New owner, new name for Camcord@Large

Jordan Donovan had been working at Camcord@Large for less than three years, and had been manager for half of those, when owner Wilson Large made a startling comment.

“Hey Jordan,” Donovan remembers him saying. “You should buy the company from me.”

Donovan said he thought Large was kidding at the time, but after a year-and-a-half and a name change to Current Media Productions, Donovan became the owner of a company specializing in his passion, video production, in late June.

Donovan said the name change was something he and Large had been working on for more than a year.

“We wanted to get the word ‘camcord’ out of the name,” Donovan said, considering that the shop uses and rents high-definition digital cameras. “We don’t want people to think that we’re using old, over-the-shoulder camcorders to shoot with.”

The shop, located downtown across the street from the Whatcom Museum of History and Art, offers what Donovan calls “four pillars” of services: video production, rentals, media transfers and duplication. After being in the same location for 26 years, the shop is now fairly well-known and receives quite bit of walk-up traffic.

Transfers are the most popular service with local customers, Donovan said, due to both to the wide variety of media types the shop accepts, and because everything is done in-house.

“We can transfer almost any media type created in the past century to CD or DVD,” Donovan said. “I say century — it’s kind of an exaggeration, but only a little bit because I’ve actually transferred film from the ’30s and ’40s.”

Before working at Current Media Productions, Donovan said he was unemployed, bouncing around from one odd-job to the next. In his free time he performed at the Upfront and iDiOM theaters, and volunteered at video production studios to work his way into the industry. One day, while working security for a pilot TV show in Mount Vernon, Donovan was approached by Large, who had seen him perform in the iDiOM’s “Serial Killers” show, and asked to drop by the shop and turn in an application. *This paragraph has been edited to remove incorrect information.

As the new owner, Donovan has already begun updating his business. The shop has been redecorated with new furniture and local art, and cutting-edge rental equipment is on the way.

He is also revising the shop’s marketing strategy, and along with modern means such as boosting the shop’s social media presence and tapping into the wedding industry through trade shows, Donovan is planning a more comical approach.

With the help of some funny screenwriting friends he has made since he started performing improv, Donovan will mock up and pitch off-the-wall commercials to local businesses to try and drum up production revenues.

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