Dean Velez and Billy Reese didn't know where their company, Sprocket Creative, was headed three years ago.
Once a prime outlet for commercials, animated promotions and motion graphics for broadcast giants, the design studio faced a huge threat when their clients started closing their doors a few years back. Their biggest client, the Hub Channel, shut down completely and the client keeping their payroll going, Cartoon Network Latin America, reduced its outsourced work to reorganize.
Situated in their basement headquarters in Midtown, creative director Velez, and executive producer and founder Reese, said they had to change or perish.
"I wish I could say we were innovative for innovative sake," Velez said. "I wish I could say, ‘You know what? We want to be the cool guys. We want to go forward. We want to do this stuff.’ That is not the case at all. We were in a risky situation where competition, deadlines, budgets, everything was getting tighter and tighter and tighter and we had to make some hard decisions about who we were."
A week prior to their sit-down with Atlanta Inno, the studio had attended the HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition for health IT in Las Vegas where they launched a product for a healthcare client, Change Healthcare, they never dreamed of working on when their crisis began: 360 degrees virtual reality.
Unlike most 360 degrees virtual reality experiences on the market, Velez said their company focuses on content, imagery and design, rather than relying on the tech, to give an audience an immersive storytelling experience via virtual reality goggles, YouTube and other mobile platforms. Using audio and visual cues, their experiences prompt the user to look where they want them to at the precise moment, Velez said. Not only that, but unlike many VR experiences, Sprocket's design rarely makes a user queasy.
After musing over whether to start producing animated gifs or interactive rich media when matters became dire, the company decided to head in the direction of 360 degrees virtual reality. However, when the team started researching the market, Velez said he couldn't find one ray of hope that it would work.
"So we took a chance. We took a chance because we had to."
"So we took a chance," he said. "We took a chance because we had to. We knew that if we don’t do something, we’re dead. We’re dead in the water, we have X amount of dollars to carry us, but we had no jobs lined up."
With an on-air assignment from Cartoon Network Latin America for a Halloween campaign, Sprocket used the opportunity to test what they knew about building a 360 degrees environment. Cartoon Network called the product a success within four hours after it was live for meeting social network goals, but Reese and Velez saw success elsewhere.
"The thing that we got from this was, the actual video was a minute and 15 seconds. The average engagement time was a minute and five seconds," Velez said.
Engagement, Velez said, was something the company could sell, especially in a market flooded with competition in the VR and 360 degrees world. Though Cartoon Network scaled down the work sent to Sprocket, they did share vital research with the company that would kickstart the project that would save their business: Victoria Frankenstein.
"I have never had such resistance to actually moving forward."
What initially started as a plan for a 360 degrees Halloween card rapidly turned into an immersive, 360 degrees virtual reality ghost story about a mad scientist that would supposedly launch Sprocket onto the 360 degrees scene. Even with varying viewpoints between Reese and Velez, the company decided to pour every dollar into creating Victoria Frankenstein with the rational that they had to create a product people would remember.
"We’re not just building something in an immersive space, we’re building an original story with original content," Velez said. "I could say, I’ve been doing this 25 years, I have never had such resistance to actually moving forward. Everyone says they want to build original content, but it is so difficult and it’s difficult because you’re basing it on everything that already exists, you want to be original, it’s a nightmare."
By sheer luck, the company was able to land a booth at VR Day Atlanta in 2016 after a vendor dropped out days before the convention. After rapidly finishing Victoria Frankenstein, Sprocket debuted their creation which was met with high accolades and feedback from audience members.
Competition were dumbfounded as to how the studio had created an illustrated look for a 360 degrees program using Photoshop and After Effects.
"It gave us affirmation that we were going in the right direction," Velez said.
But even after their success at VR Day Atlanta, Sprocket heard nothing from potential clients and decided to create a commercialized strategy using Victoria Frankenstein as their model product. The experience would serve as an example of what Sprocket could do for any client on the market with their own story.
"How this works, and we built it in such a way that whatever component (clients) gave us, we could replace her with their component," Velez said. "It's going to work the same way."
Then, luck struck again for the Atlanta studio. After Turner Classic Movies requested a single 360 experience dedicated to noir film characters, Sprocket turned it into another opportunity for the company to stretch their legs in 360 degrees storytelling by creating a trans-media storyline that rolled out for two months and included seven different episodes.
With Noir Alley, they created a 360 degrees experience accessible through any mobile platform, whether it be VR goggles or YouTube, to immerse an audience in the world of noir.
"I am genuinely excited about this medium and I’m genuinely excited to see where it goes."
The success of the original content they created with Noir Alley opened the door to more jobs and clients, including 360 degrees components for Cartoon Network, CARE, Georgia-Pacific and their latest opportunity with Change Healthcare. Velez said after so much trial and error with trying to sell clients their products, he discovered being passionate was the key to finding the work they needed.
"I am genuinely excited about this medium and I’m genuinely excited to see where it goes and how far we can actually push this in story telling, which is fascinating to me," he said.
