used for welding.
Attached to the arm is a high-speed camera which is able to capture video as the arm moves to fixed positions by either moving side to side, rotating 360 degrees and other movements.
“You can do some cool stuff with it,” McIntyre said. “You can do 360 rotations on a fixed point and the arm can extend and come back to exact points that are programmed in. The moves are perfectly repeatable. It can do some mind-bending things.”
Scaling his businesses has been a challenge, McIntyre said, especially as it has grown. Deciding when to purchase new equipment or when to just rent it have proved to be some of the most difficult aspects.
McIntyre has been able take on more projects, especially over the past two years, with the help of freelance workers and full-time help from senior editor and camera operator Chris Cichra.
“Figure out what you are good at and not good at,” McIntyre said. “I learned that I was OK at editing and I hated it. People were better at it than me. So learn that as early as you can and find people (Cichra) that are honest who can tell you the truth if you are good or bad at something. Surround yourself with people where you can pick their brain.”
