Startup ShareGrid Wants to Help Seattle Filmmakers, Without Hollywood
The new startup wants to connect filmmakers and make renting equipment more affordable.
By Max Rose July 12, 2017
This article originally appeared in the July 2017 issue of Seattle magazine.
While seattle is no Hollywood, a new startup, ShareGrid, may make independent filmmaking more achievable in our city. By facilitating peer-to-peer film equipment rentals, the company is designed to lower the cost of renting equipment while also connecting members of the film community to each other. Once you join ShareGrid, you can rent or loan equipment for different types of creative ventures—not only cameras and lenses for filmmaking, but photography and audio equipment as well. This kind of exchange also connects like-minded folks in an industry where “who you know” is everything.
“We want ShareGrid to be a platform to build community and to be the kind of company that champions artists,” says James Keblas, the company’s new director of growth—and the former director of the Seattle Office of Film and Music, where he worked closely with up and coming filmmakers like Lynn Shelton, John Jeffcoat and Megan Griffiths.
Keblas believes the company model, also available in Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco, is a good one for this city. “Seattle is at its best when it doesn’t care about Hollywood,” he says, pointing to companies like Amazon, VRstudios and Freefly, which are thriving even as they disregard usual entertainment industry protocols.
With the future of Washington State’s Motion Picture Competitiveness Program uncertain—the tax incentive praised for its role in helping to grow the state’s film industry is up for renewal as we went to press—ShareGrid provides a resourceful infrastructure as the creative community continues to need support.
Follow Us
Back to Gander
Seattle Rep revisits its original world premiere with a new staging that pulls you straight into the heart of the story.
When you walk into the theater, the cast is already onstage in what looks like a Gander high school gym—setting out dishes for a potluck, chatting, and then cleaning up. It feels like you’ve arrived in the middle of a reunion, which is the point. This run marks 10 years since Come From Away first…
Seattle’s Big Holiday Arts Guide
A full lineup of seasonal performances across local theaters and venues.
In the words of William Shakespeare, “All’s well that ends well.” Local theater and arts organizations are hoping for exactly that. Holiday productions often account for as much as half of their annual ticket sales. A 2018 Dance/USA survey found that The Nutcracker alone represented 48% of yearly revenue for many companies producing the Tchaikovsky…
Outside The Frame
In their first solo museum exhibition in Seattle, artist Camille Trautman uses photography to reclaim history, narrative, and self-expression.
You have probably seen Camille Trautman’s work without even realizing it. A huge photograph—20 feet wide—is currently hanging across the exterior of the Frye Art Museum, visible to passersby driving along Boren Avenue. The image is of a wooded landscape in black and white. Its edges are vacuous, with trees swallowed by darkness, but the…
Holiday Hunt in Pioneer Square
A daily ornament drop turns December into a neighborhood-wide scavenger hunt.
The holidays tend to bring out the kid in all of us. And if opening presents and eating too many treats weren’t enough, there’s also a scavenger hunt in Seattle’s oldest neighborhood. Pioneer Square’s Holiday Ornament Scavenger Hunt has returned for its third year. Twenty-five handblown glass ornaments—all made at Glasshouse Studio—are hidden across 25…