There was an interesting problem to solve back in 2005: how does a team build a high-quality, high-volume automotive media library of every make and model of vehicle in North America and Europe?

It took me two years to solve this problem, while working in San Francisco, Long Beach, and Bangalore, India building cross-functional production teams, and agile learning workflow systems.

This automotive media production system worked so well I was sent solo to Belgium, and spent another two years 2008-2009 replicating this system in Europe, while keeping the North American studio operations and Indian post-production running smoothly.

In between starting Europe operations I became the founder of izmostock.com, to develop an additional licensing and sales channel to Homestar Systems, Inc., for the automotive media assets created at the izmostudio, as the Stock Media Director.

Building the worlds largest automotive media library also meant enjoyable work, as an advertising and interactive media photographer of cars for Y&R, Campbell Ewald, Traffic, Mitsubishi, Ford, Pontiac, Renault, GM Europe, and many more.

All together I enjoyed around eight years building the world’s largest automotive multimedia production system, rights managed licensing, and distribution channels. That means a comprehensive media library of 25 still photos and four animations of all makes and models in Europe and North America every year since 2006. This was possible with the help of some amazingly talented teams of people in three countries across four time zones.

These were a few more divergent problems to solve:

• Vehicle Logistics: Negotiating access to 600+ cars per year and transporting the vehicles to a studio.
• Image Capture: Producing consistent, high-quality interactive interactive media of all makes and models, with two cars per day.
• Post-Production: Design high volume workflow systems to transfer, ingest, retouch, and code final media products.
• Operations: Maximizing ROI with high capital expense, international labor, and product delivery in multiple time zones.
• Automotive Database: Matching the final media library visual content with multiple country specific data sources.

When I started this journey in 2005, the company I worked for had a car dealer website business already established since 2002. The company was making car pictures outdoors in the sun. Surprisingly, these photos generated some good traction for the car dealer website business unit, and proved the business model.

Fortunately, when I started working for Homestar Systems it was a small company with lofty goals and many irons in the fire. This afforded me tons of responsibility and room to move around and grow. It was in this environment that I literally built izmostudio from the ground up. From site selection, architects, contractors, equipment vendor negotiations, recruiting employees, 360 VR capture systems design, and final creative input on how the image library would look, my teams and I made it happen.

By 2006 we landed our first interactive media assignment for Pontiac with Campbell-Ewald in Detroit. In 2007 the first complete studio quality automotive media library was published with over 400 models.

Both the Long Beach, California and Brussels, Belgium studios continue to operate today producing automotive photography and interactive media. I stopped working on these businesses December 2012.

Visit these websites, izmostock and izmostudio, to see more automotive media solutions.