Details regarding
IMS Studio Operations
are available on the
IMS Producing Partners Membership Site
General overview;
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 production must begin before the core material is fully refined. This will will assure that the material does not spend an eternity in development.
In the instance of "Nunc Licet", the material is as refined as it can be, although I do expect changes to occur in production. "Grael" can work as an animation, but it needs quite a bit more work for a live action film to be fully implemented, although scenes can be shot and I am intending do do so at Tamanend Park in Southampton. The core material for "The Gnomes of New Hope" is sufficient to begin production in various ways. You can read about these projects in other posting on the IMS Virtual Studio.
Each of these three projects requires investment and facilities in order to effectively move ahead and these funds need to come from external sources that are not directly tied to the banking system in the form of loans. Thus, those funds need to be coming from investors who can tolerate a longer term return or from the sale of ancillary rights.
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 who are capable of managing the larger financial needs of the studio. I am doing this by building IMS Producing Partners: wherein the corporate structure of Image of the Mind Studios will be defined and implemented.
Detailed information regarding those operations will be posted there and not be available on the IMS Virtual Studio.
IMS Producing Partners is a subscription site available only to our partners who contribute financially the the studio's growth and long term success. AG
