1) 2018 was an amazing year, we learned so much about our business, ourselves, and our place in the world as an entertainment and branded content focused production company. The biggest take-away was probably about investments. Investments in security and the move into the new age of marketing our business to the world at large. There is so much noise in the digital world that just wasn’t present even 10 years ago; finding ways to navigate through chatter and engage clients has been second only to the investments required to guarantee the security of the content.
2) Early this year we released a Satirical article titled “Shooting Vertical.” It was Intended to be silly, but as the year progressed we found more and more evidence that it was no longer satire at all. Instead, maybe it was a premonition?
The biggest shift we are seeing has to be resolution and screen size ballooning to mammoth proportions. Long gone are the days of a simple nice and tidy 1920×1080 video, so quaint. And whether small for wearables to gigantic for wrapping buildings, we will see more and more advertising, infographics, and to some degree pure entertainment showing up in places previously only intended for static images. Experiential storytelling through large format video, animation, and augmented content has made up a good chunk of our work this past year.
3) To build upon the year we had last year. We developed some fantastic creative relationships with clients in 2018 and finding avenues that allow us to continue developing relationships in which we work together to create content that viewers feverishly consume — well, that’s the dream.
4) The year is still pretty fresh and there is quite a bit in the hopper already. Right now we are neck deep in a Washington’s Lottery spot that features a CGI character in a live action environment. Not much more I can say about that before launch, but I think it will be pretty damn cool.
6) We are light-years past being able to coast by on a few macs and a simple server. For us to continue to work on the projects that excite us, and to offer the breadth of capabilities to our clients we want to, we need to stay on the bleeding edge of tech. Many of our clients are in the entertainment industry and we have seen a steady increase of security procedures over the years. For us, these standards not only required new workflows but also in some cases required new hardware to boot. In many ways this is the new cold war. People will figure out new ways to get into places they shouldn’t, and we are going to be figuring out new ways to thwart their efforts. On behalf of our clients, whether entertainment, advertising, or a mix of the two, we take this very seriously. All the while having a blast creating content that we hope will delight audiences – but only when and how they were meant to.
