David Tingey
“In 1990, the New Zealand Government decided that they would cut costs, reduce staffing levels and turned TVNZ into a state owned enterprise. By doing that, both Darryn and myself were two of the staff they lost! I can honestly say the both Darryn and I were not keen to stay and fancied our chances out in the real world!”
“Because Darryn and I worked closely and travelled a lot together, this meant we obviously talked a lot. We both have entrepreneurial spirits and believe in a free market and competition. We spent hours talking about something like this and once that opportunity came along we grabbed it. So, we started up a camera and sound crew hire company that ended up employing the cream of the crop that left TVNZ. With these resources it meant we were able negotiate with TVNZ to put our company on contract back to them!”
"We had to buy a lot of gear, with each camera crew costing $200,000 to put on the road. And we had four of them! So, we took mortgages on our houses, hired the crews, brought equipment and vehicles and it started to happen.”
“It really took off for us. It was like a roller coaster, we were signing big contracts for long form television programs in New Zealand and Australia.”
“We had an incredible group of people working together. It was a roaring success! Out of the blue we had an offer from a buyer to purchase the crewing business - It was a really hard decision but felt like the right time to move on. It was the right move and with the money from that sale we decided to invest in post production. Little did we know at the time, but we thought post might be easier! How wrong were we.”
“At that time Dave and Darryn welcomed a new partner to the business, Chris Canton. Chris was an ex-editor, same age and same business ethic. With Chris's post production knowledge and experience it added another dimension to the partnership.”
“At this time in New Zealand, the first generation of post production houses were coming through. They were either tape or linear based houses, with some really big investments going on here in Wellington. A local company was investing $1.5m on a linear edit suite. This was at the time non-linear was starting to gain momentum.”
“Our business ethos was all about relationships. It was successful for us in the crewing business, so we took this approach with us into post production. We purchased two local businesses here in Wellington and combined the staff and resources into one."
“Once we bought these companies we had to make the big decision about which path we would take - non-linear or linear? It might seem like a no brainer now, but it wasn’t then. We went up to NAB in Vegas and saw Quantel and Discreet displaying fantastic content. This was stuff not achievable in the linear world – it was a real eye opener. When we returned home we placed orders for a Flame and Smoke."
"It cost us a about 1 million dollars to buy which seemed huge and even now those numbers seem huge. What we didn’t realise and what Discreet didn’t tell us, was that it was just version one of the software! It didn’t really even work for us. It would take 45 minutes to boot up and constantly crashed. It was a disaster really. But for the local NZ clients, it was a new piece of technology and they all wanted to see it and use it!"
"After a very short time, Discreet came out with an update and that worked fine, so after the initial hard yards, it paid off."
"The biggest stress that I had through this period was employing and keeping talented artists to drive the machines. There was not that many artists in Wellington, let alone the world at that time!”
Since those early days, the whole post production industry changed and the digital realm has taken over. That has meant that all the post houses had to change or face their own demise. Sauce has been no exception to this and have changed the way they do business and expanded into other markets.
“The game changer for us over the last 5 years has been the realization that we actually have a product that we could take and sell to overseas markets. That has been very exciting. It really is the most exciting part of our business, apart for the first cheque that arrived in the mail when we first started! The reality that there is a whole world out there that potentially could be interested in what we have to offer, was just unbelievable and continues to get Darryn, Chris and myself out of bed every day and keep doing what we do!"