New service, OnCall Content, gives a professional touch to quick turnaround video projects

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Momentum: The people and companies shaping what’s next, a weekly series that explores new ventures, founder support, and the resources powering entrepreneurship and small businesses across seven counties in Southwest Michigan. This project is sponsored by Southwest Michigan First.

Websites and online posts created by businesses, services, and individuals all compete for visitors. One way to stand out is to add photos, videos, and graphics. But having that done professionally can quickly become very expensive. 

There’s do-it-yourself with a smartphone, but too often the result is so amateurish that it’s a detraction, not an enhancement.

A new business in Kalamazoo intends to offer a solution for this dilemma. OnCall Content, an hourly video, photo, drone, and editing service from Overneath, a Kalamazoo commercial video production company, opened in August.

Customers create a free account at oncallcontent.club, book a shoot (or an edit) online, and find their ready-to-use video, photos, and edits in their OnCall Content portal in as little as 24 hours. Rates of $90 to $125 an hour cover both shooting and editing.

The service is intended to fill the gap between hiring a full production crew and doing it yourself. Most businesses are expected to post new video and photos constantly, and many end up doing it on a phone between other work, with results that rarely look the way they hoped. The alternative, a full production with a director, producer, and a multi-week timeline, is more than everyday work calls for. 

OnCall Content sits in between, suitable for a product shoot, a grand opening, team headshots, an event, a testimonial, or a social clip that somebody wants quickly, shot by a professional and priced by the hour.

“The need for video and photo content is exploding,” says Drew Raklovits, co-owner of Overneath and its creative director. “We got so many requests from people who said, ‘Can you just send somebody out on Thursday at 3 p.m.?’ or ‘Can you come and film our donor event or our luncheon or whatever?’ We wanted to be able to accommodate that, but it was hard with our previous production model. We needed a better system, something that was simpler. 

“We thought, ‘If we can make it as easy as booking a rideshare, that might get rid of those barriers.’ Now you simply log in, pick the time and place, and a trained pro shows up. Or if you need something edited, just log in to your portal, give us the details and the due date, and we get to work.”

OnCall Content was designed for small businesses and marketing teams, but the service is open to anyone who needs professional photography or video, from nonprofits and schools to individuals booking senior pictures, family photos, or product shots for an online store. The service is available in southwest Michigan anywhere within roughly an hour’s drive of Kalamazoo.

The shoot process looks like this: A customer books an OnCall shoot through the portal. A professional Creator, OnCall’s term for its videographers, photographers, and editors, arrives with a kit for both videography and photography. This includes a cinema/photo camera, a gimbal, simple lighting, wireless microphones, and a drone. Drone footage, if desired, is included at no added cost. 

Shoots can be booked for one to four hours. The footage and photos are delivered to the customer’s portal in as little as 24 hours.

Editing, if desired, is the other half of the service. When a customer wants a finished video, a cut-down version for social purposes, or a set of retouched photos, they request an OnCall edit in the portal, provide directions such as the kind of music if they want a soundtrack, and OnCall Creators will do the editing at the same hourly rate. Clients who use OnCall Content multiple times will have a library of shoots in their portal, and these can be edited into new content.

Pricing is published on the site. Random shoots and edits are $125 an hour with a one-hour minimum. Businesses and organizations that often want content can join the OnCall Content Club, which is like a bank of discounted, prepaid hours: $110 an hour on a three-month plan, $100 on a six-month plan and $90 on a twelve-month plan. Joining is free.

Overneath’s president, Gordon van Gent, says clients to date include the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, which ordered a video of an interview with a donor at their home. The orchestra also uses the service to help publicize its community outreach program, which includes small musical performances and music education.

Overneath does major productions for big clients like Stryker and Bronson Healthcare, but occasionally a big business needs a service like OnCall Content. An example is a quick interview with a top executive about something their staff needs to be informed about quickly.

OnCall Content’s parent company, Overneath, was founded in 2014 by Raklovits and van Gent. It produces brand films, commercials, documentaries and corporate videos for clients across Michigan and beyond.

A loan from the Small Business Administration helped the business get going, and its success has enabled it to be financially independent since then. Overneath has nine employees, including Raklovits and Van Gent. Both Raklovits and Van Gent are Kalamazoo residents who graduated from Western Michigan University.

Overneath is a member of the Southwest Michigan First Chamber and participates in its business networking events. The regional economic-development organization is also an Overneath client.