Big Spaceship: Creative InspirationsIntroduction| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:05 | Michael Lebowitz: I think everybody here has a
tremendous desire to experience culture and art.
| | 00:12 | I won't say that we have a foosball
table and Guitar Hero tournaments
| | 00:16 | because of our brainstorming process
or anything like that, but they are
| | 00:20 | certainly interrelated in some way or another.
| | 00:22 | Female Speaker: People don't really believe me
when I tell them what my job is, because a big
| | 00:25 | part of it is just playing and
watching stuff on the Internet.
| | 00:28 | Male Speaker 1: The designers are working on visual
explorations. The developers have that time to work
| | 00:33 | on functionality explorations.
| | 00:35 | Male Speaker 2: We're trying
something new in every single case,
| | 00:37 | for every single project we do,
it's never been done before.
| | 00:40 | Michael: If you want it
innovative, you want to differentiate,
| | 00:43 | you have to take risks.
| | 00:44 | Male Speaker 3: Without an experiment, somebody
might not believe that we could that.
| | 00:49 | Michael: We were just incredibly open to
anything that might be said by anybody.
| | 00:53 | Male Speaker 4: Most of the actors are, we just
grab people from their chairs and dress them up
| | 00:58 | in coats and whatnot and call them doctors.
| | 01:02 | Male Speaker 5: Sometimes
there's, there's just too many details.
| | 01:06 | Michael: You can't limit people to watch
something four minutes long that go from here to here.
| | 01:11 | You have to let them go to any point
in it and see it however they want.
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| Welcome to the Big Spaceship | 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Michael Lebowitz: So here we are, where all of
the real work actually happens, which is the big
| | 00:14 | open space that is really the Big Spaceship.
| | 00:17 | The most important thing is just to see
this glorious vista, this expanse of space.
| | 00:21 | We really loath cubicles and things
that separate people from other people.
| | 00:26 | We really want people to be able to
turn around and interact with each other at
| | 00:30 | any moment and really be able
to collaborate in real time.
| | 00:37 | When we decided we wanted to start a
company, we sat in a caf? for several
| | 00:45 | hours with a dictionary,
| | 00:46 | just trying to pull out keywords
that we thought were interesting in some
| | 00:51 | way and spaceship was by far the
favorite, because it had connotations of both
| | 00:55 | sort of retro and future.
| | 00:57 | It's just sort of evoked different
things in different people's minds.
| | 01:00 | But because www.spaceship.com was
taken, and is still taken, we needed a
| | 01:07 | modifier, and I just thought Big
Spaceship sounded really inviting and sort of
| | 01:12 | it had the connotation of mothership
and thought, sort of, there is room for
| | 01:17 | everyone on a big spaceship.
| | 01:18 | We left a somewhat larger agency and
followed with typical startup story of
| | 01:28 | an extra bedroom in an apartment on Smith
Street in Brooklyn that was about 100 square feet and,
| | 01:35 | slowly but surely, worked our way up in
space and moved into this neighborhood.
| | 01:38 | We're located here in 45 Main Street in
DUMBO, which is sort of the very heart
| | 01:45 | of DUMBO, which stands for Down
Under the Manhattan Brooklyn Overpass.
| | 01:49 | When we first moved here, it
was a pretty empty neighborhood.
| | 01:55 | It was mostly artist lofts in old
factory buildings. These are all old factory
| | 01:59 | buildings. We're right on the
waterfront and over the seven and a half years,
| | 02:05 | we've been in the neighborhood, it's
changed really radically, to the point that
| | 02:08 | we have a Starbucks and
fancy condos and places to eat.
| | 02:12 | Brooklyn was, sort of, it was both a
lifestyle choice and a very conducive
| | 02:20 | choice to the finances of a startup.
| | 02:23 | We certainly have a different kind of
recognition in the world in that early on
| | 02:30 | with no recognition in the world at all.
| | 02:34 | We sort of carved our way into the
niche of working on theatrical campaigns for
| | 02:41 | feature films and that became our
bread and butter for a long time.
| | 02:46 | We really often talk about the very
first thing we do on a project is say "What's
| | 02:51 | the conversation we're trying to start?"
or "What's the story we're trying to tell?"
| | 02:55 | And that is fundamentally
the service that we provide.
| | 02:59 | We partner with brands to tell stories
or open conversations on their behalf.
| | 03:04 | Specific services, we certainly do a
lot of design and video work. We do a lot
| | 03:10 | of work inside of social networks. We
do a lot of a game development and we
| | 03:15 | have our own proprietary game
engines that we build games on top of, very
| | 03:20 | regularly, for brands.
| | 03:22 | But it's almost limiting to say we do
the following six things, because as soon
| | 03:30 | as we write that down, we'll replace
three of them with other things and we'll
| | 03:33 | invent three new ones.
| | 03:36 | So I think our services are fundamentally
the value proposition that put in front of you.
| | 03:42 | We create experiences for brands.
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| Workspace| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:05 | Michael Lebowitz: Over here, we move on to
the team that is known as Cheepy's Playhouse.
| | 00:12 | Back there is the mascot and
founder of Cheepy's Playhouse.
| | 00:18 | Baron Wesley Von Cheaphausen, is that right?
| | 00:22 | Wesley Von Cheaphausen, the 2nd.
| | 00:23 | It seems like some of the people in this
team are off playing foosball, so maybe
| | 00:29 | we'll see them in a minute.
| | 00:31 | Well, more importantly, here is
the shrine of Cheepy's Playhouse,
| | 00:34 | or, that's what how I think of it.
And every day at random times, well I guess
| | 00:41 | they're not random, they're random to me,
but at moments of accomplishment, the
| | 00:46 | bell is rung so that they're sort of
making note of their accomplishments.
| | 00:50 | Male Speaker: I hit it every time I undo.
| | 00:52 | Michael: Every times you do?
Male Speaker: Yes.
| | 00:54 | Michael: He hits
it every time he undoes.
| | 00:57 | If you come to the studio and you look
around, you really see, pretty quickly, I
| | 01:03 | think, what differentiates us.
| | 01:06 | We don't look like a normal place of work.
| | 01:09 | I just want a place where
people feel completely comfortable.
| | 01:12 | When I interview people, I sometimes
use the analogy you spend a third of your
| | 01:18 | life in beds, so buy a
really, really good mattress.
| | 01:22 | You spend a least another third of your
life at your job. Have a place that you
| | 01:26 | love to go everyday, that you're happy
to go everydayy, and that's sort of the
| | 01:31 | principle of what it's like to be here and
hopefully, at least, and that's what it's like for me.
| | 01:38 | I love coming here everyday.
| | 01:40 | I think everybody here has a
tremendous desire to experience culture and art.
| | 01:48 | And there is a lot of sharing that
goes on, both sort of through systems that
| | 01:52 | we have built or that we use and just
one-off and sending each other links and
| | 01:58 | interesting things.
| | 01:59 | There is a couple of photos that
are sort of silly photos of one of our
| | 02:04 | designers and our 3D artist
and they've been Photoshopped into
| | 02:08 | absolutely everything,
| | 02:09 | Evan's face in a particular photo,
across everybody known to man and they do
| | 02:15 | this on company time.
| | 02:17 | It's not like they're
going home so they can do this.
| | 02:21 | I actually think it's really good.
| | 02:23 | It's fun that they can laugh at each
other and that they can play with the world
| | 02:29 | around them as much as they do.
| | 02:31 | We do everything from really silly things,
| | 02:33 | we're about to start the very first
Big Spaceship Olympics for instance.
| | 02:38 | We voted on us on a giant list of
potential events, ranging from air hockey to
| | 02:42 | pictionary to trivia and we did a
poll of the entire office and the top ten
| | 02:47 | events were selected and we're going to go
out and do these things over the course
| | 02:51 | of the entire summer.
| | 02:52 | It's the Big Spaceship Summer Olympics.
| | 02:54 | Does it directly relate to creativity or
concepts that we're doing in our work? Maybe.
| | 03:01 | You never know where things are going
to come from, but I think getting people
| | 03:04 | out into the world doing silly things
that sort of breakdown inhibitions and let
| | 03:13 | people feel more trust of each other.
| | 03:15 | I won't say that look at we have a
foosball table and Guitar Hero tournaments
| | 03:18 | because of our brainstorming
process or anything like that.
| | 03:22 | But they're certainly
interrelated in some way or another.
| | 03:25 | We have several dogs in the office, ranging one,
two, three, sometimes four dogs at any given day.
| | 03:33 | Over the time, we just
have a culture of having dogs.
| | 03:36 | This space is really great for dogs,
because they can move around a lot and
| | 03:39 | there are a lot of things to explore and see.
| | 03:41 | I think it makes people happy,
| | 03:43 | ultimately. It's really nice to have
sort of a silly creature nudging at you.
| | 03:50 | I don't always love the barking when
it happens, but I can live with it.
| | 03:54 | We make very significant use
of headphones in the office.
| | 03:58 | I think headphones are the sort of
isolation booth that people sometimes
| | 04:03 | need to just charge through and get work done.
| | 04:05 | We also don't put phones at every
desk, because we don't want things
| | 04:09 | ringing constantly.
| | 04:11 | Because people sit with their teams,
so everybody around them in general is
| | 04:15 | working on the same project,
| | 04:17 | I think it's a lot less likely that
there'll be interruptions and they can kind
| | 04:21 | of figure out their own methods
for saying I'm busy right now.
| | 04:25 | People have put signs on
the sides of their heads.
| | 04:28 | People have put signs on their
computers saying "not now", but the point is that
| | 04:33 | they can do that however they think
is going to be most effective in their
| | 04:36 | group and it tends to work.
| | 04:40 | Everybody can play music here.
| | 04:42 | We have iTunes set up for the office.
| | 04:45 | We spend a lot more time thinking
about how we can make our company and our
| | 04:51 | workplace good for the people that work here.
| | 04:53 | You don't walk in the door and
see, oh my God, this place is so
| | 04:58 | perfectly designed. It's our house.
| | 05:01 | It's not for our guests.
| | 05:04 | I think when I go to other design
studios I always think like, wow!
| | 05:07 | That's really pretty.
| | 05:08 | I wish we had something that was that
clean and polished, but then I think, could
| | 05:11 | we actually get our work done
in an environment like that?
| | 05:13 | I'm not sure we could.
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| Projects: Nike Air| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:07 | Michael Lebowitz: One project I thought it would
be good to highlight is something we did for Nike.
| | 00:13 | They came to us with a really, one of
the most fabulous briefs we have ever
| | 00:17 | gotten, because it was so simple.
| | 00:21 | They said "We have done lineage. We
have done the technology of the shoe.
| | 00:28 | "We need to do the experience," and I
think the way they said it is "The user can't
| | 00:35 | "stick their foot through the
monitor and try their shoe on.
| | 00:37 | "We want the next best thing." And that was it.
| | 00:39 | Ultimately, the concept is
like a visual synthesizer.
| | 00:44 | You choose either running or basketball
and as you progress from the real world
| | 00:51 | into the More world you are given a
value - or a call to action I
| | 00:57 | should say, experience
More world, use your keyboard.
| | 01:02 | We really labored over this copy because
we wanted - it's not a natural behavior,
| | 01:08 | that we were asking people to participate in.
| | 01:10 | So, we needed to explain it because
people wouldn't sort of adapt to it
| | 01:13 | naturally on their own, but we didn't
want to be so explicit that we took away
| | 01:17 | from that 'Aha!' moment, the moment of discovery.
| | 01:20 | So, it was just use your keyboard, no
sense of what was going to happen when
| | 01:23 | you did, and as you hit buttons on your
keyboard, you are activating different
| | 01:28 | visual effects that interact with the runner
or basketball player that you have selected.
| | 01:34 | So, that's the overall concept.
| | 01:35 | And people are really creating their
own vision of what More world really is.
| | 01:43 | The concept required a tremendous
diversity of work and of assets, because we
| | 01:48 | had two different iterations for
running and basketball that required 30
| | 01:57 | different effects each, 26 for the
little letter keys on the keyboard, and then
| | 02:01 | the arrow keys as well.
| | 02:03 | And we really wanted them
to be sort of wildly diverse.
| | 02:08 | We have flexed every
muscle we have on that project.
| | 02:10 | We had things that were done hand
illustrated. There was code-based visuals
| | 02:15 | interacting with video that we
had shot against green screen.
| | 02:19 | There was pre-rendered 3D.
| | 02:21 | There were pillows that pop up under
the feet of the runner and then we did a
| | 02:25 | lot of video effects on the runner and
baller using the arrow keys, that you
| | 02:30 | could actually affect their motion, as well.
| | 02:32 | And all of this needed to tie into
that overall sense of music, because the whole
| | 02:36 | thing is that it's supposed
to be a visual symphony.
| | 02:39 | The core team we had two developers
and a several designers just working on
| | 02:45 | making sure that this thing had a
visual consistency, that we were sort of
| | 02:48 | covering the full design of the piece.
| | 02:52 | The production team was handling
just generating the human assets of our
| | 02:55 | characters, and then the individuals
teams were - sometimes individuals, in the
| | 03:01 | case of, we had a 3D artist who was
doing an elephant inside of a bubble that
| | 03:06 | you might blow with a kids toy.
| | 03:09 | And he just worked completely on his
own, just getting this very beautiful,
| | 03:13 | individual piece there.
| | 03:14 | In other cases, developers and
designers were working together to
| | 03:17 | accomplish something.
| | 03:18 | So, a designer might have come up with a
sort of hand illustrated thing and want
| | 03:22 | to expose that to motion in
some way, programmatically.
| | 03:27 | So, they would team up with a
developer to find how to do that.
| | 03:30 | And we also had to start thinking very
carefully about how this system was going
| | 03:35 | to function practically for the end user.
| | 03:40 | It's a very video-intensive project
and so we needed to think about what the
| | 03:47 | experience was really going to be
like when it wasn't all loaded instantly,
| | 03:50 | which is the case that we are still
living in, even in a mostly broadband world.
| | 03:55 | One of the ways that we bridged that is
we built a tool internally that allowed
| | 04:02 | designers control over some of the
visual effects that are only accessible
| | 04:08 | through code inside of Flash.
| | 04:10 | So, usually these are the things that
only programmers would have access to, and
| | 04:13 | one of our developers created a system
of just, it was very rudimentary, pretty
| | 04:17 | ugly tool, but it allowed them to use
sliders and dials and things like that to
| | 04:22 | create effects on top of video,
| | 04:24 | effects that were just generated with
code so they were all instantly available
| | 04:27 | because they were basically bandwidth free.
| | 04:30 | And then as all these different pieces
started to come together, we started to
| | 04:34 | achieve the goal of the function of
the piece, which was not just to create a
| | 04:40 | one-off experience, but also, as
people are hitting their keystrokes, playing
| | 04:44 | with this toy that we have built, this
experience, we are actually recording
| | 04:49 | each keystroke along the way.
| | 04:51 | We actually can then show you what you
have created or allow you to send that
| | 04:56 | on to somebody else.
| | 04:57 | So, your actual creation of More Air,
of more world, is then available as sort of
| | 05:04 | an artifact that can be sent out into
the world, which is a really sort of
| | 05:08 | satisfying final option to this
experience that you have done. And the project
| | 05:13 | was really, it was
tremendously successful for the client.
| | 05:18 | Nike Air has been around for 20 years,
but that this is a completely new
| | 05:23 | technology, a new experience, and a new
product and they really just wanted the
| | 05:30 | awareness of that in a very, very
special way and in an innovative way, in a way
| | 05:35 | that differentiated it from
anything else out there in the marketplace.
| | 05:39 | And I think we really accomplished that.
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| Projects: Hungry Suitcase| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Michael Lebowitz: Another project that we had a huge
amount of fun on was one that I actually
| | 00:14 | wasn't so excited to do, initially.
| | 00:18 | Arnold Worldwide came to us, wanting us
to be the digital partner on a project
| | 00:25 | for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and
I thought, cruising? I am not sure if
| | 00:33 | that's really right for us.
| | 00:34 | We tend to do stuff that's very sort of
popular culture-oriented and influenced.
| | 00:40 | And some of the team came to me and said,
"We think this has tons of potential.
| | 00:45 | "And we've got some ideas and we
are really excited about them."
| | 00:49 | And I said, "Alright.
| | 00:50 | "Go ahead, run with it.
| | 00:52 | "If you're excited, that's going to
lead to better work, than anything else."
| | 00:55 | The project, in a nutshell, is that you
arrive in a bedroom that looks like any
| | 01:01 | standard bedroom rendered in 3D, but
there is a suitcase on the bed, and the
| | 01:06 | suitcase starts talking to you in a
sort of unidentifiable foreign accent,
| | 01:12 | objects pop up in the room around you,
| | 01:14 | some of them that make a lot of
sense in that room, others not so much.
| | 01:18 | The idea is that you drag objects
that appeal to you, because the overall
| | 01:22 | program is called to the Vacation fun-a-lyzer.
| | 01:26 | You can actually travel from room to
room, so you can go from bedroom into
| | 01:31 | living room, living room into
kitchen, kitchen into bathroom.
| | 01:33 | There are objects of all
different kinds in each one.
| | 01:35 | Once you've added, I think, five of
possible 10 objects, he will then deliver you
| | 01:43 | your customized vacation personality.
| | 01:46 | And he delivers that in song as any
suitcase would, so we created five musical
| | 01:53 | numbers that correspond to the five
potential destinations that you could arrive
| | 02:01 | at, via Royal Caribbean.
| | 02:03 | We got to do absolutely everything. We
created this character. We explored all
| | 02:08 | different kinds of suitcases that he might be.
| | 02:11 | We've got to cast the voice talent.
| | 02:14 | We got to record, we did the voice
recording here in our studio, Royal Caribbean
| | 02:19 | remains a fantastic client.
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| Projects: HBO Voyeur| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:07 | Michael Lebowitz: Another project that we did in the
past year was a partnership with a HBO and
| | 00:16 | their general agency, BBDO Worldwide.
| | 00:19 | The concept that BBDO came up with was
for where you had stripped away the wall
| | 00:26 | of New York apartment building.
| | 00:28 | So, you could see the eight apartments
inside, and it's shot as a silent film.
| | 00:34 | There is no dialogue and you can watch
all of these individual stories that are
| | 00:40 | going on each apartment and then also
some of the intersections that happen
| | 00:43 | between the apartments themselves.
| | 00:47 | They came to us before
any of this had been shot.
| | 00:48 | That was just sort of part of the plan.
And the outdoor event, which was really
| | 00:51 | neat, was to project this onto the side
of a building on the lower-east side,
| | 00:56 | so that you really felt like you were
looking inside the building. When they
| | 00:59 | actually did it, it was
really fantastically beautiful.
| | 01:02 | We went to the shoot and
we participated with them.
| | 01:04 | They hired Jake Scott, Ridley
Scott's son, to shoot the piece and it's
| | 01:09 | stunning, really beautiful.
| | 01:11 | And we really wanted to make sure that
we were maintaining that piece of film as
| | 01:17 | the hero of what we are doing,
of our destination experience.
| | 01:21 | One of the primary ways that we did
it, technically, was rather than using
| | 01:24 | pre-rendered 3D to allow you to sort
of fly through the city of New York, we
| | 01:29 | used the papervision3D engine in Flash
that allowed us to create that sense of
| | 01:34 | motion in a much, much lower bandwidth.
| | 01:36 | We spent a lot of time working on the
user interface that allowed people to do
| | 01:40 | things like zoom in on the video, so
you could see an individual apartment or a
| | 01:46 | couple of apartments together, or you
could see the entire wall turning on,
| | 01:51 | which parts of it you could see and
which you couldn't, in such a way that that
| | 01:55 | user interface was only there
when you needed to do something,
| | 01:57 | but always faded into the background,
so that, again, that beautiful piece of
| | 02:01 | film could stand on its own as
the focal point of the piece.
| | 02:06 | They also commissioned, I think, six
composers to do different scores for this
| | 02:10 | piece and we built a system allowed
you to change the score in midstream and
| | 02:16 | always stay synched up with the films.
| | 02:17 | So, you really had some control over
this experience and while it was like
| | 02:21 | watching a film in a lot of ways
and you could experience it that way,
| | 02:25 | you also had a total freedom to
experience it however you wanted.
| | 02:28 | If you wanted to jump to the end, you
can do that. If you wanted to change the
| | 02:31 | tonality of it by changing the musical
background, you could do that as well.
| | 02:35 | We really spent a lot of time thinking
about the difference between sitting
| | 02:39 | back and watching something on your TV,
where something is linear and you just
| | 02:43 | watch, and the analogous experience in
a world that you're used to controlling.
| | 02:51 | And that is one where you can't limit
people to watch something four minutes long
| | 02:57 | that goes from here to here.
| | 02:59 | You have to let them go to any point
in it, and see it however they want, and
| | 03:02 | also bring it with them.
| | 03:03 | So, we have built systems that allowed
people to pull things into their iPod, to
| | 03:07 | their PSP, to have a screensaver of
the entire wall that they could watch.
| | 03:12 | So, we are really trying to find
ways of distributing this content out.
| | 03:15 | And the response has been just tremendous.
| | 03:18 | It generated more press, I think, than
any other project we have ever done and
| | 03:21 | has won, arguably, I think, the most
awards we've ever received for a single project.
| | 03:26 | So, we couldn't be happier.
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| Creative Philosophy: Controlled Chaos| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:05 | Michael Lebowitz: One thing I should mention is that
we're in this team system, we're cross
| | 00:11 | disciplinary teams and each team,
we were going to put each team at a
| | 00:16 | table and then we realized that it
would be far better to have people in an
| | 00:20 | aisle because then they could just
rotate their chairs inwards to have one-off
| | 00:25 | spot conversations because the whole idea is
that they're autonomous and self organizing.
| | 00:31 | Well, I think what differentiates Big
Spaceship is it's a tremendous focus on innovation.
| | 00:39 | We may do little things that are only
apparent to us internally, optimizing
| | 00:43 | something, squeezing a little
tiny bit more space out of something.
| | 00:48 | We talk a lot about using the analogy
of architecture or software development
| | 00:57 | more than film and video, which is
the common analogy to what we do.
| | 01:01 | And I think that we've always said
"What can we do better?" on every front, and
| | 01:06 | that allows us to not get too rigid, and
not force too much process on the work
| | 01:16 | and instead allow the process to just
scaffold the thinking that we do here.
| | 01:21 | I think, especially with what we do and
with the pressure we put on ourselves to
| | 01:26 | never repeat, to always produce
something new, even if it's in a similar space to
| | 01:32 | something we've done before, you need to
have a really, really flexible, elastic
| | 01:36 | environment that allows you to that.
| | 01:39 | That's the real reason for it
| | 01:40 | is that we need to be working
collaboratively in real time with each other as
| | 01:45 | much as we possibly can in order to
get quality out of the work and to let
| | 01:51 | inspiration really happen, because
inspiration is a momentary thing and as soon
| | 01:56 | as you've sort of codified the process of
inspiration, it's no longer expiration at all.
| | 02:01 | Its just idea-having and ideas - it's
sort of strange for me to say this, but in
| | 02:05 | a lot of ways, ideas are a dime a dozen.
| | 02:09 | There are great ideas, but they're
only great when they get implemented,
| | 02:13 | and what gets things to happen is that, is
the momentum of the excitement of the idea.
| | 02:20 | And so if you don't have a system
that allows for that and nurtures that in
| | 02:23 | some way, it's not going to really work.
| | 02:25 | So we don't make any guarantees about
the success of what we do, because working
| | 02:29 | with us or doing the kind of work that
we do in the space that we do it has some
| | 02:33 | essential risk to it.
| | 02:35 | If you want to innovate, if you want to
differentiate, you have to take risks.
| | 02:40 | I actually don't think that they are huge risks.
| | 02:43 | I mean, if you look at some of the
most successful companies in the world,
| | 02:47 | they're giant risk-takers.
| | 02:48 | You look at Apple or Google. They're not
afraid to put things out there and have
| | 02:54 | them fail, because that's how you innovate.
| | 02:58 | That's how you differentiate yourself.
| | 03:00 | So we don't make any guarantees, but we
say based on our experience and what our
| | 03:04 | gut tells us, this is going to be
very compelling for your audience.
| | 03:11 | The traditional mentality for
producing work through an agency is a
| | 03:17 | cascading approach.
| | 03:19 | Strategy or planning will
receive the brief and plan it.
| | 03:25 | They'll pass it to project management,
who will scope it and make it actionable,
| | 03:30 | who then hurl it over the fence to
design, who make it visual, who then hurl it
| | 03:34 | over the fence to the engineers at
the end, the poor sad engineers, who get
| | 03:39 | their hands on this thing and say, wow!
| | 03:41 | We would've made 900 decisions
differently if you had included us at the
| | 03:44 | beginning and that leads to a lot of mediocrity.
| | 03:47 | When you get to the actual execution
of work, what separates good from great
| | 03:54 | often is that last 10% of polish, of
attention to detail, and we have that so
| | 03:59 | fundamentally built into our culture.
| | 04:02 | Every project is different, every goal,
no matter how similar it sounds is going
| | 04:05 | to have a different story to it.
| | 04:07 | So, we have to get into that and really
figure out who are these people we're talking to?
| | 04:11 | They're not just users, they're not
consumers, they're people and we need to
| | 04:14 | speak to them in an authentic way and
then once that decision is made, it's
| | 04:19 | really about guiding the process
enough that it remains authentic and that
| | 04:24 | really is an ongoing dialogue
between our clients and us and those people
| | 04:28 | out there.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Workflow Process| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Male Speaker: At the moment, I am working in
Flex. I am always going back and forth with Flash
| | 00:10 | and Flex, and TextMate and all those programs.
| | 00:13 | We created this environment where you
can shoot flares into the sky and then I
| | 00:21 | can click on the sky and those little
particles follow your mouse and create nice
| | 00:26 | little funky-colored Northern Lights.
| | 00:33 | Michael Lebowitz: In general, almost
all of our new business, all our new business is inbound.
| | 00:38 | We don't go out and search for things.
| | 00:42 | So, a lead will come in, either through
email, from our website or over the phone.
| | 00:47 | Usually a producer will reach out and
ask the questions that need to be asked,
| | 00:52 | whether it's just basic stuff like
timing and budget and such, like, or more
| | 00:57 | nuanced questions about goals.
| | 00:58 | Once we have enough of the answers to
these questions, we run through a pretty
| | 01:02 | short checklist of qualifications for
whether it's a good project for us or not.
| | 01:10 | And those qualifications
range all different categories.
| | 01:14 | Does it provide us an opportunity to innovate?
| | 01:18 | Is it going to make you money?
| | 01:20 | And are you going to have a lot of fun doing it?
| | 01:23 | We believe very firmly that people
who find something truly interesting to
| | 01:31 | themselves, in the projects that
they're doing, are likely to do better work.
| | 01:34 | And so, that's why we go out to
everybody in the company and say, "Who is
| | 01:37 | "interested in this topic?"
| | 01:40 | That usually leads to more excitement and
enthusiasm, which leads to more and better ideas.
| | 01:45 | Jason Prohaska: Obviously, if it's a new
client, there are a lot of new things we need to
| | 01:47 | learn about each other.
| | 01:48 | So we'll go through, we being myself
and the aligned producer and the strategists,
| | 01:57 | to kind of figure out what some of
the obstacles might be with some of the
| | 01:59 | stakeholders, but we'll go through the
contracting process and figure out the
| | 02:03 | basic details of what we need and
what they are going to need in order to
| | 02:08 | allow our team to engage with
them in a really healthy way.
| | 02:11 | And then that moves through the
natural process of initial concepts.
| | 02:16 | For the Grind House project we ended up
having to go off-site and decided to go
| | 02:22 | out up to the midtown, in Manhattan,
where all the old theaters used to be and
| | 02:27 | shooting stuff, in some cases going
in some of these buildings, talking to
| | 02:31 | people that would let us in so
that we could shoot pictures.
| | 02:33 | We had some people that were talking
to friends of ours in Los Angeles that
| | 02:35 | were going to look at some of the old
Grind House theaters to get stuff for that.
| | 02:40 | That will come together very quickly
because most of the content, when we're
| | 02:43 | doing something for an entertainment
property, they won't really have any assets
| | 02:47 | to provide us at all.
| | 02:48 | So, we'll have to create all of
that stuff on our own, very quickly.
| | 02:54 | That then goes into a rapid
prototyping process where the design and the
| | 02:58 | development pieces are coming together.
| | 03:00 | But a lot of that initial discovery
process that we try and engage with every
| | 03:03 | single one of our clients helps
inform what I think is a real fundamental
| | 03:08 | principle about what we do.
| | 03:09 | We're trying something new in every
single case, for every single project we do.
| | 03:14 | It's never been done before.
| | 03:15 | That puts you into inherently unknown
territory. Something that you haven't made
| | 03:19 | before can't be measured or managed.
| | 03:21 | So we want something in two weeks, okay.
| | 03:25 | Let's talk about what your objectives are.
| | 03:28 | We'll see how that might measure
against an iterative release of something that
| | 03:32 | will get some awareness upfront about
something, so that we can then start
| | 03:37 | feeding in from multiple angles into
that initial awareness, into that initial
| | 03:41 | seed that we're planting.
| | 03:43 | Michael: The reason that we speak
really generally about this process is that the
| | 03:49 | process is kept very loose and elastic
because we do so many different kinds of projects.
| | 03:56 | We've done all of the motion graphics
for every Jumbotron in Times Square, for
| | 04:02 | New Year's, '06 to '07 for Target.
| | 04:05 | They buy every Jumbotron in Times Square.
| | 04:07 | It's a motion graphics project, but
with these with huge-huge aspect ratios to
| | 04:11 | work with. We do very, very rich
immersive web-based experiences.
| | 04:18 | So, what we have isn't so much a
process per se as sort of a framework.
| | 04:23 | And what we're describing is the
framework, because it allows us to be able to
| | 04:30 | very quickly, and with great agility,
move between these types of projects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Teams| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Michael Lebowitz: This is a team area. Currently,
the team is hibernating, but the team is called
| | 00:12 | Blood Turkey. That was the name of
it, and you can see that all the team
| | 00:16 | members made Hand
Turkeys but we used fake blood.
| | 00:21 | It was sort of like a blood brother,
blood sister ritual.
| | 00:25 | We recently reorganized the company
from being all organized by discipline
| | 00:32 | designers, developers, to
being in cross disciplinary teams.
| | 00:39 | We did that partly because we're
starting to see some moments where things were
| | 00:46 | getting lost in communication between
disciplines, and partly because of the
| | 00:54 | insight of, when we were a small company,
it was really easy to self-organize.
| | 01:00 | And so if we create multiple sort of
small units within, we can sort of, again,
| | 01:07 | give them the autonomy they need to do
things the way that's going to work best
| | 01:10 | for that particular group of people.
| | 01:12 | So we sort of defined the make-up of a
team and we put the teams together and
| | 01:20 | then we sort of said, "Go!
| | 01:22 | "You can figure everything else out from there.
| | 01:23 | "You've got the tools and the staff that
you need to do it" and so we asked them
| | 01:28 | to come up with team names just
so that we can have identifiers.
| | 01:31 | We didn't want to have team one, two and three.
| | 01:34 | So, they've just sort of have adopted these
personality traits for their teams and
| | 01:39 | sort of act accordingly.
| | 01:41 | Joshua Hirsch: We used to be
set up in this room by discipline,
| | 01:43 | so designers sat together, developers
sat together, producers sat together,
| | 01:48 | strategists sat together.
| | 01:50 | Now, we sit by teams.
| | 01:52 | Each team is made up of a couple of,
an art director, a couple of designers,
| | 01:57 | producers and developers and they
all sit together and work together.
| | 02:00 | None of the teams have specific
specialties, and they're all of even strength,
| | 02:06 | so if a client worries they are
going to get like the B-team or the D-team,
| | 02:09 | that doesn't happen.
| | 02:11 | Every team is an A-team.
| | 02:13 | I know one thing that I can say, for
sure, that a lot of agencies still do is
| | 02:17 | designers work in Photoshop and
developers work in Flash, well, for Flash projects and
| | 02:22 | that's entirely not the case here.
| | 02:24 | Our developers aren't just Flash guys.
| | 02:26 | They don't do all the breakout and animation.
| | 02:28 | It's not like they do everything in Flash.
| | 02:30 | They're really writing a lot of code and
really robust, like, high-level code, and
| | 02:36 | the designers get into the
animation, into Flash, and building files.
| | 02:41 | So there is a lot of file sharing, which
is complicated with these kinds of files.
| | 02:45 | So that's another reason that having the
kind of physical proximity of the teams
| | 02:49 | is so important, because it's kind of a
constant communication about what file needs
| | 02:53 | what and how people work with things.
| | 02:55 | Zander Brimijoin: Ideas can come from anywhere
and some of the best ideas that I've worked on have
| | 03:03 | come from developers and interns as
like little nuggets of possibilities of
| | 03:11 | things that we could do.
| | 03:13 | Tina Glengary: Basically, we
float in between all the teams.
| | 03:15 | So, the teams are made up of two
producers, two designers, two developers.
| | 03:20 | But for every project, either Ivan or myself
will be on that project from start to finish.
| | 03:25 | So, we can't actually be on a team because
there is a bunch of teams and two people but -
| | 03:31 | Ivan Askwith: We've formed our own team, all
of the floaters in the office who don't have a
| | 03:36 | team to call their own.
| | 03:37 | So our team consists of strategists
and a 3D guy and -
| | 03:41 | Tina Glengary: QA.
| | 03:42 | Ivan Askwith: QA, and a copywriter, and we like it.
| | 03:47 | We get the luxury actually of getting
work with everybody in the office on a
| | 03:49 | pretty regular basis.
| | 03:51 | Joshua: It's one
thing to talk about this process,
| | 03:53 | this kind of flattened out process, but
actually putting it into practice here
| | 03:58 | and having the team set up really kind
of formalizes that relationship amongst
| | 04:02 | the team, and the physical proximity
and knowing during the Comp phase, when
| | 04:09 | the designers who are going to have
visual explorations, the developers have
| | 04:12 | that time to work on functionality
explorations or other kind of interface
| | 04:16 | explorations which really leads to
the innovation Zander was talking
| | 04:19 | about, where you get everybody involved in the
ideas and the creation, right at the beginning.
| | 04:24 | Even though we have this more
structured system now, the kind of organic nature
| | 04:27 | of the place, I think is going
to still be underneath everything.
| | 04:30 | So, we'll figure it out when it happens.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Client Relations| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Michael Lebowitz: And the other side of the
luminescent wall we've the opportunity to write on
| | 00:11 | the wall and dry erase.
| | 00:12 | So that was supposed to be for meetings
but it's turned into just an opportunity
| | 00:16 | for lots of graffiti.
| | 00:17 | We've also used this space because it's
got such a nice long expanse for doing
| | 00:22 | deep video work where we need
somebody sort of running at us.
| | 00:25 | In fact, if you look back over here, there
is a white shirt with bloodstains all over it.
| | 00:31 | That isn't actual blood.
| | 00:32 | That's our fake blood. For the game we did
for 30 days of night, one of the two games,
| | 00:39 | we had vampires running at you and you
were a sheriff with a rifle shooting back
| | 00:44 | at them and that's what the vampire was wearing.
| | 00:48 | The funny designer in-joke, of that, is
that the vampire was the producer on the
| | 00:53 | project and the person
shooting him was the art director,
| | 00:57 | a little comment on
traditional roles in design agencies.
| | 01:04 | It's really essential that we
collaborate with our clients from the very
| | 01:11 | beginning of an engagement.
| | 01:12 | At the beginning of our discovery
period, we tend to do a pretty deep dive
| | 01:19 | meeting with our clients to try to
pull to the foreground all of the
| | 01:25 | expectations that they may have, that
they haven't been fully voiced, to try to
| | 01:30 | get a sort of an inventory of all of
the assets that we might have available to
| | 01:33 | us, all of the stakeholders that we may
not have met with, or have been made
| | 01:37 | aware of, and really get a nuanced
sense of their goals and expectations.
| | 01:44 | And then give them a sense of how we go
about having ideas and that we were just
| | 01:48 | incredibly open to anything
that might be said by anybody.
| | 01:53 | It isn't just to client collaboration,
but all collaboration here that we really
| | 01:58 | don't have any hierarchy of creativity,
of brainstorming, whatsoever.
| | 02:03 | Anybody, at any level, who has an idea,
has a voice and an audience to hear that
| | 02:09 | idea and that's really
integral to everything that we do.
| | 02:12 | And so getting as many different
perspectives, and that includes all the
| | 02:16 | different client perspectives, in the
room at the outset is absolutely essential
| | 02:21 | to the success of a project.
| | 02:23 | Jason Prohaska: The people that engage the
client directly are predominately the producers.
| | 02:28 | We've consciously chosen not to have
account managers up to this point because
| | 02:35 | they've added a layer of diffusion of
the messages that we need to - we're
| | 02:40 | really going for the most
transparency that we can possibly achieve.
| | 02:44 | It's more of kind of friendship
management, where we're trying to move through
| | 02:49 | professional walls of communications
and just get to the real nitty-gritty of
| | 02:55 | here is who we are, here is what we
like to do, what are you interested in, and
| | 02:59 | how can we best facilitate
those lines of communication.
| | 03:02 | You know, we're getting ready with
this Andromeda ARG Campaign to send some
| | 03:07 | folks over to have a debriefing with the client.
| | 03:10 | It's going to be a little bit of a wrap
party but we're also going to be talking
| | 03:15 | about the successes and some of the
knowledge management that we learned
| | 03:18 | together about, not only to inform
what we did but also how we can improve on
| | 03:22 | what we might do together next.
| | 03:25 | And that, over the course of a project,
is very much like a real relationship.
| | 03:31 | You're developing understandings that,
you know, a lot of clients come to us and
| | 03:35 | they just want the facts.
| | 03:36 | They just want to know what we do, and
that's not a core principle of how we
| | 03:40 | approach things, initially.
| | 03:41 | We really want to help the best
levels of understanding come to the very
| | 03:47 | forefront of what we're doing, so
that everything is very transparent,
| | 03:51 | everything is very clear and we
understand what we're doing together.
| | 03:53 | So that we can comment on things,
if they're good or if they're bad.
| | 03:57 | Michael: We tend to be brutally honest
and maybe that's not as much of the norm as it
| | 04:03 | should be. As much as possible, we
really try to say, you know, "Hey!
| | 04:10 | "You're trying to offer us money,
but it's not best spent with us."
| | 04:12 | People aren't used to hearing that.
Everybody is "Oh yeah! We can do that.
| | 04:16 | "We'll take it. Give us more budget."
| | 04:17 | And we don't take that approach.
| | 04:20 | We know what we're really good at and
the value we provide and we know how to
| | 04:24 | work with others, and collaborate with
other companies and other agencies and
| | 04:29 | other providers in a way that, that's
going to do the best job for the client.
| | 04:34 | And so, we try really hard to be
super clear about what it is that we're
| | 04:42 | providing and what isn't
the best thing for us to do.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Strategy| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:05 | Michael Lebowitz: And here we have actual
thinking going on in action, so these guys are reviewing
| | 00:12 | a lot of the thinking that we are doing
around the multiplayer game that we are
| | 00:18 | doing for Sony, which is - we
do a lot of multiplayer games.
| | 00:22 | We have our own proprietary multiplayer
game engine and so the underlying code
| | 00:28 | for it is already built and it's all
about determining how we can bring the
| | 00:33 | themes that we are bringing in to lay
over game in a compelling way and
| | 00:37 | adjusting that accordingly.
| | 00:39 | So it actually requires, even though
it's already built, it require just as much
| | 00:42 | time because we have just spend so
much more time talking about it, really
| | 00:45 | thinking through it every little detail,
| | 00:47 | because games are so nuanced in the
sense that they have to be balanced
| | 00:50 | really, really carefully, or
they won't be fun to play.
| | 00:54 | So there are a lot of gatherings and
walking people through user flow concepts
| | 01:00 | and things like that.
| | 01:01 | That's what going on here.
| | 01:02 | Tina Glengary: People hear strategy and they
immediately think, like, business strategy and our
| | 01:07 | actual titles are Creative
Strategist, which I think is very different.
| | 01:11 | We need to think about our client's
goals and our client's needs, our client's
| | 01:16 | business needs, but think about that
in a creative way and help tell the
| | 01:19 | stories that the other guys here in
the shop make come real, become real.
| | 01:25 | So I think a big part of the strategy
here is more about touching emotions
| | 01:30 | and reaching people than actual coming up
with business strategies and things like that.
| | 01:36 | Ivan Askwith: Yeah. I think a huge part of it is
figuring out, like Tina said, what story we are trying
| | 01:40 | to tell and then where the audience is
going to fit into that and be anything
| | 01:43 | other than just a passive audience.
| | 01:45 | We like to create stories that people
not only listen to or watch, but can
| | 01:48 | actually feel like they are a part of.
| | 01:50 | Tina: A big part of our job is just
sort of staying on top of trends and reading blogs
| | 01:54 | and playing with other people sites.
| | 01:56 | So, like, people don't really believe me
when I tell them what my job is because
| | 02:01 | a big part of it is just playing and
watching stuff on the internet and watching
| | 02:05 | YouTube or whatever.
| | 02:06 | So it's a lot of fun because then that
way we know what our clients are looking
| | 02:11 | for, what the demographic is.
| | 02:13 | We are brought in probably the very earliest.
We are usually the first contact with the client.
| | 02:20 | We will do like a new business
meeting or something like that.
| | 02:24 | Ivan: We try not to do the same thing
more than once because it gets stale for people here.
| | 02:30 | So everything we do tries to at least
build upon, or pick up, where something else left
| | 02:33 | off. And so we usually cycle through, at
the beginning of a project, what are we
| | 02:38 | trying to do here? And who we are trying
to reach? And what are 10 or 20 big ideas
| | 02:44 | we can start with? And then finesse out
later and figure out what they'd look like.
| | 02:47 | Tina: Yeah, we have a lot of fun
going through sort of the brainstorming process and
| | 02:52 | it can be difficult because I think the
strategy team is much more interested in
| | 02:56 | sort of the concepts behind things and
a lot of the other people here are like,
| | 03:00 | "What it is going to look like?
What we are going to make?"
| | 03:02 | So we sort of try to break our
brainstorming into two different parts where it's,
| | 03:07 | "What's the story we are trying to tell?
How are we trying to reach people?" And
| | 03:10 | then once we sort of solidify that, we
can come up with a little bit more of "How are
| | 03:14 | we actually going to do that?"
| | 03:16 | Ivan: The best thing about working on
strategy Big Spaceship is that it kind of becomes
| | 03:20 | an upward spiral in the brainstorms,
especially where I feel like everyone has
| | 03:24 | something incredibly
inspiring and valuable to add.
| | 03:26 | And so we all sort of keep pushing each
other upwards and one person will throw something
| | 03:30 | out and someone will build on it and
someone else will build on that.
| | 03:32 | It's just, it's one of the best
collaborative environments I have ever seen,
| | 03:36 | much less, worked in.
| | 03:37 | Tina: It's fun.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Research & Development| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Michael Lebowitz: Jamie also created, with
these guys, the special bears application.
| | 00:10 | It's a desktop application that lets
you sort of almost like a slot machine to
| | 00:16 | create your own special bear.
| | 00:18 | This was, the same way that these guys the
Cheapies Playhouse guys have their mascot,
| | 00:22 | these guys have the special bears. So
you can hit randomize and members of the
| | 00:29 | team with different bear features and
different team features all come up.
| | 00:38 | There is Jamie, and then you can add
bear eyes to him and change him to Tyson,
| | 00:44 | bear snout, and you could save it and it
actually creates a little emblem around
| | 00:48 | it for your desktop image.
| | 00:50 | So, it's the special bears desktop
image generator, with their tag line,
| | 00:54 | "It's not our fault."
| | 00:55 | Jamie: It hasn't been
my fault in twenty-something years.
| | 00:59 | I haven't been wrong.
| | 01:03 | Michael: That's debatable. That's highly debatable.
| | 01:05 | Zander Brimijoin: I don't necessarily see that
technical production and creative expression are at
| | 01:12 | odds with each other.
| | 01:14 | Joshua Hirsch: I agree.
| | 01:16 | Zander: Often, like, we will come up
ideas while exploring production techniques, whether it
| | 01:23 | be, like, physical, building things
physically and then an idea and a comp would
| | 01:28 | come out of it, or whether it's exploring
ways of coding specific things and then
| | 01:35 | we will make a design to match
what we can do, development-wise.
| | 01:40 | So I think we are really - work
really closely with production techniques.
| | 01:46 | Joshua: Yeah, I think technical
production can be a way to express yourself creatively,
| | 01:52 | just like anything else. And I think, I mean,
there are technical limitations
| | 01:56 | sometimes that can effect both, but
that's just a limitation and a huge list
| | 02:02 | of other limitations that we work
with all the time, in any medium, any
| | 02:06 | design medium, especially.
| | 02:07 | That's part of the challenge, part of the fun.
| | 02:10 | Zander: We do have some down time here
and we like to use that down time to explore some
| | 02:16 | things that might be in the back of
people's heads and the idea would be that
| | 02:22 | ultimately, these things are going to be useful
later. We might use a technique that we
| | 02:27 | develop and make something
real for a client afterwards.
| | 02:32 | I am interested in doing installation
work, so I wanted to do something small as,
| | 02:38 | like, a demo of things that we could do.
| | 02:42 | So, I wanted to take an activity that
happens at Big Spaceship all the time and
| | 02:48 | then have a Flash application react to it.
| | 02:54 | So, we took foosball --
| | 02:55 | Joshua: Which happens here all the time.
| | 02:57 | Zander: Right.
| | 02:59 | So I decided to just map that activity
and I buried light sensors in the goals
| | 03:07 | of the foosball machine, and so every
time somebody would score it would send
| | 03:14 | some data to a Flash application.
| | 03:17 | And then I made animations
that would be triggered every goal.
| | 03:22 | So you would be playing foosball and you
would see, every time you would score a goal it
| | 03:28 | would sort of react with an animation
and then also send it to a live server so
| | 03:34 | you could check the live score
whenever you wanted, from your desk,
| | 03:40 | not that you would do that, but they
were like setting ground work for a
| | 03:46 | potential project maybe involving games
that create live projections and without
| | 03:52 | an experiment, somebody might
not believe that we could do that.
| | 03:57 | Joshua: And learn valuable things too.
| | 03:58 | The first, what was the first
sensors? The first sensors were like
| | 04:01 | touch, physical sensors.
| | 04:03 | Zander: Yeah, I
first used piezo sensors.
| | 04:06 | Joshua: And then the
score was like 111 to -5, sometimes.
| | 04:09 | Zander: Right.
| | 04:10 | It thought every time the table
shook that there was a goal.
| | 04:13 | Joshua: So that's some valuable
learning we got from the experiment.
| | 04:18 | Don't use piezo, use light sensors.
| | 04:19 | Zander: Always use light sensors.
| | 04:22 | Joshua: And the Dev team, again, during
the down time I just encourage the team to just
| | 04:28 | play with things,
just like Zander said, you know,
| | 04:30 | anything in the back of your mind,
start playing around with it.
| | 04:33 | There are lot of specific things that
we need to go out and experiment with,
| | 04:37 | like different APIs for Facebook,
OpenSocial, or YouTube, or Flicker, those
| | 04:44 | things that we may not get the chance
to apply to our project right now, so we're
| | 04:48 | going to have to take time to learn it
| | 04:49 | so we are ready and so we can pitch it,
be really knowledgeable about pitching
| | 04:52 | it for certain clients or for certain uses.
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| Quality Assurance| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Mike Delosrayes: Basically, I click on a button
until either it breaks or two, I pass out from exhaustion.
| | 00:12 | Jamie Kosory: And my job
is to make him pass out.
| | 00:15 | Mike: Exactly.
| | 00:18 | Well, usually, in beginning when I start
QAing, I am pretty relaxed, because the
| | 00:23 | project, it's new to me.
| | 00:25 | So, I am acting like a user. I don't know
what's going on. I don't know what to click.
| | 00:29 | So, I will just browse around and I
will click through whatever needs to
| | 00:32 | be clicked through.
| | 00:33 | Jamie: By the time it gets to Mike's hands,
we typically feel good enough that we know
| | 00:42 | our stuff is going to break, but we
feel like we have got it in a good enough
| | 00:46 | place that we can get him
to come in and look at it.
| | 00:49 | And kind of one of the nice things
about having him here and having a QA
| | 00:56 | department here is that, and keeping
them out of the loop of a project is that
| | 01:01 | they can actually come in
and just be confused, is a bug.
| | 01:05 | So, I don't know how to get to this
section or if they don't reach a
| | 01:08 | section, we can almost kind of like
interview him afterwards, to ask him
| | 01:15 | "Did you get to this thing?
| | 01:16 | "Did you unlock that part?
| | 01:17 | "Was this thing easy to figure out?"
| | 01:20 | And if he is, like, "I don't
know what you are talking about.
| | 01:23 | "I never even saw that thing," then
we have a bug that's much bigger than
| | 01:31 | something not operating properly.
There is kind of like a little bit of, I
| | 01:35 | think, he uses the word play testing.
| | 01:37 | as an appropriate term for it.
| | 01:39 | Mike: There isn't a time where
I am actually sitting back and waiting for
| | 01:41 | developers to fix a bug.
| | 01:44 | So, while the developers are fixing
bugs and optimizing the code, I am also
| | 01:51 | QAing under all these different environments.
| | 01:54 | I have to check at least six times,
| | 01:56 | go through the sites, at least six times.
| | 01:58 | Jamie: One of the sites that we had to QA
pretty thoroughly was for Adobe Flash on.
| | 02:04 | We had to have at least a couple hundred,
maybe a thousand thumbnails that could appear
| | 02:09 | on the site at any point in time.
| | 02:12 | And so we had to some up with some
diagnostic utilities to help us determine if
| | 02:19 | we were loading them all, but then Mike
also had to kind of like painstakingly
| | 02:22 | go through and see if a thumbnail
loaded the wrong the video, or if a thumbnail
| | 02:30 | didn't load or something to that effect.
| | 02:34 | Mike: It's a lot of manual
testing. We don't do any automated
| | 02:38 | Jamie: That's what you think.
| | 02:39 | Mike: That's what I think, yeah.
| | 02:40 | Maybe the developers do,
but all my testing is manual.
| | 02:44 | Jamie: One of the challenges we have
going into QA is that everything that we have
| | 02:49 | created, it's not going to be the same deal.
| | 02:53 | It's going to be, sometimes there
are just too many details, but it's
| | 02:58 | rewarding for us when we get through
that last bug. I feel like I want to like
| | 03:06 | raise my hands and "Yes!"
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| Tools| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Michael Lebowitz: We can sort of
just quickly look into our studio.
| | 00:10 | This is the area of the spaceship that's
not necessarily the most trafficked but
| | 00:17 | one of the most important.
| | 00:18 | It's the area where we do
things that aren't digital.
| | 00:22 | We do things that are dirty, like
glue guns, ink spatters, paper crafts of
| | 00:30 | all different kinds,
| | 00:31 | anything that we need to do, plus we
have our green screen wall, so we can do
| | 00:35 | small video and photo shoots and we
do some sound work in here as well.
| | 00:40 | Zander Brimijoin: Some things that we do in
this room are paint textures for Photoshop, Brush
| | 00:48 | Libraries and so we will come in
and basically spend a couple days
| | 00:58 | making tons of textures.
| | 01:01 | And the reason why we do this is so
that we don't have to rely on downloading
| | 01:09 | other people's work and we
can create our own assets.
| | 01:11 | Jason Hart: It's created by hand.
| | 01:15 | Usually, it will look a lot more realistic
than trying to duplicate something on a machine.
| | 01:20 | It gives you a nice quality.
| | 01:21 | Phil Sierzega: It's just a quality you
can get when you start on the computer.
| | 01:25 | Zander: And this way, no one will recognize a
certain brush pattern that everybody has downloaded.
| | 01:33 | So, even if they look similar, it
will at least be somewhat different
| | 01:36 | from what's going on.
| | 01:37 | If we need a specific piece of
artwork, like for Corona, we had a sand
| | 01:44 | drawing application.
| | 01:48 | So we had to actually got sand in here and -
| | 01:52 | Jason: I mean there are certain things
that you just actually can't do on a computer.
| | 01:57 | Drawing in the sand is one of them.
| | 01:59 | It's really difficult to try and comp that
up in Photoshop, or do anything like that.
| | 02:05 | So, sometimes going to the
real thing is the easiest approach.
| | 02:09 | Zander: The main use for this
space is using this big green screen wall.
| | 02:17 | This way, we can shoot video, and
still shots, and key people out of it.
| | 02:24 | So, we will get actors in here, most
of the actors are - we just grab people
| | 02:28 | from their chairs and dress them up in
coats, whatnot, and call them doctors.
| | 02:35 | Michael: We make available to the staff pretty
much anything they think they can make use of in some way.
| | 02:44 | We bought a smoke machine the other
day because they wanted to create real
| | 02:50 | smoke, not particle generated smoke.
| | 02:52 | We have a lot of fake blood around the office.
| | 02:57 | We have paints and X-ACTO knives.
| | 03:02 | We also have all of the Adobe suite, CS3.
| | 03:06 | We work really closely with Adobe, so
we are on all the pre-release programs
| | 03:10 | for everything and working closely with them.
| | 03:12 | We have digital video cameras.
| | 03:15 | We have anything that
might be helpful to somebody.
| | 03:20 | We have got this really neat Wacom
tablets that have LCD's built into them and
| | 03:25 | are incredibly touch sensitive, for a
couple of our Illustrators, because they
| | 03:28 | work more naturally with a pen.
| | 03:32 | What's great about this business is
the equipment is really cheap, overall.
| | 03:36 | I mean, it's not like you need to buy a
$50,000 machine to produce the work that we do.
| | 03:44 | I mean it's not inexpensive, but I
mean we are talking about standard desktop
| | 03:48 | and laptop machines and some
software that goes with it.
| | 03:53 | It's more that people need to stay on
top of what's available to them and then
| | 03:58 | they bring to us their desires and
needs and we do our best to fulfill them as
| | 04:03 | quickly as possible.
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| Recruiting| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:06 | Male Speaker: I am a student
at the University of Cincinnati.
| | 00:09 | We have an internship program, and Big
Spaceship takes interns every quarter.
| | 00:15 | We have to go through an interview
process, just like anyone else would.
| | 00:18 | We come on and they pretty
much throw us right into projects.
| | 00:22 | Zander Brimijoin: Well, in terms of the way we
recruit people and look for job applicants, we
| | 00:29 | don't have to do a whole lot,
because we do get a lot of applicants.
| | 00:34 | But every once in a while we do -
we've started to go to certain schools to
| | 00:42 | talk about Big Spaceship
and to interview students.
| | 00:47 | Joshua Hirsch: We don't hire to meet - like,
let's say we need somebody really specific,
| | 00:51 | we're not just going to hire the
first person, or know that we need somebody.
| | 00:54 | So, if we get a batch of applicants, but
none of them really fit or have what we
| | 00:58 | are looking for, then we will just make
do until we find the right people.
| | 01:01 | At the same time, if we are not
necessarily looking for somebody specific, and
| | 01:05 | somebody comes along who has what it
takes, or has, is one of us, or has the right
| | 01:09 | talents, then we will definitely bring him on.
| | 01:12 | We are mostly just looking for those
kind of special people who fit here, who
| | 01:16 | have the talent and desire and the enthusiasm.
| | 01:21 | And it's hard, really,
really hard to find good people.
| | 01:26 | Zander: Good people that are also the
right blend of relaxed and easy to work with, in
| | 01:38 | order to kind of survive in this environment.
| | 01:40 | Joshua: I mean, the education
programs are kind of just now catching up, because
| | 01:47 | education in this field, kind of new
media, design, whatever you want to call it,
| | 01:50 | is so new and it's so far behind the industry.
| | 01:54 | So, we are making an effort to kind of
talk to schools, and talk to industry
| | 02:01 | companies, like Adobe, see how they can
influence the curriculum and change it,
| | 02:06 | and ensure that the kids are learning
the right skills and the right tools to come
| | 02:10 | into an environment like this and really thrive.
| | 02:12 | We find that a lot of young
applicants and kids in school in these kind of
| | 02:16 | programs think they have to know everything.
| | 02:19 | And they come up to us and say, "Oh!"
| | 02:21 | Like in these career days, they come up
and say, "I do motion graphics. Well, but
| | 02:25 | "I also know how to do ActionScript, I
also know how to code," like, we are going
| | 02:28 | to be looking for that. Like "Oh!
| | 02:29 | "You are just a Motion graphics guy?
| | 02:30 | "We don't want you unless you can do everything."
| | 02:31 | It's completely the opposite.
| | 02:34 | We want, we'd rather have somebody
who says, "I am really into After Effects
| | 02:38 | "and Flash animation and that's what
I love and I can do a little bit of -"
| | 02:40 | and having kind of overall
knowledge of how things are put together is
| | 02:44 | important, but you don't have to be a
programmer to do animations. If you want
| | 02:49 | to animate, do that.
| | 02:50 | And the kind of scale of the projects
we working on, we want people to have
| | 02:55 | specialties like that.
| | 02:56 | And that's better than somebody saying, "Oh!
| | 02:58 | "I do kind of little bit of everything.
Just give me something to do," because
| | 03:00 | then we are dictating where they go, rather
than them really picking what they like to do.
| | 03:05 | Sometimes, everything is a risk, but
we have managed to put together the
| | 03:11 | greatest team on earth, I think.
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| Interview with Lynda| 00:00 | (Music playing)
| | 00:07 | Lynda Weinman: So, Michael, it's so wonderful to
have you with us. Thank you so much for
| | 00:11 | agreeing to let us profile Big Spaceship.
| | 00:13 | Michael Lebowitz: Thanks for having us.
| | 00:15 | We are really excited about it.
| | 00:16 | Lynda: You must be a proud papa.
| | 00:17 | Michael: I am. Yes, in multiple ways.
| | 00:20 | A real papa and a papa to this thing,
if that's what it is.
| | 00:24 | Lynda: Exactly. Well, we were talking, kind of going
all the way back to your childhood, and
| | 00:29 | your parents, and their vocations, and I
thought that was actually kind of interesting.
| | 00:34 | Do you want to talk about that a bit?
| | 00:35 | Michael: Sure, yeah.
| | 00:36 | I thought it was interesting too,
because I had never really put it in the same
| | 00:39 | context that you spoke about it, but
I definitely come from a background of
| | 00:47 | writers, and storytellers.
| | 00:50 | My father was an English professor and a
novelist and taught fiction writing as
| | 00:57 | well as American modernist fiction.
| | 01:04 | My mom was a poet, and does
editing and manuscript development.
| | 01:09 | The throughline is really storytelling
and narrative. I translated that into
| | 01:15 | film when I went to college and I did
film there and then when this industry
| | 01:20 | started to emerge, I became very quickly
fascinated with it, and threw myself in
| | 01:25 | and I think there is a lot
of interesting overlaps there.
| | 01:27 | Lynda: Well I think there is a huge
transformation going on, because video is so
| | 01:31 | much more approachable and accessible to
so many more people, and so, in the past
| | 01:36 | really the only way to tell
stories was through writing.
| | 01:39 | And so this is the new media of
storytelling and you are right at the forefront of it.
| | 01:44 | Michael: I tell people on the team a
lot when they get frustrated with the world not
| | 01:48 | moving as quickly as they want to
move that it's the price that you pay for
| | 01:52 | getting to be out on the very
edge of something brand-new.
| | 01:55 | And you wouldn't have it any other way and
that's what I have to keep telling myself.
| | 02:00 | Sometimes I just want to move so fast,
but we're getting to, in our own small way,
| | 02:05 | help define something brand-new.
| | 02:07 | Lynda: Oh, absolutely.
| | 02:08 | That's tremendously exciting
to be a part of.
| | 02:11 | Lynda: Definitely. So, you are now a business owner.
| | 02:17 | That must be a very huge transition
from being a film student, and I'd love to
| | 02:21 | hear a little bit about that journey for you.
| | 02:24 | Michael: It's a strange
thing because I never expected to be here.
| | 02:26 | I never, think I was probably entrepreneurial
in some sense or another, but I didn't
| | 02:32 | really know it or hadn't really tapped into it.
| | 02:35 | But I think the transition from
film into the world of digital 'stuff',
| | 02:45 | the interactive world was - a lot of it
was really just the necessity of not
| | 02:53 | wanting to be a starving artist.
| | 02:56 | Film, at that time, I was the very last
class that did all the production work
| | 03:03 | in film without avid,
without anything non-linear.
| | 03:06 | So, I was chopping up 16mm reversal and
searching for little two frames that I
| | 03:11 | lost 17 hours ago in the
editing bay, falling asleep.
| | 03:15 | And I actually really enjoyed that.
| | 03:17 | I loved it being so tactile, and
also being very technical in a way.
| | 03:26 | But the reality was that in school I
paid $100 a semester to shoot all the film
| | 03:31 | I wanted, and it was this incredible
luxury and then leaving, my options were to
| | 03:37 | polish lenses for free, or hustle 98%
of the time to maybe get to do what I
| | 03:42 | really wanted to do 2% of the time.
| | 03:44 | And I didn't really like the balance, for me.
| | 03:47 | It wasn't effective and I don't
think that I had the, I didn't have the
| | 03:50 | necessary momentum behind film, specifically.
| | 03:55 | So when I started to see this digital
industry emerging and I was living on the
| | 04:03 | West Coast for a year, and my friends
were calling me and saying we are actually
| | 04:06 | making really good money now, and I was like Oh!
| | 04:08 | Well, I have been playing
with Mac since the 512 came out.
| | 04:12 | I have always been incredibly comfortable.
| | 04:15 | I played with desktop publishing
applications just for my own fun and doing my
| | 04:21 | resume and things like that, and I was,
like, I can figure this stuff out.
| | 04:24 | And I swallowed my pride, and I
moved in with my mom, and took an unpaid
| | 04:30 | internship, and learned
absolutely everything I could.
| | 04:35 | Lynda: Who did you have the internship with?
| | 04:38 | Michael: With a funny little
company in Boston called Stumpworld Systems.
| | 04:42 | The office was based in house where a
bunch of the owners of the company lived.
| | 04:48 | I would dutifully show up on time
everyday, really, really happy to be there,
| | 04:53 | and somebody would stroll down with a
cigarette and a coffee in their robe and
| | 04:56 | kind of put the coffee on top of
their monitor and get ready to type.
| | 04:59 | And I found them through a connection,
but I didn't really seek out the right
| | 05:04 | place to get the internship.
| | 05:05 | It was like okay, I can get one near
home and live for free for a little while,
| | 05:09 | but they did entertainment work, strangely.
| | 05:14 | They did a lot of sites for major bands.
| | 05:17 | They did aerosmith.com and
fish.com, and things like that.
| | 05:22 | So, I got to start playing with that,
and that's when I discovered Flash.
| | 05:27 | I was learning the real basics, old
school 2.0 and 3.0 browser, HTML, and
| | 05:36 | basic graphic optimization.
DeBabelizer was my friend back then.
| | 05:41 | Lynda: Yeah, I remember DeBabelizer.
[ | | 05:42 | Michael: Yeah,
great, great application.
| | 05:44 | Lynda: Yeah it's still around, actually.
Michael: The worst user interface I have ever seen and I loved it.
| | 05:49 | I saw, actually, it was the power
computing website, the horrible era where
| | 05:53 | Mac tried to make, to license the
OS, and power computing had a Flash intro.
| | 06:00 | It's big words, shooting at you, 'fight back for the Mac.'
Lynda: I remember that.
| | 06:04 | Michael: And I saw it, and I was, like, "That
is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Lynda: Mmhm.
| | 06:09 | Michael: "How did they do it?"
| | 06:10 | And I told everybody at work, I said, "I
am going to figure out how to do that by
| | 06:13 | "the end of the weekend."
| | 06:14 | Lynda: So awesome.
Michael: They had one license of Flash kicking around, or something.
| | 06:17 | Lynda: Right.
Michael: And by the end of the weekend I came in,
| | 06:19 | and I had done 'fight back for Mike' or
| | 06:22 | something like that.
Lynda: Right.
| | 06:23 | Michael: And they were all like, "Wow, how did you do it?"
| | 06:26 | And I just started
playing, and that was Flash 2.
| | 06:28 | I mean, that must have been the first version
after FutureSplash, and that's sort of how it all
| | 06:32 | Lynda: That's fantastic.
Michael: formed.
| | 06:34 | That's a really inspiring story.
| | 06:36 | I think a lot of our members will be
very inspired by that, because everybody
| | 06:40 | has to get up with the digital age,
and a lot of us are too old to have been
| | 06:47 | born into it, right?
[ | | 06:48 | Michael: Yeah, very much, including me.
Lynda: Yeah, you know, yeah, that's all good.
| | 06:52 | We had a good conversation the other day.
| | 06:54 | I was asked to write an article
about kind of a complex subject about how
| | 07:01 | advertising and marketing is
shifting in the marketplace due to digital.
| | 07:05 | So I wanted to just talk to, as I often
do, just sort of talk to people in the
| | 07:09 | team and just see what they thought.
| | 07:12 | I realized, at one point, we were talking about
sort of who was born digital and who wasn't?
| | 07:18 | And I realized that in the room, we
had somebody who I said -- I said to each
| | 07:23 | person, how old were you
when you first used a browser?
| | 07:26 | And it was, I was, whatever, 20-21, and
the next person in line, 17-18, and then we
| | 07:35 | get to the last person and then, "Oh! I was five."
Lynda: Yeah.
| | 07:38 | Michael: I was, like, there is a fundamental difference
Lynda: Yeah.
| | 07:39 | between that person and me.
| | 07:41 | Even though we are all co-existing
in this one environment. We are all
| | 07:43 | producing the same work.
| | 07:44 | There is a fundamental difference in
the sort of native understanding of
| | 07:50 | having that sort of that control over your information,
over your environment, over your entertainment.
| | 07:56 | Lynda: Well, this has been a recurring
conversation that I've had with a lot of the
| | 08:00 | people I have been interviewing in
this series is just, what are the timeless
| | 08:03 | principles that you learn in the
film school? And you may have a different
| | 08:08 | advantage over those who were born digital.
Michael: Mmhm.
| | 08:12 | And I think there is this necessary
merging of the two worlds that people can
| | 08:19 | get so involved with just a straight
technology and not think about the story, or
| | 08:24 | the film grammar, or some of the really
important types of principles that you
| | 08:31 | would learn in film school.
| | 08:32 | Michael: Yeah. That's exactly right.
| | 08:33 | I mean one of the things I find myself
saying over and over, year after year
| | 08:37 | with teams is is not to always think
of everything as a tween, that you don't
| | 08:43 | have to always show how something gets
from here to here to create a compelling story.
| | 08:51 | Look at editing techniques.
| | 08:52 | You look at the really early pioneers of
these things, where they're putting
| | 08:56 | disparate footage together to create a
story, and the juxtaposition of unrelated
| | 09:02 | images to create meaning.
| | 09:06 | I think that's actually something that
digital still needs to adapt to a little bit more.
| | 09:10 | We see a lot of - now we can put our
films online and that's coming from one
| | 09:16 | direction, and then from another
direction you've got the sort of motion
| | 09:19 | graphics world where everything can fly
freely wherever you want it to go, but
| | 09:22 | maybe a little less
fundamentals and storytelling.
| | 09:25 | And I think where we sit or try to sit
is that place in between where we really
| | 09:30 | want to be able to tell a story, but
be incredibly true and authentic to the
| | 09:35 | medium we are telling it in.
| | 09:37 | Lynda: You still seem so passionate and engaged.
| | 09:40 | Do you ever see yourself transitioning
out of what you're doing now, or what are
| | 09:45 | your short-term and long-term goals?
| | 09:48 | Michael: Well, I
love to come to work everyday.
| | 09:52 | The whole company is, it's not founded, as
many companies are, with a huge profit motive.
| | 09:58 | I mean, it's great to make money, and I
hope that we do and continue to do that.
| | 10:03 | But I've been at places you just don't
want to be, and I've seen the difference
| | 10:08 | in the quality of output.
| | 10:11 | If you are not sort of passionate about
what you are doing, find something that
| | 10:14 | you are passionate about doing and do it.
| | 10:16 | Lynda: Are there some things that
you haven't done that you want to do?
| | 10:19 | Michael: I am getting to do a
lot of things that I really am excited about.
| | 10:22 | I get to go out and speak to
people and that's really, really fun.
| | 10:25 | Doing something like this is
incredibly exciting for me,
| | 10:28 | although a little weird, because I
always fancied myself a behind-the-
| | 10:30 | camera-person, and it's weird
to sort of suddenly be in front.
| | 10:33 | But I got to teach a seminar for a
few years, just a couple of days in Rome
| | 10:41 | through a German Film School.
| | 10:44 | It's all taught by visiting
professionals, and they asked us to do sort of
| | 10:47 | digital marketing for films, which
is where we sort of grew up in this
| | 10:51 | business, and I loved it.
| | 10:54 | I did it for few years, and I
haven't done it in a couple, and I miss it.
| | 10:57 | I really enjoy the teaching side of it.
| | 11:01 | So I think that that's something
I maybe could transition into in the
| | 11:06 | longer-term future.
| | 11:07 | But for now, I'm really,
really happy with what we are doing.
| | 11:09 | It's still a very exciting place to be.
| | 11:10 | Lynda: It really is, and I'm so grateful
to you for sharing yourself and letting us
| | 11:15 | peak behind the scenes here, and also
sharing some of the thoughtful ideas that
| | 11:20 | you shared with us just now.
| | 11:21 | I think they are going to be very
meaningful to people, and it's just great.
| | 11:25 | We applaud your generosity, and
thank you for being part of this.
| | 11:28 | Michael Lebowtiz: It's my absolute pleasure.
| | 11:29 | Lynda: Thanks Michael.
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