🔒Q&A: Votary Films built a business by helping companies with their storytelling

Jed Burdick founded Votary Films of Worcester in 2007. From brand development to filming and post-production, Votary has created videos for a wide variety of local and national businesses and nonprofits, such as Boys & Girls Club of Worcester, international finance firm Fidelity Investments, manufacturer Saint-Gobain in Worcester, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and national sports apparel maker Reebok. 

How did Votary Films get its start?

I had just come off of writing and directing a feature film in northern Indiana, and I was kind of starry eyed about being able to jump from one independent film to the next. At the time, I had four children, I have six now, and they were very young. I was going through a career change. So, when I finished the feature film, I'm like, “What do we do now? Do I actually go get a job somewhere? Let's just start a film production company and see what comes of it.”

We moved here to Massachusetts, barely knew anyone, and at first, I just was taking anything I could get. We quickly became a full-service creative agency, where we were taking on websites, logos, and all kinds of stuff.

Fast forward five years of heartache, challenges, grinding, and trying to build a business, and we were finally like, “We're not doing well with everything other than film and video.” So, we decided to focus on film and video exclusively.

We really started growing in 2014, and we've been on a fairly steady climb since then. In the last two years, we've really started dialing in on who we are and the types of companies we can serve best. And funny enough, it's more with the organizations that actually care about humans flourishing. So, we call it meaningful storytelling, and that's actually our tagline: “Meaningful Stories.”

How do your services capture the meaningful stories of businesses?

The first thing we do is we bring people into a workshop we designed called The Story Acceleration Workshop. That really allows us to get to know the customer really well with aspects such as: What are they trying to achieve? What is their long-term vision and goals? Then we help translate that to: What are the storytelling opportunities that would really accelerate toward those goals? Do we need more high-end customer case studies? Do we need to write some fictional narrative that would really put them on the map? Do we need to make a documentary series about what they're achieving? Do they need more commercials like straight-scripted commercials? All kinds of ideas bubble to the surface in the Story Acceleration Workshop. Then we go into figuring out, and how it fits their budget.

Story is pretty much the most powerful force in the universe. It's no coincidence our brains think in story and we dream in story. There's a lot of ways you can leverage this thing called story innately in us. So, we try to get people to be really vulnerable and teach them to lean into leveraging the power of their authentic stories.

Can you describe the film projects you are the most proud of?

The stuff that we're probably most proud of is not public yet. They are part of these growing campaigns, so you're taking a longer period of time to develop some really special things for some really special clients.

We just recently partnered with Jordan and Julian Peterson; they're launching a software company. So, we were very pleased to be able to work with him and his son on this endeavor. Then we have plenty of examples of really solid documentary storytelling. There's a school down in New York called University Prep Charter High School; we have a really cool project that we worked on with them. Then we have two episodes done in a documentary series about lean transformation or regenerative transformation we worked on with FLEXcon, which is a local company in Spencer.

We create originals just for our passion. One is a documentary about Major Taylor, who was a famous Black cyclist from Worcester. He won world titles in 1899, when he wasn't even allowed to race as a Black man. People jumped through hoops to help him race, and he would just mop the floor with competitors and win races; but he went through a lot of adversity to get to where he really achieved, so it is a really cool documentary.

What made you establish a film company in Worcester?

My wife is from here, and we live in Auburn. I knew in the early mid-2000s the film production scene was growing in Massachusetts, so I was like, “Alright, let's go there, and see if we can jump in on some of these indies that are being made here.” This has been a wonderful place; this is home to me now. In my early life, I moved around a lot, and so I never really had a sense of where home was, until we put down roots here. Worcester and New England became our home.

As a filmmaker, what is your take on the film industry in Worcester County?

Being a lover of movies and film, I love seeing movies being made here in New England. The reason why they're made here is strictly because of the tax credit; the commonwealth has a very specific tax credit really favorable for filmmakers. It is kind of up for debate whether it really is helping the economy the way that they want it to, and I don't have enough data to have an opinion on whether it is or isn’t; but I certainly will take advantage of that tax credit as a filmmaker, because it is very helpful. I have a lot of friends in the industry, and I like the jobs it creates for them. It creates a buzz, and there's certainly a sense of fun to seeing different film productions happen around here.

All in all, I do love the movie industry, but I don't love how challenging it is for independents. It is still very much kind of a closed system; but there are ways of getting things made independently, and that's kind of our next move. We do all this work with different organizations, brands, and companies, but our real passion is crafting stories you would see on Amazon Prime, or Netflix, or any one of these big platforms. Projects like that take quite a bit of effort to get off the ground, but when you do, it's super gratifying.

This interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by WBJ correspondent Sloane M. Perron.