There has long been a structural disconnect at the heart of creative production. Ideas are developed in one place, executed in another, and refined somewhere in between, passed along a chain of specialists built for a different era of media. That model, inherited from a time when production was bound by physical processes and rigid workflows, is increasingly out of step with how ideas are conceived and realized today.
That tension sits at the center of MakeMake’s recent consolidation. Founded by Angus Wall, the newly unified studio brings together a lineage of companies including Rock Paper Scissors, a52, and Elastic under a single banner. The move reflects a broader shift away from siloed, assembly-line production toward an integrated model where strategy, storytelling, design, and execution operate in continuous dialogue. With the addition of a dedicated Story Department and leadership spanning strategy, narrative design, and brand building, MakeMake is positioning itself around a more iterative, collaborative approach to making work.
Brand Storytelling caught up with Wall to discuss the thinking behind the consolidation, what breaks down in the traditional production model, and how a more unified creative spine can change not just how work gets made, but what becomes possible to make in the first place.
What was the core reasoning behind unifying your creative companies under a single MakeMake identity?
The future.
As a company, we’ve always kept an eye on the road ahead, which has allowed us to help shape what happens. Functionally, we are finally moving out of the Victorian assembly line era and into an era of un-siloed creativity. Our new studio structure reflects that. In terms of how we make things, that means a shift from a linear workflow designed for a series of physical processes into an iterative, integrated one that moves at the speed of thought. New technologies are a catalyst for this change, but there has been a need for this kind of shift for as long as I can remember.
This also means bringing the execution of ideas into the same room as the inception of ideas. We have a formidable Story Department that works across advertising and entertainment. The Story Department is focused on strategy, world-building, and story development for brands as well as film and television. After all, great brand work is entertainment, and great entertainment creates brands. Venetia Taylor, the former Head of Strategy at Google North America, has joined MakeMake as Chief Strategy Officer. Alex McDowell, one of the greatest production designers in the world and Head of the World Building program at USC, has joined as Director of Narrative Design. And Sasha Markova, former Global Creative Director at Mother and former Brand Director at Impossible Foods and Period., is our Head of Story. Imagine what happens when you put all of this together. We’re betting that everyone benefits from working in a much tighter creative circle.
Make it up. Make it happen.
How does bringing strategy, creative, editing, VFX, design, color, and production under one roof tangibly change the creative process for your clients?
For our creative partners, this is a much simpler and more collaborative experience. With the old way, there are numerous blind handoffs during the process. Ask any producer. If an idea changes at any point, the ripple effects can be daunting. Unifying that into a coherent iterative process where all the parts are communicating is simply better for everyone.
Fortunately, we have the level of talent throughout the studio to do this with, but our ecosystem is very porous and accommodates outside talent beautifully…as it always has.
What gaps or inefficiencies in the traditional “assembly line” model pushed you to formalize this integration now?
Now IS the moment, isn’t it? The distance between having an idea and making it real has never been shorter, so why make a creative idea go through all the steps of the old paradigm? It’s completely inefficient. Conversely, while anyone can make anything with AI, we MakeMake with AI. That’s why we invented MakeMake prototypingTM. We ideate, iterate & realize in one continuous act of discovery, guided by our artists’ intelligence and our ability to make a human connection with our work. Radical experimentation and cohesive iteration would never be possible on the old assembly line model, and would never allow us to prototype to the standard that makes our work unique. Plus, working with people across disciplines is way more productive and joyous, and silos stand in the way of that.
How do you define the value of a single creative spine when working with brands that often have multiple stakeholders and measurement demands?
The way we’re working now gives a brand collaborator the ability to measure and evaluate at every stage of ideation and iteration. We start by sitting at a creative roundtable with stakeholders and walk away from the session with some tangible assets that start the process. That could be strategy, a written outline, a set of creative ideas, and original concept art. Then we prototype that work collaboratively with several rounds of ideation, iteration, and realization. A brand has the opportunity to test the work and shift direction at ANY point in this process, which is a boon to making the work better.
What challenges have you faced – organizationally, creatively, or culturally – in merging teams that historically operated independently?
What’s the saying…“Everyone wants transformation but no one wants change”?.
Change is hard for a lot of people. We retired some incredibly strong brands in order to do this… Rock Paper Scissors, a52, and Elastic being just three of them. You have to be able to let go of old thinking and old structures in order to move forward. There are lots of people who just want to stay in their lane, in continuity with the past, which is ok I suppose… but you’re never going to do something new. You’re never going to move into the unknown, which is where all the interesting stuff is creatively. I had somebody tell me that they just wanted to go back to the 90s. They were born in the 90s, by the way. It blew my mind because there is this false idea that things used to be better. That kind of bogus nostalgia and sentimentalism is completely toxic.
The people most excited about this are people who’ve come up through the old system and have become plugged into the whole creative process, and then there are people who are under 30, maybe even under 25, who are coming in, and they are asking, why would you have a system where you can only do one thing?
In ‘97, we were the first commercial editorial company to start a VFX business. Even then, I didn’t want to start a separate company. I wanted editorial and VFX to be together. But literally everyone said, you can’t do that. because nobody’s going to understand what it is. So we ended up starting a separate division called a52 to do visual effects. And then another division. And another. It became unwieldy, but it has given us the elements to do this now.
So how DO we make the leap into a new modality? We did it with the movie Zodiac, and my friend Andreas Wacker and I won the patent for digital film for creating the workflow that’s now the industry standard. Zodiac was the first studio picture that was completely file-based. And we did it so much cheaper and more efficiently than literally anything before. The apprentice on the project literally replaced the lab. It was a radical simplification of how things got done. So, change happens when somebody says, No, we’re going to actually do this differently.
The concept of “re-enchantment” is a bold creative North Star. How do you operationalize that philosophy across such diverse disciplines?
Stories are the human operating system. We live in very disenchanting times, and we desperately need stories that can lead us out of that. We all want this.
Stories can re-enchant us, reconnect us to the living world in a way that makes us feel less alone, less full of despair, and more energized and connected to all the things that really matter in life.
Re-enchantment defines WHAT we make but also HOW we make. That means combining technical innovation with the oldest thing in the world: human connection. We operationalize Re-enchantment by finding a unifying human insight and creative idea as a north star for everything we makemake. We iterate on strategy, idea, concept, and realization guided by that human spark of intent which makes a brand’s story unique and which a brand’s competitors cannot imitate.
Re-enchantment is not a naive state. It’s a choice. It’s a choice of believing in life and in the feeling of being connected to other living beings. And that’s not just being connected to other humans; it’s actually being connected to everything in the living world. Nothing really shows us how to do that better than stories. And we makemake those stories.
For other filmmakers/producers working with brands, what lessons or warnings would you share from your experience consolidating creative power under one studio?
Decide what you want to do and say it over and over again until you start hearing everyone around you saying it too.
The more you can connect everyone to the core strategy and idea of something, the more empowered they will be creatively. And the highest form of creativity is play… and who doesn’t want to play?
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