By the mid-2010s, BondIt Media Capital was thriving, funding 50 projects a year, as well as producing its own slate through its Buffalo8 division. But its post-production pipeline was a chaotic tangle, employing an uncoordinated mix of talent working at facilities spread across the map.
Simply put, “it was unsustainable,” says BondIt CEO and co-founder Matthew Helderman.
Then, in 2017, an opportunity presented itself: a post-production house was exiting its lease on a 10,000-square-foot space in Hollywood, leaving both the building and an impressive amount of equipment and personnel up for grabs. Helderman and BondIt COO and co-founder Luke Taylor stepped in and Buffalo8 Post Production was born.
The facility has full picture and sound teams on staff, including picture editors, colorists and visual effects artists and supervisors, ADR artists, sound designers, editors and mixers.
“We built it for people who love movies, who want to find safe harbor in one building that can do soup-to-nuts post-production from editorial to delivery” says Jonathan Sheldon, head of post-production at Buffalo8.
Sheldon came into the BondIt orbit in the mid-2010s when he approached Helderman at the America Film Market in Santa Monica and pitched his services.
“He said send me five producer referrals,” recalls Sheldon. “I did that and maybe three weeks later he said, ‘I’ve got a musical set in Paris in the thirties, and we need post-production on all ends of it.’”
In the area of VFX, Buffalo8 handles a wide range of CGI, including set extensions and face replacement. “We can have our picture team look at the footage, make determinations of what should be visual effects, and then send it to the visual effects artist who’s in the same space and we get that work done quickly and affordably,” says Sheldon.
Although Buffalo8 Post Production has provided BondIt with the synergy it was seeking, handling in-house projects ranging from the Sesame Street doc “Street Gang” (pictured above) to the horror film “Becky,” Helderman says that more than 50% of its revenue comes from outside business, including projects from Blumhouse Prods. and Robert Rodriguez’s El Rey Network.
