Though Wahlquist has the loftiest title, power is shared equally among the three founders, and three is a handy number in case of disagreements. They also own 80 percent of the company, with 10 percent belonging to a minority partner (a sister company called St. Paul Film) and the last 10 percent held by employees.
Behind the scenes
Until early 2012, when it moved into spectacular new digs in Tribeca, B-Reel's New York headquarters was a floor-through loft in a narrow building in SoHo. It was a tight space, filled to its limit with young creative types. Growth has been so precipitate that it was B-Reel's fourth New York office since 2007, and it was so crowded when I first visited that I practically exited the elevator into someone's lap. Wahlquist didn't (and still doesn't) even have a desk.
3 Live Shop
B-Reel built this virtual customer service agent for the European cell-phone company 3. Users log in and interact face to face with representatives, who demonstrate new phones using 3-D models. The reps use mirrors, high-end cameras, and touchscreens to create an experience that looks and feels like something out of Minority Report.
He led me into a narrow conference room at the very back of the floor, where we were joined by the executive producer Nicole Muniz, a 28-year-old brunette whose arm tattoos revealed themselves from under her long sleeves whenever she reached for something. She was cheerful and mildly frantic and arrived carrying, in addition to her laptop and some notebooks, two cans of diet Red Bull.
You don't drink coffee? I said.
She looked at me as if I had asked a very strange question. "I drink coffee, too."
Lately, the New York office had been working a lot with Google. It started with some work on the launch of Chrome in conjunction with the agency BBH, which led to The Wilderness Downtown, which Muniz produced. Now there is generally no agency intermediary; the line from Google to B-Reel is direct.
Granted, Google is an anomaly. It is so huge and multifaceted that its various components operate almost independently, with their own teams and budgets. Mostly it has been coming to B-Reel to help raise the profile of new products—the Chrome browser, for instance, or new features in Maps or Plus. "They want the developer community to use their products to create art and awesome things," Muniz said.
She opened a laptop to show me a few examples of this work. The first, which was a kind of spiritual and technological cousin of Wilderness, was, and still is, top secret. Sorry. The second was a game you might have played by now, Cube. B-Reel engineers had been playing with the code for Google Maps.
Now, at the prompting of Google, they used Maps as the base environment for a simple and highly addictive game in which you, the player, navigate a little ball around the streets of New York using the traditional overhead map view.
The game is built as a series of levels, each one forming the side of a cube. You control the ball by tilting the cube with your cursor, and once you complete one level—say, you've mastered New York—the cube spins around to reveal a new level highlighting a different feature in a different city. For instance, in London, you roll the ball through the Underground. In San Francisco, you follow bike lanes. When you get through all the levels on the outside of the cube, you go inside and navigate your way through the Mall of America.
B-Reel gives great latitude to its engineers and designers to experiment with ideas and technologies, even if there is no client to bill the time to. This results in a steady flow of concepts that can be applied to actual projects. And, in a clever marketing move, B-Reel now posts videos on its website of "experiments."
This serves two purposes. It burnishes the company's image as a house for innovation, and it also provides a collection of dangling carrots waiting for the right client to walk by and say, "Hey, can you try that with my product?"
Entertainment and/or marketing
We are at a very interesting moment in the world of production, whether it's entertainment or marketing. The revolution in technology has put professional tools in every person's pocket, creating a realm so democratic that any one person can upturn an entire industry. And if you're running a business that competes in this realm, you're cool only as long as you're the one coming up with new ideas. It takes one smart person to do something really great, I said, and Muniz nodded.
"And we have 25 of them."
B-Reel opened its West Coast business in late 2010. The company had been working with top Swedish directors in Europe for its entire history—even producing feature films back home—and after building a reputation in the U.S. as a laboratory for digital wizardry, it only made sense for the founders to integrate a film division that could make traditional commercials while working seamlessly alongside programmers and designers on projects that required multiple elements.
It would also stand poised to produce straight-up entertainment of the kind it was already doing for advertisers. If users were willing to play a game that is really a Doritos ad, might they not also actually buy B-Reel games or download its films?
