Picture Perfect Productions owner Judd Allison (Photo: AdamReign.com)

Hip-hop stars with a Scarface fetish aside, most producers who shoot to Miami are searching for warm weather and locations that resemble the nondescript suburban neighborhoods they left behind.

The days of Miami Vice are over. Nowadays the city is overrun by shopping malls, Starbucks and seniors, but the spirit of that time lives on in Judd Allison, a well-connected fixer/producer who proudly embodies the colorfully gritty attitude of the city he grew up in during the ’80s and ’90s.

The owner of Miami-based Picture Perfect Productions and music video shop 305 Films, Allison got his start in the early ’90s renting tricked-out motor homes for commercial fashion photographers such as Herb Ritts,

Albert Watson and Bruce Weber. If they wanted to shoot an underwear ad in the Everglades with an alligator, or on the grounds of an exclusive villa,
Allison made it happen.

A decade later he transitioned from print to film production when his first Canadian client, Toronto-based Revolver Films, hired him for a music video.

Now 47, he resembles an ex-biker: a graying, manicured goatee and sideburns frame his round, suntanned complexion. In innumerable Facebook photos, he sports a jovial grin and dark sunglasses, while posing alongside several of the southern rapstars he’s produced videos for: Rick Ross, T-Pain and Lil’ Wayne.

Allison briefly studied hotel and restaurant management at Florida State University, but dropped out to manage a nightclub in Tallahassee. Explaining his professional journey from drop-out to production-service fixer, he is both self-effacing and self-mythologizing.

“A fixer is a social person. A fixer is somebody who has contacts and introduces people to people,” he explains. “When people come to book my company, it’s mainly because of me. They’re booking a personality. They’re booking a legend.”

“The whole persona about us was that we were always the bad guys. There was some intrigue to us because my drivers were all bikers,” he continues. “People from out of town kind of like that.”

He can bypass the wait at South Beach seafood restaurant Joe’s Stone Crab and knows the best places to catch a local hardcore show. He’s found quiet places to film simulated drag races and organized marine shoots on air boats, speed boats and in the storied Stiltsville homes of Biscayne Bay. Eagles, alligators and white tigers are but a phone call away.

When Steam Films director Benjamin Weinstein needed a hawk for a Wal-Mart shoot, Allison remembered a guy with a bird sanctuary outside Tallahassee. He hadn’t been there since the ’80s, but made the eight-hour drive into the middle of the woods anyway and found the compound right where he’d left it.

Allison is a natural storyteller who relishes recounting those types of stories – even when they don’t quite work out as planned. For example, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) sent him a complaint letter last year after a white tiger bit its trainer and nearly came loose on the set of a Rick Ross video, causing a minor sensation on the local news. “[The letter] hangs up on my wall,” he laughs. “I’m pretty proud of it.”

Dan Ford, EP at Toronto-based Son & Daughters, shoots five to six spots a year in Florida and says he’d turn down a job if the client refused to shoot with Picture Perfect. He characterizes
Allison as “rough around the edges”, but reliable.

“It’s just his personality,” he says. “He drives around in a monster truck. Any other service guy would be in a BMW.” Q

www.pictureperfectmiami.com