The Story Collector Plus
By Adolfo Pesquera of the SA Express News mysa.com
As chaos wrought by Hurricane Katrina played out day after day on his television, what impressed Jesús Ramirez, a producer of video commercials, were the treasures ordinary people could not replace.
“They could replace their cars and sofas,” Ramirez said. “They couldn’t replace their pictures and videos.”
The disaster underlined the need for a product Ramirez had been mulling over in his mind for some time.
Ramirez, 43, was already a successful advertising executive. Raised in the small South Texas ranch country town of Hebbronville, Ramirez moved into the advertising world with a strong sense of how to convey culture. He became an early innovator in Hispanic marketing.
His San Antonio-based company, the Cartel Group, is little known locally. That is, Ramirez explains, because he only has national accounts. These include Remington shavers, Tecate beer, Rayovac, Dickies and Capital One.
Ramirez shared the idea with the owners of two video productions companies he sometimes worked with: Alejandro Maya of Video Wave Digital, a wedding video producer, and Jorge Conde of Sprocket Productions, a maker of television commercials and local shows.
They became his partners in My Story, a video biography production company. The concept was formalized in 2006 and became a project that shared space in the physically adjoining offices of Maya and Conde. But the project had little momentum while Ramirez was still working full time as head of Cartel.
My Story’s languishing fate shifted gears right around Dec. 20, the day legendary Texas border singer Lydia Mendoza died.
Ann Hernandez McKinney, Mendoza’s granddaughter, knew Ramirez through their children, who attended St. Paul’s Catholic School. Ramirez had done videos for school functions and she approached him about doing something for the rosary.
The subsequent 12-minute production, a collage of old photographs, narration and Mendoza’s music, drew praise.
“Everything, he coordinated beautifully,” McKinney said. “He puts a lot of intimacy in it.”
Soon, Ramirez reshuffled his priorities — not an easy thing to do for a father of eight children — and left Cartel Group in trusted hands to give My Story his full attention. He’s looking to market the concept through funeral homes, assisted living communities, event planners and attorneys doing wills.
“A lot of people leave inheritances to people that are strangers to them,” Ramirez noted.
The process is designed to be informal and intimate. An interview subject drops by the studio at his or her convenience, sits on a stool in front of a white background in a small room and talks to the cameraman about the project’s subject at $200 per one-hour session. Six sessions, once edited, run about $2,000 for the finished DVD.
In addition to the client projects, Ramirez hopes to compile the best interviews into a collection for commercial distribution, through either cable television or bookstores.
Mario Riojas, formerly the owner of a chain of camera stores who sold them to be a sales trainer, was so impressed with My Story he came aboard to help with marketing.
Ramirez produced a 50th anniversary video for Riojas’ parents, and it was so professional it made Riojas think of the colorful history of his great-grandmother — a famous Mexican pianist who had a personal relationship with the Steinways — and the oral history that might have been preserved.
Riojas was surprised, in researching the business concept, there was so little information on such services. He found one company that did picture collage tributes, but video documentaries of this type were still confined to corporate clients.
Randy Johnson, 61, understands in stark terms the emotional tug toward investing in a history that can be preserved. He laments what has been mostly a blank canvas on his own past. Johnson’s father died when he was 12 and his grandchildren are today ages 6 and 7.
“You tell them about him now and what do they remember when they’re in their 20s?” Johnson asked.
Edwin Johnson, his father, started Texas Wholesale Floral in the 1950s. Johnson’s mother took over the company after his death, and Johnson ran it years later. He sold it recently and is semiretired.
“I want them to know about my father, know about the business we had,” he said. “I want them to know about the ranch we lived on.”
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