by Kevin Flinn | Sep 22, 2017 | Buzz, September 2017
After serving in the United States Army, Detroit native Sam Blue, Sr. wanted to combine his passions for assisting people with their fitness and training goals and working with young people. His company, Triangle VertiMax, trains dedicated young athletes, preparing them for the uppermost levels of high school and college competition. While the logo for Triangle VertiMax reflects the confluence of trainer/athlete/sport as opposed to the Triangle, Blue has unquestionably made his mark on hundreds of local athletes.
How did your military experience prepare you for working with young athletes?
The military experience taught me to be transparent, either right or wrong. With athletes, when they’re doing movements or they’re training or playing, they’re either executing correctly or they’re incorrect, so I make that correction. It also instilled in me [the idea] that the best way is to be direct. I think that transparency is what reaches kids. If I see a kid that I know can play at a Division I level, I tell him, “If you dedicate yourself—just like in the military—if you really work hard and do what you’re supposed to do, you’ll get promoted.”
What brought you to the Triangle?
When I got out of the military, I wanted to raise my son here rather than in Detroit. In my upbringing, we weren’t taught about college. I wanted him to be brought up in this environment, where college is instilled in a lot of the kids. The [athletic] competition level in this area is off the charts. Wake County is just one of those places where the kids are really working hard, wanting to be the best. They’re passionate about it.
How many athletes do you typically work with at one time?
The max that I like to work with is four in one session, but that’s rare; most of my sessions are one-on-one. That way, it’s more like an individual workout rather than a sweatshop like some of these other places that have 20 or 30 people come in and only five kids benefit. Not all training is good training. It needs to have purpose. I can have four different athletes from four different sports, and they’re all doing something completely different and I can focus on all of them.
I work with over 500 middle and high school athletes a year, with another 300 in college. Whether volleyball, soccer, football, basketball, track, softball or baseball—whenever they’re at home or in the area, they always come through to train.
What’s your biggest success story?
My son, Sam Blue, Jr.. He played three sports—basketball, football and track—at Millbrook and did great at all of them. Up until he completed his junior year he only wanted to play basketball in college. The summer prior to his senior year I told him we need to get working on the basketball trail because he didn’t have any offers at that point. He was like, “Dad, I don’t want to play college basketball. I want to play college football now.” I told him to keep in mind that we hadn’t done one camp or one combine; we’d done zero football recruitment. I told him to write up the pros and cons of schools he was interested in. I took a month off work, and we trained five mornings out of the week, football specific, and then we hit those camps. He ended that summer with 14 Division I offers, but he had received over 30 total offers by the end of that summer. [Sam Blue Jr. is currently a redshirt junior defensive end at North Carolina A&T.]
Do you hear back from the students?
I get all these text messages from athletes. When they first report to college and go to conditioning, they text me: It was a breeze. I appreciate what you did. It helped so much.
What are your goals for the future?
My wife, Derema, would confirm that I feel my training is more like a tailored suit. Once someone wears a tailored suit that’s made specifically for them, it’s hard to go back to off-the-rack. I consider Triangle VertiMax a Ticknors or Liles type of bespoke training. Other places are like department stores—their goal is just to get people in and out. I intentionally want to keep it small. That way I can work with each athlete, because I don’t look at each athlete that comes through that door as a client; I look at him or her as a niece, nephew, or close family member. I see myself as becoming a part of their village.
My job is also to educate, to empower. I don’t want kids to rely on their high school coaches for recruitment. That’s not their job. The information is out there for everyone. You just have to learn it for yourself. I want to empower athletes and parents to do that on their own, too. With me, it’s about education. I didn’t plant the initial seed for the athlete and the sport they participate in. I consider myself some of the fertilizer that the parents chose to use to help that seed flourish.
by Kevin Flinn | May 31, 2017 | Buzz, June 2017
Once a growing hub for moviemakers, North Carolina hopes to regain a foothold in the industry
This past March, Governor Roy Cooper outlined a plan to boost film and TV production revenue statewide. Cooper’s proposal is an attempt to stem the tide of productions leaving North Carolina for more incentive-friendly states like Georgia and Louisiana; in a perfect world, the plan would not only entice those productions to return, but also lure others to join them when it goes into effect in January 2018.
The exodus was partially due to the expiration of a tax credit system that previously offered film, television, and commercial productions a 25 percent refund on qualified spending, up to $20 million. In both 2013 and 2014, productions claimed over $60 million, and a whopping $83 million in 2012. When the tax incentive program terminated at the end of 2014, it was replaced with a grant system that featured a flat $10 million per year, a pool made available only to qualifying productions.
According to Rob Shoaf, managing director of the Triangle Regional Film Commission, the elimination of the tax incentives “effectively gutted the indigenous production industry across the state, and especially in the areas not considered production centers. The Western Carolina office was closed, the Triad and Triangle offices were drastically cut back, and Charlotte and Wilmington saw their lists of possible productions curtailed.”
Productions fled North Carolina because “it’s a simple numbers game,” says Eric Roth, co-founder of Raleigh’s Dailypint visual effects studio. “Georgia has great tax incentives that most are flocking to. The base amount to take advantage of that is a $500,000 minimum, which is why Atlanta is booming right now.”
The base amount to which Roth refers is the minimum that a production must spend in order to qualify for a grant. In Georgia, that minimum is half a million dollars; in North Carolina it’s currently $1 million per episode for a TV series and $5 million for feature films. That leaves many smaller, independent productions—both narrative and documentary—out of the loop. In 2015, Georgia hosted almost 250 TV and film productions with a $6 billion impact on the state.
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has been a mainstay in Durham for over two decades. The festival’s director, Deirdre Haj, notes that tax incentives impact the overall environment for the film industry, as “filmmakers often need to move back and forth between these industries to have enough work to survive. Most people that work in entertainment are not on-screen talent or millionaires; they drive trucks, haul lights and cable, run equipment and do hair and makeup, and they buy homes and cars and pay taxes. Many of those folks have moved to Georgia, where incentives are strong.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Cultivating talent at home
While the situation sounds dire, it should be noted that not everyone’s shipping out. In fact, some filmmakers like Raleigh native and NC State alum Patrick Shanahan of Denim Buffalo Film Collective are doubling down on their home base. Shanahan, who directed local documentary The No Hand King, will shoot his feature The Hounds of Dixie in-state, but he bemoans the loss of opportunities for local filmmakers.
“The truth of all this is that NC does very little for filmmakers here already in the state,” says Shanahan. “The Hounds of Dixie has a $500,000 budget so we don’t even qualify for an incentive in our own state.”
Amidst the uncertainty about the industry’s future in the state, writer/director/producer Shanahan is committed to making the Triangle a burgeoning axis of production activity, and he’s optimistic about opportunities for growth. For starters, he is planning a co-op film studio in Raleigh specifically due to the area’s inimitable development as a national and global hub for technology. “The studio I envision is a modern, energy-efficient ‘pre’ and ‘post’ facility with resources for filmmakers, musicians, video game developers and the like to produce and create their work from beginning to end,” he says.
In Shanahan’s vision, his studio works with out-of-state productions while fostering young talent coming out of North Carolina’s universities. His goal? Stimulating creativity in a way that will benefit the filmmakers’ individual careers as well as the entire state.
Indeed, many local talents have left the state and turned to Georgia for their productions. Case in point: Durham natives Matt and Ross Duffer, known professionally as the Duffer Brothers. Their hit Netflix show Stranger Things became a cultural phenomenon and could have been filmed in North Carolina given the right environment. Matt Duffer told the Hollywood Reporter: “We’re actually from North Carolina, so when we wound up in Atlanta and I started scouting Atlanta, we got excited about it, because it looked actually much more like our own childhoods.”
Had there been enough incentive perhaps the Duffer Brothers could have filmed the show, now in production for a second season, in North Carolina, bringing accolades to the state and boosting its economy.
Raleigh’s Trailblazer Studios has a similar mission to Shanahan’s. Vice President of Sound + Engagement Eric Johnson points out the company’s strong outreach to colleges and universities in North Carolina, which not only brings in talented, media-savvy students, but also entices those students to stay in state to work after graduation. “There’s a myth that you have to live and work in New York or Los Angeles to have a career in this industry,” Johnson says. “We’re trying to dispel the myth and create those opportunities [in the Triangle].”
Late to the party
The remaining question, then, is why has the Triangle lagged behind other areas of North Carolina in the realm of film and TV production? Shoaf says that the Triangle “is at the center of the last area of the state that was without aggressive professional representation to the industry by a dedicated regional representative. We were a bit late to the party when other areas, with ongoing funding and several years track record
in place, were making their pitch to the Hollywood producers. Even so, from a low of zero production dollars in 2010, the TRFC was instrumental in growing production spending in the Triangle to around $5 million/year just before the incentives were withdrawn.”
Other local media companies who may not be as affected by the tax breaks will still continue to flourish, primarily because they’re providing services for bigger productions. Dailypint’s Roth notes that plenty of productions shoot in Atlanta but send the post-production work like editing and visual effects back to California—or elsewhere–for the final pass. There’s no reason pre- or post-production outsourcing can’t continue to work here in the Triangle.
Even Triangle-based business that aren’t actively involved in production have managed to carve out their niche. A/V Geeks, helmed by Raleigh’s Skip Elsheimer, focuses on digitizing non-theatrical and academic films, creating one of the country’s largest libraries of 16mm film. Like Dailypint, the contracts A/V Geeks earns are most frequently from out of state—with productions of all sizes farming out motion-capture, virtual-reality and digitization work in a manner practically impossible a generation ago.
Creative solutions
While bringing back major film, TV and commercial productions (and keeping them) is clearly one of Governor Cooper’s priorities, nurturing promising young filmmakers and keeping them working in-state tops the list of a number of local media businesses’ goals.
Trailblazer’s Johnson promotes the idea of tax credits or incentives for companies who ground themselves in North Carolina, akin to in-state tuition for state universities. “I’d ideally like to see us revisit [the incentives] in a way that supports everyone,” he says. “I’d love to see all parties come to the table for a creative solution.” Johnson’s in-state “advantage” would apply to companies that move to the state and establish a presence instead of “dropping in” and doing the finishing work in New York or L.A. “That way, you’d need to commit to the area and make a home for North Carolina graduates” before earning any kind of tax break or incentive.
Full Frame director Haj would like to see a similar incentive available to students who graduate from in-state universities, a proviso that would allow a financial incentive which would be tethered to their debuts. “If you graduate in North Carolina and you make your first film here in our state, perhaps there is a financial incentive for that,” she posits. “It’s a great way to attract and retain young talent that is trained here and perhaps can stay here.”
In the long run, will even amending the current plan, as Governor Cooper proposes, have the desired impact? Shoaf believes it will. “If our indigenous resources bounce back and funding rebounds for both filmmaking incentives and film commission support that make North Carolina production spending make sense to them, the commercial industry from Hollywood and beyond would love to return,” he says. “But they will do so only if they know there will be a long-term dedication by not only the filmmakers, but also the legislative, educational and business communities.”
Looking toward the future, Shanahan says that “North Carolina has to fix itself from within and build up with what we have here, before we can return to the thriving film climate we once had. These are tough times in North Carolina for film, but we’re going to continue to shoot and work here no matter what.”
by Kevin Flinn | Dec 7, 2016 | December 2016 / January 2017, Eat
Here’s the pitch: you’re stuck in traffic on 540 or Glenwood Avenue near RDU, and you’re thirsty. Whether you’re a bona fide craft beer enthusiast or merely someone who enjoys a tasty brew, the founders of DAILYPINT craft beer venue and event space would like to roll out the proverbial red carpet and invite you in for a drink.
DAILYPINT co-founders Will Clay and Eric Roth met in the late ‘90s while working at Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm’s visual effects studio in San Francisco. Working together on blockbusters like “The Mummy Returns” and the “Star Wars” prequel “Attack of the Clones,” Clay and Roth found they shared a common interest: beer.
Roth and Clay soon got acquainted with NorCal breweries like Anchor Steam and Sierra Nevada, and just like Luke Skywalker’s eyes were opened to the ways of the Force, both men recognized the burgeoning enterprise. Now DAILYPINT is bringing its unique blend of storytelling and beer knowledge to the Triangle.
Both DAILYPINT owners agree that the Triangle was the perfect venue for their joint venture. “Our goal was to keep doing [film] production,” Clay says, “and then it would become the theme of the beer destination.”
From Reel to Raleigh
When Roth left ILM to work at DreamWorks in Los Angeles, he says he was struck by the craft beer explosion: “It changed my tastes and gave me an understanding of how that industry worked.” Even though he and Clay weren’t working in the same place anymore, they kept in touch, sharing homebrew recipes and research and talking about beer.
Clay, a Durham native, returned back to North Carolina and when the idea of merging his two passions struck, his first call was to Roth. They came up with a unique idea: a company that would capitalize on its knowledge of special effects (for video games, virtual reality, commercials and film) as well as its thirst for promoting craft beer.
While DAILYPINT Studios is currently operating, offering motion-capture, virtual reality and animation services for a bevy of clients both local and national, the craft beer taproom is slated to debut later this year, with a larger event space to follow in early 2017. The taproom will feature 12 rotating beers, wine, soda and a diverse selection of canned and bottled beers to pour in house or take home.
The space will have the subtle design of a film set or studio backlot, driven by the founders’ behind-the-scenes experiences in film. Roth adds that DAILYPINT is “a mixture of two elements of our story—one is the idea that film is very important to us and ties into the look and style we want to portray” in the space. The other element, of course, is sharing a cold pint of beer.
“We spent our first 20 [years] in film and entertainment. We want to spend our next 20—or more—in beer. Most people open the brewery first but we’re doing the switch. We’re the entertainers, so let’s make the destination first. It’s the reverse of what a lot of people have done, but we feel it works for us,” says Clay.
While Clay and Roth would eventually like to venture into small-batch brewing in the future, the idea is to first carve out DAILYPINT’s niche as a craft beer destination.
Disclosure: Eric Roth is married to Editor-in-Chief Alexandra Drosu.
by Kevin Flinn | Mar 2, 2016 | Eat, March 2016
One sandwich and a bunch of Raleigh food memories gave Fanny Slater her first cookbook Raleigh native and cookbook author Fanny Slater easily traces her love of food to growing up in the City of Oaks.
“I’ll never forget the first time I took a bite of a Boondini’s chicken salad sandwich,” Slater says. “I’ll never forget working in the kitchen at Margaux’s and, after eating there almost my entire life, learning the secret to their Caesar salad. I’ll never forget how my mom would always, always make me request extra caramelized onions on the lentils at Neomonde. My foodie inspiration in this area comes from the memories I have growing up that shaped my love for all kinds of food.”
Slater’s first cookbook, “Orange, Lavender & Figs: Deliciously Different Recipes from a Passionate Eater,” hit shelves March 1st. The title pays homage to a breakfast sandwich that Slater’s father prepared for her and her sister before school at Ravenscroft in north Raleigh—a sandwich that ultimately won her a book contract.
Rachael Ray is pictured during the production of “The Rachael Ray Show” in New York on Tuesday, May 6, 2014.
Photo: David M. Russell/Rachael Ray Show
©2014 King World Productions. All Rights Reserved.
Slater took her father’s English muffin sandwich, added a homemade jam of orange, lavender and figs and used the revamped recipe as her entry into Rachael Ray’s Great American Cookbook Competition in 2014.
She beat 1,000 entrants from across the country and, after four rounds of competition on Ray’s daytime television show, Slater won the grand prize of a publishing contract under Rachael Ray Books.
Slater currently lives and works in Wilmington, but when she’s back in Raleigh visiting family, she hits as many of her favorite restaurants as possible.
“I’d walk from Wilmington to Raleigh for the chicken biscuit with honey mustard and fried green tomatoes,” says Slater, of her favorite dish at Beasley’s.
Her other faves?
“Raleigh Times will always be my go-to for PBRs and fried pickles and ranch. For pizzas—it’s Bella Monica all day long,” she says. “I’ll also always dip my Char Grill fries in my vanilla milkshake and not be sorry about it.”
by Kevin Flinn | Nov 30, 2015 | Buzz, December 2015 / January 2016
With the increase of gun violence nationwide, you’d think Bill Edwards would be facing a lot of opposition opening the Triangle Shooting Academy (TSA), a 41,000-square-foot indoor gun range in Brier Creek.
But he hasn’t received one complaint.
It could be because the land, between Hwys 540 and 70, was already zoned for the purpose. But Edwards thinks it’s all in the numbers—Wake County’s demographic, specifically.
Triangle Shooting Academy, Raleigh
TSA has more than two million people in a 40-mile radius, with a large number devoted to outdoor pursuits. We’re one of the few areas in the U.S. that hosts Cabela’s, Gander Mountain, Bass Pro Shops and Field and Stream.
But the nearest gun range (of this size) is hundreds of miles away.
“There’s nothing like it in the Carolinas, period,” says Edwards.
It will be one of the largest indoor ranges in the Southeast when it opens in mid-January. Edwards says it will alleviate crowding at the Wake County Firearms Education & Training Center in Holly Springs where local law enforcement goes for training and certification. TSA will offer law enforcement a separate entrance and 24-hour access.
Bill Edwards of Triangle Shooting Academy, Raleigh
The “Gun-try Club,” as Edwards calls it, will offer both indoor and outdoor shooting and feature a restaurant, VIP lounge, play area for kids and a virtual range that simulates video games. There will also be a full-time gunsmith in house, and Sig Sauer will run a retail store (one of 10 in the U.S.).
So far, Edwards says he’s sold 600 annual memberships, to some from as far away as Virginia and Greensboro, and about a dozen lifetime memberships.
