Studio Operations

IMS was founded in 1977 and has gone thru many changes both up and down. The studio has been set up in nine different locations over the years from Boston to Hollywood. The last scene shop was on a ten acre farm in Solebury just out side of New Hope, Pennsylvania and that was shut down in 2005. The office location in Southampton has been in use since 1985 and has served as a private work space for most of that time. Expansion of the facilities is quite urgent because the limited facilities are severely impairing our capabilities. The concept of an animation studio fits in quite well with "The Gnomes of New Hope" project and so the new facilities will be oriented toward implementing the animation objectives of The Gnomes, but any expansion must also accommodate the known requirements for office, studio & design spaces, assorted stage & fabricating spaces, a recycling yard, a vehicle maintenance bay and loading dock and storage space for inventory. Even this set-up will require the potential for expansion. Numerous buildings have been considered and rejected for various reasons, not the least of which is financing. Because with expansion of facilities comes the expansion of personnel and therefore a whole plethora of other aspects of the operation, aspects which I have consciously tried to avoid. If Image of the Mind Studios is to become better and more productive than it is, it will need to be completely re-organized and managed under an improved corporate structure. For the most part, it has been a proprietorship and it has been a victim of my own deficiencies, one of which has been trying to avoid becoming a personnel manager. I have chosen to opt for dedicating my energy to developing new works, writing & designing . I have found that business management takes so much energy that it tends to take control of my creativity, leaving less for conceptualization. As a result, the organization of Image of the Mind Studios has gradually become more disorganized than I care for it to be. My focus of concentration has been on the development of these new works and I've found that completion is itself a difficult task and refinement just seems to go on and on. So because of this continuing process, I've concluded that the production must begin before the core material is fully refined. In the instance of "Nunc Licet", the material is as refined as it can be (although I am making new notes on it now). "Grael" can work as an animation but it needs more work for a live action film to be fully implemented. The core material for "The Gnomes of New Hope" is sufficient to begin production in various ways. Each of these three projects requires investment and facilities in order to effectively move ahead and these funds need to come from external sources. There are many other projects on-the-boards at IMS all of which, not only have, but yet still require substantial investment in time and money. So it is that the only practical way for this to happen is for a re-organization of IMS to include a corporate board of directors capable of managing the larger financial needs of the studio. So it is with this posting that I invite dialogue in this regard. Please do so via e-mail. I will address this further at another time. AG