Monthly Meeting April 2021
The March 2021 Monthly Meeting was held in person and online on Wednesday 3rd March 2021, with over 40 members in attendance at Moorabbin and over 70 members in attendance via Zoom. This was the program for the evening:
Guest Speaker: Grant Petty
Topic: Empowering Creativity
Grant Petty
Grant, founder, and CEO of Blackmagic Design has become one of the world’s leading innovators of creative video tech. His goal was – and still is today – to empower creativity by making film, television, streaming, and AV production equipment affordable for everyone. Because of Grant Petty, nearly every new film, TV show, commercial, music video, live concert you watch was created with a Blackmagic Design product.
Blackmagic Design, with more than 1,400 employees in seven countries, has tens of millions of customers around the world. This includes Oscar-winning cinematographers to 15-year-old students; and projects from Avatar and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, to Game of Thrones, the AFL, Elton John’s end tour, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Grant is not looking for just profits and openly refutes the thought that he should act like other businesses. He is focused on design and problem solving and has assembled world-leading software, hardware, R&D, industrial design, interface design, manufacturing and marketing, and focused them all on design and creativity.
He has also built a corporate culture that has turned every part of the company into an “invention factory.” The creative process starts with identifying a problem and then reconceptualizing the entire way a product is made, sold, and used.
Grant has also taken his passion for problem fixing and design into the M&A space, acquiring seven companies, including Sydney’s Fairlight Inc, and DaVinci, and brought each of these companies back from the dead. Since acquiring DaVinci, a company that was losing $1 million a month before being acquired to now being the most used professional post-production software in the world.
iHelp Online
In a similar vein to the Q&A segment that ran for many years at Moorabbin face to face monthly meetings, a member of the iHelp team will join the meeting each month to answer your technical questions.
This month it is Harry Lewis.
You are are invited to submit your questions to iHelp for responses during the meeting. Please send your questions by email to: ihelp-questions@melbpc.org.au to arrive by 6pm on Wednesday, 3 March.
Meeting Agenda
7.00pm sharp: Meeting opens. Host is Peter Bacon.
Guest Speaker: Grant Petty
Q & A with John Hall
President’s Report with David Stonier-Gibson and SGM Life Membership Presentation to Harry Lewis
Fireside Chat with Stephen Zuluaga and Hugh Macdonald: Top Security Tips
iHelp Online: Harry Lewis and iHelp Team.
9.30pm (approx): Close.
If you missed out the first time and would like to view any of these presentations, you can do so at http://services.melbpc.org.au/videos/
The username is videos and the password is drum286.
The photographs above were taken by George Skarbek.