Impact, founded by Oscar-winning duo Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, today announced the launch of an online professional network for the film/TV industry that’s focused on serving the needs of crew and the challenges of production. The platform will launch publicly first in the Atlanta market, a rapidly growing hub for some of the entertainment industry’s best talent, productions, and studios.
With production exploding in Atlanta and globally, spinning up film and television productions has become increasingly difficult. Due to shortages of crew and equipment, it will often take producers and studios months to lock in crew and locations, causing major delays in production. Using Impact’s database of over 400,000 profiles for crew from top film and television shows, production teams can now find talented, available crew in 24 hours or less.
“We launched Impact to empower the people who bring stories to life,” said Brian Grazer. “We want crew to have the ability to access more opportunities and streamline how productions connect and collaborate.”
“While there have been tremendous technological innovations over the years in digital effects, cameras, editing, and streaming, the actual mounting and physical production of shows has not changed much in the past 20 years,” said Ron Howard. “We hope that Impact will make the hard-working crews’ jobs a little easier, and allow productions to run a bit smoother and maybe even wrap days earlier.”
Impact has been in beta for the past year, and already has over 18,000 registered users, (with 4,000 users based in Atlanta). In the past 90 days alone, 50 productions around the world (13 in Atlanta) have used Impact to help source available crew for 118 jobs on major movies and shows like Houston and The Color Purple.
“Productions face many challenges that we believe Impact can help solve, starting with finding talented, available crew,” said Impact CEO, Tyler Mitchell. “There are over 330,000 working crew in the U.S. alone, the majority of which are independent contractors. But, until now, there has not been a network to connect this widespread talent with opportunities. Impact is excited to become the destination for crew to network, showcase their work, and find jobs, while giving productions a place to easily find and hire diverse talent.”
Impact is backed by venture capital firm Benchmark, which led investments in Uber, eBay, Zillow, OpenTable and NextDoor.
