Del Padre's Web work wows clients with flash It's a good thing for Nino Del Padre that the Internet came along. The 30-year-old president of Del Padre Visual Productions in East Longmeadow loves media production, from video to CD-ROM design to Web site creation. And so does the company's vice president, Mark A. Archer. "It's really a labor of love, we would do this regardless if we were getting paid for it," Archer said. "We'd probably be living in a van down by the river with a video editing machine in the back if it weren't for this." Del Padre Visual Productions has come a long way since Del Padre started it 10 years ago as a wedding videography business. Archer joined the company in 1997. Today, there are six full-time employees at the multimedia production company. In addition, free-lance programmers, photographers and designers work on a contract basis for the firm. The company has doubled its sales every year for the past four years. DVP's customers share its sense of excitement about the visual and audio possibilities of the Web. "I'm a little sensitive as to how people treat our work," said Robert F. Zemba, vice president of Robert Charles Photography in East Longmeadow. The company hired Del Padre Visual Productions to create a Web site to promote their family portraits, which are highly prized in and out of the region. Zemba found that DVP was willing to discuss how adjacent photos balanced each other and other aesthetic considerations in the site design. "I wanted to work with somebody I felt comfortable with artistically, and Nino satisfied that need and went beyond it." The Web site that DVP Productions created was given an award from a group of British Web designers on the first day it hit the Internet. Brother Edward G. Zemba, also a vice president at the photo studio, said he believes the region will be lucky to keep Del Padre and his business from moving to New York or Boston. "Frankly, they do not charge enough," he said. The company was started by Del Padre in 1991 when he was 20. It began as a wedding video business housed in a large closet in Del Padre's mother's home. Del Padre's great uncle Louis was owner of Del Padre Home Entertainment Centers, a chain of four well-known local electronics stores. "I thought the name would give us an edge," Del Padre said. Now, long after the last Del Padre store closed in 1994, the production company with a similar name still gets calls from people looking for hi-fis and phonograph needles. In its early years, the company was known as Del Padre Video Productions and focused on corporate training and promotional videos. An early job was a safety orientation video for Nova Chemicals. By the mid-1990s, the company had begun doing Internet Web sites and CD-ROM development. "Our vision, if we had one, was knowing the business was going to multimedia," said Archer. One of the company's strengths is something the staff calls motion graphics. That refers to graphic images containing motion, whether they be little dancing logos, moving letters or video images. The company is also known for its emphasis on audio, in the form of music or narration, even for Web sites. One of the company's largest projects has been a "virtual showroom" for Lego sales representatives. The system designed by DPV permits sales representatives to show their entire product line from a laptop computer. Potential buyers at toy stores can view all of the company's thousands of building block sets, and even see animations and video highlighting the products as well. When they make a decision on which parts to stock, prices are available and the order can be taken right in the same program. The laptops can connect directly to the central computer software at Lego's distribution centers to arrange shipping. "There are a lot of companies that think they have to go to L.A. or New York for this stuff. They don't," Archer said. Although its roster of clients includes Lego, Spalding, MassMutual Financial Group and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, DVP Productions also has small businesses on board. The costs of a custom-built Web site with video can be as low as $5,000, officials said, although more sophisticated sites can cost much more. Much of DVP Productions acclaim comes from its expertise with something called Flash, a program for bringing animation and video to Web sites. The company has several Flash designers, and relies on the technology in most of their projects. The contract to work for NASA came about through an in-house project to update DVP's own Web site. Like many Web design firms, the company's own site sometimes languished as it worked full-bore on the sites of paying customers. Del Padre spent several months working on the redesign of DVP's site, relying heavily on the Flash animation that has become his hallmark. The results impressed the company that sells Flash, Macromedia, so much it was featured on their Web site. NASA officials saw the design work and contacted DVP in December and offered it the work of pulling together the various elements of an educational presentation it was preparing for use in museums. "We kind of got in the back door on that one," Del Padre said. The production is intended to teach students about life on a space shuttle, and it includes footage from a recent shuttle mission. There is also a segment where a trained teacher accompanying students appears to have a spontaneous discussion with R2D2, a diminutive robot from the Star Wars series of movies. George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, had to personally review and approve the material assembled by DVP for the project. Much of the material was written by NASA scientists. There are segments on microgravity, bone loss in space and other subjects. DVP had to bring those elements together, editing the video shot by others and creating animations. "We built the entire presentation," Archer said. The completed project was put on a CD-ROM that will run in auditoriums of 200 science museums around the country starting with a debut at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in early June. "To work with footage from NASA and Lucas and get something out there that's going to touch so many people is great. It was really worth it." The project was completed earlier this month, and Archer spent three days recently attending a training session in Colorado where the teachers presenting the project to their students learned how to navigate DVP's interface. "We're hoping this is going to turn into a long-term relationship with NASA, the center that coordinated the project and some of the museums we met with," Archer said. The project will also be demonstrated at Wednesday's Market 2002 business-to-business trade show at the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield. It is scheduled to be presented at a Boston-area museum, although no exact date has been set. Archer said he hopes arrangements can be made for the presentation to visit a Springfield museum. Return to Del Padre Visual Productions Home. ### |