Buffalo 8 Celebrates Tenth Anniversary | Chaz’s Journal

Taylor adds, “the excitement and drive was palpable from day one. We were both obsessive with content and uncompromisingly dedicated to building a path into the business. The common interests and shared alignment was apparent during our first project together, and has remained constant.”

Helderman scrapped together roughly $20,000 money from selling personal belongings on eBay and Craigslist, to chipping in money from summer jobs and semester part time work, to buying and selling a large record collection. After shooting the film in the Chicago suburbs, including a few historic John Hughes spots, Helderman flew to Los Angeles during March break to meet up with Taylor and shop the project to buyers.

[In the video dispatch embedded above from Cannes 2018, Chaz Ebert interviews Matthew Helderman at the 8:25 mark.]

“I had never been to Los Angeles and literally stacked my schedule with meetings with sales companies, distributors, and producers with the aim of finding a buyer for the film,” noted Helderman. “We ended up selling it to a tiny home entertainment company and in retrospect it was one of the first great lessons in the film business – very few are who they say they are, and the film saw very little release. It was the start of us realizing that Buffalo 8, this little entity we had set up to produce this one-off indie film, was the real asset we had built in the process and that we could expand on that”.

Working out of an apartment, Buffalo 8 served as an indie production services company from 2011 through 2013 producing a few dozen smaller indie films; 

Re-calling their formative years, Taylor stated, “The early era was hand-to-hand combat of learning physical production on projects with very minimal resources and working to build credibility with our then-unknown brand in a relentlessly competitive industry. The knowledge and resilience we acquired during this time was critical – it laid the foundation for our key principles while sharpening our business sensibilities. Realizing there was a ceiling with our current model of producing led to the lightbulb moment that to properly scale, we needed to provide value more efficiently to multiple projects at any given time. Offering financial solutions would allow us to diversify our abilities and increase exposure – this realization spurred the inception of BondIt Media Capital.”

You can view the original article HERE.