One van. Two decades.

How it started

In 2003 there was one passenger van and one phone number. Jimmy bought the van because Los Angeles productions kept needing to move people and there were never enough vehicles that showed up when they said they would. That was the entire business plan. No pitch deck, no yard, no second vehicle.

What made it work was not the van. Any production in this city can rent a van. What made it work was that the number on the invoice was a cell phone, and the person who answered it was the person who owned the vehicle. If a shoot ran to four in the morning, the phone was still on. If something went wrong on a Sunday, someone picked up on a Sunday. In an industry where the schedule moves twice a day, that turns out to be the thing coordinators remember.

The second vehicle came because a coordinator who had used the van asked whether there was a truck. Then someone asked about a restroom trailer for a location out past the county line with nothing on it. The fleet grew the way small transportation companies actually grow: one specific request at a time, from people who had already been given a straight answer once and came back for another.

What twenty-plus years actually buys you

It buys knowing the city. Not in a brochure sense — in the sense of knowing that a stakebed does not make the turn into a particular alley downtown, that a location in the hills has a clearance problem the scout did not mention, that basecamp parking at a given stage will hold what you think it will hold. Twenty years of Los Angeles call sheets is a map you cannot buy.

It buys knowing what a production actually needs before the specs are settled. A coordinator calling on a Thursday for a Monday does not want a catalogue. They want to know whether the unit exists, whether it is free, and what it costs. We built the fleet small enough that all three answers fit in one phone call.

And it buys the credentials underneath. Cinecraft Services Inc is a California corporation operating under USDOT number 2957955 and MC number 1718678. Those are federal registrations, they are public, and your production office can look both of them up before cutting a purchase order. We would rather you checked than took our word for it.

Who runs it now

The same person. Jimmy still owns the vehicles, still quotes the jobs and still answers the cell. The office side — paperwork, invoicing, scheduling — runs Monday to Friday, nine to five, because someone has to keep the records straight. But the number on this site is not a switchboard, and it does not roll to an answering service at six o’clock.

That is deliberate, and it is the reason the fleet is three unit types instead of thirty. A company this size can promise that the owner picks up. A company ten times the size cannot, and most of them stop pretending.

What we will not do

A short fleet means we say no more often than a big yard does, and it is worth being direct about where.

We will not confirm a unit we do not have. If the stakebed is out on your dates, you will be told on the first call. There is no holding pattern, no soft yes, and no calling you back on the Friday to say it did not work out. A coordinator who gets a no on Tuesday can solve the problem by Wednesday. A coordinator who gets a maybe is stuck.

We will not publish a number we have not checked. Deck lengths, payloads, seat counts and stall counts vary by unit. Every one of those figures on this site is marked confirm until it has been verified against the specific vehicle going out on your dates. That is a gap in the website, not a gap in the answer — you get the real number on the call.

We will not quote a rate card. A one-day commercial and a six-week series are different jobs on the same truck. Rates are quoted per production.

We will not release a unit without a certificate of insurance. Not as a formality and not after the fact. See the insurance page for exactly what it has to say.

Which Cinecraft this is

Several companies in film and video use the name Cinecraft. To be unambiguous about it:

This company is Cinecraft Services Inc, trading as Cinecraft Studio Transpo. It rents production vehicles — stakebed trucks, passenger vans and restroom trailers — to productions shooting in Los Angeles County, California. It has operated since 2003 under USDOT 2957955.

Cinecraft Productions Company LLC is a video production company in Cleveland, Ohio, at cinecraft.com. Different business, different state, different service.

CineCraft Studios is another separate business again.

If you are looking for production vehicle rental in Los Angeles, you are in the right place. If you are looking for video production in Ohio, you are not.