Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Mac Cushing. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Mac, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

I started working in film and television in 2006 in Syracuse, NY and over the course of the next 14 years had moved to Nashville, TN and then Brooklyn, NY to become a Grip doing lighting and camera support on set. As a freelance technician it’s always a gamble on moving to a new market because nothing is guaranteed- your ability to get work is based on how well you can network and how well you work once you get on set. But by the end of 2019 I was looking to do more than work, and I had found out that new film incentives were being issued to upstate New York, and it was looking like if I invested I could do two things I had always wanted to do: scale up in my film work and also help grow the film community in my home town. So in November of 2019 I secured a line of credit and put a business plan together and bought a lighting package that I was going to set up in Syracuse and create infrastructure in order to make it easier to make films in Central New York.

Then the pandemic hit.

Quarantine was hard, but I was able to make it up to Syracuse by May of 202o and started building out my shop. It was a lot of pouring my own money into the venture with no promise on return at that point, but there was a three month period where I was able to focus on building the shop out and getting things up to par that I think helped me hit the ground running when the rest of the world started to open back up and get back to filming.

Over the next two years it’s been trying to control growth and manage the costs of upscaling to meet demand and also to keep up with the other rental houses that have moved into the area. The most important lesson has been understanding the niche you can occupy best as opposed to trying to be everything to everyone all the time, and as of the time of this writing we’re running the shop full time.

Mac, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started working in film in 2006- I was doing construction and a friend who was on an independent film recommended me to grip because “he could probably lift six sandbags at once.” Gripping is lighting and camera support – figuring out how to move the camera, how to create shadows and also diffuse light. There’s also a bit of rigging and construction thrown in there. When turning to opening the rental house I had to stock both electric department (lights) and grip department gear, so it helped that I have had a little experience setting lights over my 16 year career in film. Over those 16 years I’ve worked every kind of shoot on every kind of budget – from big action movies like John Wick 3 to music videos with budgets in the hundreds of dollars. My experience there has taught me how to tailor gear packages to clients based on their budgets, and to help talk them out of throwing money at bigger more expensive lights they dont really need. I try to help them find the perfect fit of the right tool for the job for the right price. That helps me help the client figure out their manpower- its important not only for safety but for helping retain good technicians by not overworking them by hiring the right amount of people for the right job. We cant build a 20′ by 20′ frame on a windy day with only two technicians, and sometimes those contingencies are overlooked in the pre-production process, which is where I come in.

I think thats why people come back to our shop- because we don’t just rent gear, we help plan the project with an authority only experience can provide.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A piece of advice I got when I was starting the shop was “You have to be everything to everyone all the time until you don’t have to be.” and I think I would like to not have heard that. The big lesson I’ve learned after three years in business is that you’re not an island as a company, and you can always reach out to the other companies in your market and while it wont work all the time it is possible to crate synergetic/symbiotic relationships with other companies and together you can focus on growing the things to make yourself as complete as possible while maintaining a presence in the market/community.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

A common practice in Gripping is having a package or kit you bring with you on jobs. Your kit or package size can vary in size according to the size of the job but towards the top bigger Key Grips (department heads) bring their own equipment packages to set in 53′ tractor trailers. So understanding that trajectory had me interested in investing in gear early on, but also I was very interested in producing my own creative content, and the idea of having an entire lighting/grip/camera package to use in my own studio system was very appealing. So as early as 2015 I was piecing together gear here and there, but with no real discernible end game. It wasn’t until 2019 and the idea that Syracuse, NY was ready for a film renaissance that I decided it was time to take the dive and make a large scale investment.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.saltcitygrip.com
• Instagram: @salt_city_grip
• Facebook: @saltcitygrip

Image Credits
All Photos by Mac Cushing