RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME

Dateline – Hong Kong, November 1992: e Sky assignment editor called from London but this time he asked for me rather than my business partner, Adrian Brown. is was strange because as the Brit in APV, our edgling video and creative agency, Adrian typically dealt with our UK and Australian clients and I handled the Americans and “others”.

“Mark, this is an unusual situation but, on this job, we will be retaining copyright on all the footage you shoot.”

Understanding his rationale and appreciating that he’d been steady and straight with us for the previous nine months, I really didn’t want to argue with such a dependable client.

So, as with many of our other deals – especially the handshake agreements made in the car park of Channel Nine, Australia with Peter Meakin, Head of News and Current A airs – we had a verbal understanding.

So it was that Sky sent APV to South Korea to cover what was expected to be the last royal tour by the Prince of Wales and Princess Diana, whose marriage had long foundered on the rocks. We gave up rights to resell any footage shot.

One of my shots, taken as they sat side by side in the back of a limousine but obviously miles apart mentally, illustrated just how much distance there was between the royal couple. It has been used over and over in almost every documentary made about Diana ever since. We were never going to get rich on the back of that scene – but it sure would have been nice to watch the residuals pour in over all these years. is latter revenue stream was almost our undoing that summer when we were scammed out of US$250,000 worth of gear by a team of Brazilian fraudsters. But having been in business for 14 years, we had the money available to pay o the theft and keep the company a oat.

Fast forward to 2006: we had already covered the Hong Kong and Macau Handovers, bird u, SARS and the Gulf Wars. From a motivated two-man band selling packaged news stories to international broadcasters – while retaining copyright to almost all our footage – we had become a news, documentary and corporate- lm dynamo.

And we had branched out into renting equipment to visiting crews.

Clearly, we didn’t have the business protocols in place to avoid this potential disaster but as with most things related to APV, I made the gut decision to pay o that debt immediately rather than take the tempered advice of Chris Slaughter, our managing director, and our in-house accountant.

From day one, everything about APV was based on a combination of my gut business instincts, Adrian’s nose for a good news story and knowing what our clients wanted.

Early on, when I tried to develop the documentary side of our business through Nine, Meakin’s blunt response to my pitch was: “No sharks, no monkeys, not interested!”

While I had to wait a few years to get our documentary division going, our news business ourished.

It had all started when our Asia Bureau for Britain’s TV-am breakfast television show was shuttered in 1991. Having been in Hong Kong since 1982, I knew just how di cult the freelance market could be. Adrian had only been in town since 1988 but he and his Kiwi wife, Julia, were well settled and had no interest in returning to the UK.

In fact, our wives worked together for a graphic design shop and many years later would set up their own company, Orijen, which specialised in branding and marketing.

Our two families were linked in ways we never could have imagined when we rst decided Hong Kong would be home.

As Adrian reminds me, “ e role of our wives was crucial to APV. We, as you recall, did not bank a salary for six months, because, thankfully, they were both working.” e Hong Kong story was exploding on the international stage and we were right in the middle of it.

To continue doing what we did best, we struck upon a unique idea. Instead of working as lone guns for hire, we decided to join forces and, as a team, sell Asia packaged stories to broadcasters who didn’t have crews in the region… and retain copyright to that footage.

With a little more than ve years till the Hong Kong Handover, it was the ultimate case of being in the right place at the right time, combined with a large dose of ballsy con dence and a small injection of cash to take ownership of TV-am’s gear.

After months of admin and selfpromotion to foreign channels and agencies, we kickstarted APV with stories about the Hong Kong lm industry, Japanese businesses investing in Hong Kong and a British army team lost in the jungles of Malaysia (quaintly referred to as e Bungle in the Jungle, with the newbie Rob McBride reporting for Sky News).

We helped launch ABN, the precursor to CNBC, fed packages to the young and needy CNN, gave e Asian Wall Street Journal Report a kickstart and later, displaying considerable lack of judgement, helped Fox News get o the ground in Asia.

But there was more than luck. We had a key connection in the person of Bruce Gyngell, Adrian’s former boss at TV-am.

Adrian recalls: “Gyngell was a close colleague and friend of the late Kerry Packer, owner of Australia’s highly pro table Nine Network, and he arranged for me to meet the tycoon in Sydney a few weeks after we set up.” (In 1984 Packer had taken a substantial stake in TV-am and sent Gyngell to London to turn the company around).

“At the meeting, I pitched the idea of APV becoming Nine’s de facto Asia Bureau. I pointed out that this was, after all, a time when the then Labor government was seeking a closer engagement with Asia.

“Packer had a well-deserved reputation for bluntness, viz:

‘Anything else you’d like to tell me about my own fucking country?’ and:

‘Listen, son, we don’t use fucking freelancers because fuckers like you always

APV: THREE OF THE BEST

Mark Erder’s pick of three favourite projects:

1 | Of All the Gin Joints

The stories of the FCC’s glory days, as related to me over many years by Marvin Farkas (#004), inspired me to make this film for the FCC s th Anniversary in 1999. The structure was inspired by Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose.

Thanks to the support of Fergal Keane, the BBC pic ed up the financin . n many ways, this film is the true re ection of what I wanted to accomplish in Hong Kong. And it was s first foray into documentaries and out of news.

2 | HSBC – Red

Chris Slaughter created HSBC Red, a bi-monthly in-house TV news magazine delivered on the bank’s regional intranet.

We used the bank’s staff to deliver messages not just from top down, but also to celebrate their own stories from the bottom up. Presenters were all HSBC employees, and stories covered everything from netball matches and karaoke competitions to beach clean-ups and charity walks. It was such a success, corporate HQ in London turned into a company-wide project.

3 | National Geographic end up working for some other fucker.’”

We got on a roll with their Inside series in 2009, thanks to our Singapore office producin Silk Air Flight 185 – Pilot Suicide? We later did films on Nissan’s relaunch of the GTR muscle car; the Hong Kong Sevens; and The National Palace Museum, Taipei.

Less than three months later, however, APV was ling its rst report for Nine – a fatal re in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Hong Kong.

Adrian continues: “Not long afterwards, there was another important turning point. In May 1992, sensing that political unrest in Bangkok was set to worsen, we ew to the ai capital un-commissioned. Within hours of arriving, soldiers opened re on unarmed protestors, many of them students.

“We captured the shocking scenes lming from the rooftop of the Royal Hotel. Physically defying censors at the local TV station, we were able to transmit the pictures to Nine Australia and Sky News UK before authorities managed to pull the signal.” is was sparked by the success of bringing on Justine Fung to help us prepare for the Handover. After nishing school, she came back to work for us on our production desk and eventually became the GM of the company. We’re proud to say that she was later poached by Bloomberg to become their Asia production manager. e internship programme continued right up until this past year, with an ongoing relationship with the Media Studies Department of HKU.

Having been one of only two Western cameramen in the square that night and following up with other successes, we proved our worth to Nine and secured our retainer – with that car park handshake –which we held for over 10 years.

We were on a roll for a solid decade. e more stories we covered, the more equipment we purchased and the more sta we hired.

But, being ignorant of the basics of business, all our successes needed help. We were aided by our wives, who understood both business and brand positioning better than we did. My wife, Bella, taught me how to read a pro t and loss report and a balance sheet, and how to assign job numbers to the hundreds of jobs per year that we were selling. Julia came up with the company name and designed our earliest brochures and website.

Just as Adrian and I knew we would be better o as a team than as independent freelancers, we leveraged the advantage of having wives who had more business nous than we did.

For today’s young broadcast journalists, our operation delivers an important lesson: it is one thing to know a good story. It is something else to know how to issue an invoice, negotiate a deal and retain clients over a period of years.

We did everything we did so that we could sustain a way of life. In fact, we didn’t really understand this until a consultant delivered a sharp piece of criticism: “You haven’t created a ‘business-business’, you’ve created a ‘lifestyle-business’ without a plan.” I was devastated.

But then, I thought about what he meant and realised that he was absolutely correct.

It was only then that I rst became proud of what we had accomplished.

We were doing what we loved and we were managing to also employ, sustain and train others. Our plan was to cover stories and grow, not to grow and ip.

At our high point we had 27 sta and 30 freelancers working with us on a regular basis throughout the region.

Plus, we initiated an internship programme, so university students could spend the summer learning about the video industry and the basics of small-business life.

But stories were always our key to success, and we pulled o some major exclusives. In June 2000, Adrian became the rst foreign television correspondent to y around the world with an Indonesian president, Gus Dur.

A year later, he gained rare access to another powerful Asian leader, Cambodia’s prime minister Hun Sen.

We were also commissioned to run the press and broadcast centre for the Hong Kong Handover, as well as a ve-year assignment shooting and helping produce Jonathan Dimbleby’s BBC series, e Last Governor at said, numbers, nurturing young talent and exclusives have their limits. And you don’t recognise those limits until you get a major kick in the stomach. at kick came in 2004. e next 16 years came and went in a ash. Before I knew it, APV had become one of the leading corporate lm agencies in Hong Kong. As TV news dried up, paid corporate work expanded and we took advantage at every turn. e new partnership was with Casual Films, London. eir youth, ambition and sense of place were the perfect match for my desire to move away from the stress and madness of daily operations.

With the former, we serviced between 20 and 30 broadcasters and had upwards of 160 freelancers on the payroll.

With the latter, we secured our biggest exclusive of all, behind-the-scenes access to Hong Kong’s last British governor.

And we proved to our clients that there was a rewall between our documentary side and our news side: I gained ve years of exclusive access to Chris Patten, his family and administration, which ran from the day Dimbleby and I came o the Singapore Airlines ight with the Pattens in 1992 till the night in 1997 we sailed with them on the Royal Yacht Britannia for Manila.

Not once during that time did Adrian get any advance word from me on political decisions, upcoming statements or policy matters.

We both understood a leak would help our news work, but destroy our integrity; our rewall held and our news clients knew it.

I was in a nondescript hotel room in a nondescript Asian city on a nondescript assignment. Adrian called to tell me that he was leaving APV to move to Sydney. I spent the rest of the night dry heaving and between heaves seeking consolation from Bella.

Finally, I gured it out.

We needed to take our unique sales point and promote our storytelling abilities to our corporate and documentary clients. Many of them already loved the re ected glory of dealing with crews who had covered Tiananmen Square, both Gulf Wars and lots of bang-bang. But now we had to prove that we could tell their stories with vision and passion.

And we succeeded.

With Adrian having moved and now focused on news for Channel 7 in Australia, I was left to make fast decisions on my own: buy a group in Singapore and take advantage of their video news release skills; hire a creative director from a 4A Agency and focus on slick corporate work; convince the likes of NatGeo and Discovery that we could do their docs in time and under budget.

We cross-promoted our skillsets of news knowledge with high-end corporate production values and made in-house TV for HSBC, AIA and many others.

We transitioned from 90-second news features to the ve-part, one-hour BBC series that was e Last Governor and veyear projects with KCRC to document the construction of the East Rail Line.

Finally, after a few bumpy years of umbrella protests and COVID-19 lockdowns, we had a major turnaround with Prudential and AIA. ey both wanted investor relations lms when person-toperson meetings weren’t happening. For Prudential, that meant getting 13 lms shot in 13 countries and ready for delivery in just six weeks.

So, again, thanks to being in the right place at the right time, we got a couple of our largest ever commissions, which led to a hugely pro table year.

And by coincidence, after years of trying, we found a company that wanted a foothold in Asia just as I was ageing out of the business.

In May of 2022 they purchased APV. By 31 December I was out of a job.

I am now o on new ventures and Adrian has relocated to New Zealand. A new generation of lmmakers has taken the helm and is driving APV in new and more commercial directions.

I couldn’t be happier.

PS

None of this would have been possible without Alistair Angus, Angela Cheung, Maggie Choy, Daniel Clarke, Lee Devine, Thomas Elliott, Justine Fung, Alain Lim, Rob McBride, Chris Slaughter, Tammie Tsang and scores more.