Introducing The New Optic Sky

Today is a big day at Optic Sky! 

We're thrilled to announce some big changes in our business that’ll make you love us even more (surprisingly, it's possible!).

In response to seismic shifts in the advertising, marketing, filmmaking, and commercial production industries over the past few years, we have gradually expanded:

• The services we offer
• The tools we use
• Our partnerships 
• Our team
• Our knowledge sharing

Each expansion complements and strengthens our prior offerings and sets our clients and partners up to thrive in the new era of content creation. 

Our objective remains consistent: To embrace what has changed to better connect with what hasn’t (more on that, later). 

To formally announce these changes, we have rebranded and built a kickass new Optic Sky website. 

Read on to learn more about: 

• Our new services and how they integrate into our combined offering
• An exciting new partnership
• The expansion of our roster 
• Our new educational offerings 
• The big picture: What's changed and what hasn't (i.e., why we’re doing this)
• What all of this means for you

Service Expansion

Virtual Production

Whether you are shooting a TV commercial, music video, an episodic series, or the next Hollywood blockbuster, virtual production using in-camera visual effects (ICVFX) makes the previously impossible possible. 

Blending live action and computer graphics seamlessly, virtual production offers limitless creative possibilities, unsurpassed client control, and incredible efficiency. It’s a new and insanely improved way to create content. 

In fact, it’s quite plainly the future of content creation. And our team can bring it to you, today. 

Read more about virtual production and see some of our recent projects with our partners. 

Partnership: Synapse Virtual Production

Key to our ability to offer virtual production is our new exclusive partnership with Synapse Virtual Production in Los Angeles. 

Synapse is the team behind projects ranging from major automotive, tech, and video game commercials to music videos for global superstars like Jackson Wang and Lana Del Ray (who's Synapse-produced / directed music video recently won an MTV Video Music Award!).

This partnership gives our commercial production clients access to Hollywood-level creative quality, a seasoned Hollywood team, and quite literally the most advanced production technologies available today—all in the context of the efficient and transparent advertising production workflow you have come to expect from us. 

Recent Synapse / Optic Sky collaborations can be found on the new Optic Sky website (fair warning, they may just blow your mind!).

Augmented Reality

Truth is, we were early adopters of augmented reality. So much so that our social AR projects have already garnered hundreds of thousands of views—with zero ad spend. 

Inherently shareable, memorable, and visceral, AR experiences are the difference between an average campaign, event, or exhibit, and a groundbreaking one.

Learn more about what’s possible with Augmented Reality.

Event Motion Graphics

Event motion graphics don’t just look cool; they orchestrate traffic, convey information (so you don’t have to), keep things running on time, set the vibe for the whole show—and when done well, they turn your event into a brand experience that leaves attendees saying, "That was awesome." 

Learn more about our event motion graphics work with Amazon and others. 

UI Animation for SaaS Products 

SaaS products can be quite complex. Selling them requires conveying what the product is and does, how it’s different/better, and why it’s relevant to the target audience. But explaining all of that information concisely and in an entertaining way is really hard. 

Our animation team turns complex SaaS products into simple, entertaining narratives that use your actual user interface to tell compelling stories (and often get a laugh), all while demonstrating the value of your product. It's like combining a TV commercial with a product tour… and it captures interest at the top of the funnel. 

Learn more about our animation and post-production work for Zeplin and other global SaaS companies.

Interactive Experiences

Our work as storytellers, emerging tech nerds, production… ok, nerds, and augmented reality (gonna go with “wizards” here), all add up to a natural expansion into interactive experiences. 

So, what do we mean by interactive experiences? Think projection mapping, motion sensing, game-engine-utilizing digital content that can fill a space and complement any in-person event…. Whether it’s a museum exhibit, a conference, an entertainment event, or anywhere people show up in person. 

We have the unique combination of skills and experience to make interactive experiences work. See how we helped The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis as one example.

Roster Expansion

Directors

Every commercial production requires a well-matched director to realize the brand's vision. However, it’s both limiting and risky to choose a production company based on a small and exclusive director roster. So, we have been quietly building a large, non-exclusive roster of award-winning directors from around the world. 

More than 60 carefully vetted directors are now available for you to choose from—each backed by our in-house team and transparent, time-tested process. These are people we know and trust, and are thrilled to count as members of our global director roster.

As our client, this gives you a wider range of choice, ensures the director is truly excited about your project, and broadens the range of styles and techniques we are able to offer. In this way, we can serve as a flexible and trusted partner that delivers the goods (ahem, “greats”) every time.

Creatives

Similar to our director roster, we have carefully vetted hundreds of creatives over the past few years, slowly but surely adding them to our freelance roster. 

And to be clear: this is not simply a list of people we have access to. Securing a place on our creative roster is not easy. Those who make it through are people we have worked with long enough to have confidence in. They are people we trust to represent the Optic Sky brand and uphold our reputation. Their portfolios include work for Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies across retail, technology, entertainment, food and beverage, automotive, and more. And they too expand the type, style, and quality of work we can offer to perfectly match your creative vision.

Educational Workshops and Email Series

Free Workshops

Virtual production, augmented reality, digital experiences… this is new territory. But it’s where the world is headed, and it’s where we’ve lived for a while now. To bridge the gap, we have slowly been rolling out educational workshops on these topics.

Teams from Hewlett Packard, Hershey’s, Charles Schwab, and others have already participated. Now, we are rolling them out on a wider scale. Sign up on our website to be notified of upcoming workshops. 

Emails you’ll actually look forward to

Along with our free workshop series, we are excited to offer a monthly email series that will provide a megadose of cutting-edge (occasionally crazy) creative inspiration, the most pertinent industry news, and frontline lessons—all intended to make you an advertising, social, and digital experience badass.

You can sign up for those inspiring emails at the bottom of this page.

The Big Picture: What’s Changed, and What Hasn’t 

Expectations have changed. 

Today, people consume digital content on more platforms and devices than ever before—and they want their content like their Burger King—their way. So, you've got to be everywhere they are, even if they're out catching Pokemon.

That means creating content in a variety of formats across multiple platforms and offering it in a way that is easy to consume and share. 

It also means augmenting real life with content and jaw-dropping experiences in the places people would like to have them but do not yet expect them—at events, exhibits, retail stores, and throughout their day-to-day lives. That is where the gaps and the opportunities lie — in meeting and exceeding expectations.

The way we define “production” has changed. 

Given the demands of modern-day campaigns, today’s brands and agencies need a partner to create content in a single shoot that can be repurposed across all marketing channels, including experiential channels like in-person events and augmented reality. 

For example, 3D assets created in Unreal Engine for a virtual production can be repurposed across your website, various social media channels, can serve as the foundation of a projection mapping experience, can be animated into event motion graphics, and can be transformed into an augmented reality filter. 

In our eyes, these all fall under the umbrella of “production” and what a modern-day production company should be able to offer. 

So, we have grown to serve those needs—expanding our team and roster and finding new ways to integrate projects cross-functionally. This allows us to offer a more holistic approach to our clients' problems and to create content that can support the entirety of their marketing and advertising campaigns.

The ways we create content and experiences have changed.

With advances in virtual production, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and all manner of software and hardware, content creation tools offer more efficiency and power than ever before—if you know how to use them effectively. 

That’s why we believe in the importance of road testing the latest tech, forging new workflows, and openly sharing our knowledge. It’s all about helping our clients and partners keep up with the pace of change and fill their campaigns with consistently astonishing content.

What hasn’t changed: Human nature. 

It’s why Shakespeare and the lessons of ancient philosophers still resonate today. 

Audiences have never been more informed or harder to please… but they are still chasing that feeling… a good laugh, a good cry, a source of inspiration, a sense of awe… 

That’s why we believe our job is to entertain and to impact… to create content and experiences that seize attention, shake folks out of their comfort zones, and move them in new and profound ways. 

It’s what the people want… it’s what they’ve always wanted… and it’s the only way to get real business results.

Thankfully, we have more ways than ever before to deliver it.

So what does all of this mean for you? 

Today’s advertisers, marketers, producers, and event/exhibit planners have more options than ever before, but less time to make decisions and to deep dive into new technologies. And they certainly don’t have time or budget to choose the wrong partner. 

By packing as much knowledge and value as possible into our new email series and free workshops, we aim to make it easy for you to get ahead of the curve, and stay there.

And, by expanding our services and team beyond the boundaries of a traditional production company, we aim to maintain our creative and technological edge—and yours—and to become even more of an indispensable partner to you… the kind that can make a real impact on your business and, together, maybe even the world.

This is the path to building long-lasting, trusted partnerships with creative integrity.

This is modern creative execution and the (r)evolution of production. 

This is the new Optic Sky.