Today we’d like to introduce you to Roy Skillicorn.
Roy Skillicorn is the founder of several highly successful Chicago based creative companies. By design and by luck, he has the luxury, the envious opportunity, to work alongside both his son and daughter on an everyday basis. Roy lives in the heart of downtown and is currently enjoying yet another thriving business venture, his most recent Chicago live-action production entity, Seed Media Arts. His son, Nathan Skillicorn, owns Heart Brains and Nerve that represents Seed along with other high-end film and digital talents.
Nathan, following in Roy’s own footsteps, is a talent agent and owns his own company, and is now the Midwest & Texas representative for high-end film and digital talents through including Friends Electric, Believe Media, Schrom, and Seed. Roy’s daughter, Jessica Rae and her business partner, Andrew Connell, run a successful Experiential Activation Production House, Engage & Resonate. They all share E&R’s spacious offices located on Sangamon Street in Chicago. Jessica Rae is also a singer-songwriter who regularly sings the National Anthem for the Bulls, the Cubs, and Nascar.
Roy started as a fine artist, taught both high school and college level art and design, struggled as an independent fine arts photographer, and eventually expanded into the commercial arts as an agent. His first successful firm, Skillicorn & Associates, originally concentrated on the representation of print photographers but soon broadened its reach into the illustration, design, music and the motion industries. Throughout the 80’s, Roy not only discovered young talents and secured them their very first assignments but he helped develop numerous start-up companies from all over the country, but primarily from LA, San Francisco and Chicago. His decade of marketing and promotion soon helped them all to become established and significant studios, PIXAR not least among them.
Skillicorn has a natural instinct for raw talent. He has a reputation as one who is able to recognize potential superstars very early in their careers. He helped establish numerous major directors, photographers, and production companies. He not only secured PIXAR’s very first assignments (they were commercial ads) but he continued as their agent from that first day up until they stopped doing commercials years later in order to focus entirely on feature films. As Roy departed from PIXAR he was immediately contracted to become the first Head of Sales for North America to establish Passion Pictures, a then London based, now an internationally well-known, Academy Award-winning, animation studio. Of note, Roy’s son, Nathan Skillicorn, has represented Passion Pictures for the last 7 years through his own firm Heart Brains & Nerve, in cooperation with Free Agents, an NY based talent representation firm.
In 1988 Roy partnered with world-class photographer/director Tony D’Orio and started Backyard Productions in Chicago. He eventually invited two prior art students to join him, one becoming his EP and partner and the other joining Backyard as a director. During Roy’s 22 years of marketing leadership, the company prospered and grew into an elite, international, award-winning production enterprise. Skillicorn’s personal interest in art and his extraordinarily successful track record representing various past animation/motion design enterprises led to eventually open a Chicago based animation studio, Tricky Pictures. Changing Tricky Pictures’ name to Transistor Studios, Roy moved the studio to LA to share Backyard’s Venice Beach office. The company became a highly acclaimed motion design destination for those seeking cutting-edge animation. Throughout the 90’s, and until Roy left in 2010 to focus on Seed, Backyard Productions was known for being the only production company, from a secondary market to be consistently recognized in the trades as one of the world’s top 20 production firms.
Even though the companies had offices in NYC and LA, Roy strategically continued to lead from Chicago, by which he managed to maintain the company’s unique brand. By residing and keeping his offices in Chicago, where it all began, the brand maintained its recognized, strong Midwest work ethic where customers could experience its honest and attentive character, its celebrated reputation and the strong visionary leadership. This grand design proved very successful right up until he sold his interests in both companies to expand his vision of the future with Seed.
Recognizing the importance of adapting to the changing advertising/entertainment environments, Roy sought a more streamlined, more agile company with lower overhead, again featuring young, fresh talent soon to become household names. SEED today thrives as a hybrid initiative that is a content creator for both commercials and entertainment, and a producer of high quality longer form films and digital media. SEED builds upon original and entertaining concepts brought to the company by creative individuals, agencies and direct clients. It produces well-crafted productions across multiple platforms for a variety of different markets, products, and contexts. Roy views the name SEED, as a metaphor for growth. The company, SEED, provide a healthy and nurturing environment continually adapting to the ever-changing conditions and climate of the industry.
Has it been a smooth road?
It was never easy, never a smooth road. The biggest obstacles were simply to overcome Hollywood competition, even in the commercial world. LA is the center of the filming universe. It took a lot of hours networking, tons of promotion and marketing to finally get the best advertising agency in the world at the time, to start working with us here in Chicago. We had to overcome the thought that the production company HAD to be in LA to be good. After that, the road got smoother but it always took a lot of hard work and persistence to keep on top.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
SEED curates distinctive filmmakers and connects them with brands. We cultivate well-established masters of storytelling and promising young directors.
SEED specializes in creating stories on all platforms in an environment conducive for developing and polishing imaginative narratives. Our diverse roster of directors and their highly sophisticated production teams collaborate with creative partners from across the world, from concept through execution.
We create a smooth, streamlined production experience and pride ourselves on clever ideation and camaraderie, all resulting in a production process that is both exciting and fun.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. If you can make it here you can make it anywhere. Today, it is easier than it was, but it is still a hard road. I would encourage anyone to start here in Chicago but, I would add that you might anticipate moving eventually if you get busy.
Living out of hotels in LA gets old fast. LA is where the weather is always ideal for shooting, where the crews are deeper and where A+ talent is numerous. That is, and always will be what draws production.
Contact Info:
- Address: 411 S Sangamon Street Unit 1 B
Chicago Il 60607 - Website: SeedMediaArts.com
- Phone: 312 925 3679
- Email: Roy@SeedMediaArts.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SeedMediaArts
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