Roy Skillicorn

In 2011 I teamed up with young talented individuals and expanded my content creation / production entity, Seed. Seed was originally famous for pioneering early "branded content" like Bud.TV and other clients wanting web content, episodic films and viral work. We are now a hybrid content and commercial production / ideation company with savvy directors and producers and Creative Directors.After 20+ yrs of running several, successful production entities, the business was changing and I envisioning a new more streamlined model for the production business. I sold two of my high overhead companies to seek a much more flexible business model. I sought a vision of a production entity low in overhead and high in creative excellence. It worked ...and most importantly, we all are having have fun.

I worked as an employee for the first time in 40 years of having my own businesses. Digital Kitchen allowed me to keep my production company going throughout my tenure. I was responsible for heading up the creative / production department and proud to say I brought them several very high profile projects before realizing that I needed to go back to being my own boss again. I learned a lot though, and today have much greater empathy for big agency employees and the hurtles they daily face.

I started Backyard with a photographer/director friend Tony D'Orio in Chicago, while I was still a rep for huge production entities In LA and San Francisco back in 1988. My wife and I named the company, and designed the iconic shadow puppet logo, all our ads, promotions, and conceived many of the famous (and infamous) parties, events, dinners and bashes for 20+ years. I led the company's marketing, sales and PR by strategizing from the trenches, not from some ivory tower. Thus, we became and remained the only company from a secondary market to be consistently recognized within the top 20 production companies throughout the 90's and early 2000s. Though I moved the company to LA, I remained in Chicago by design. Managing the company from Chicago defied conventional thought, but it worked. By my staying in the midwest, it served to underline the company's most important uniqueness: our honest, hard working, good natured, midwestern work ethic and personality. I am proud that I was able to bring two of my students from my teaching days into prominence, making one of them my partner, the other a major world class director. I'm proud that we developed most of our directors from scratch and that they stayed on top for so long. I'm delighted that most of our reps, that I groomed from novices, have all gone on to reach great heights in the industry and that so many our directors, producers, secretaries, assistants and even PA's, who got their start with us, have also reached the top of their chosen professions. Back in the 90's, Backyard became the 'creative' brand that my wife and I personally envisioned, promised, promoted and delivered upon. Backyard grew to a multi million enterprise and was for a time, a production paradise that clients sought. It was an unpretentious, fair, and honest place that I had hoped it could be and, for a time, it was the Shangri-La of production. I feel very fortunate to have lived and shared it.

Bruce Alcock and I started Tricky Pictures in Chicago and brainstormed to find a term to describe what his work was about. We coined the term "Motion Design"​ and put out thousands of post cards describing what we meant by it, what we saw as art that moved. The term caught on on and today everyone refers to it by name. Bruce left to move to Canada but I kept all the employees and renamed the company "Transistor Studios". I sold it in 2010 to its employees.

I was asked to help establish this then unknown entity, today the internationally-renowned, Oscar winning, London-based, PASSION PICTURES in North America. I set them up with NYC, Midwest, LA and Canadian representation and helped them get up and running in the USA. Ironically since 2010, my son Nathan Skillicorn has represented them through Free Agents.