The only way B-Reel's Venice, California, outpost could be more proximate to the ocean would be if it were an encampment of tents on Venice Beach itself. It occupies all three floors of an airy townhouse right on the town's legendary boardwalk, with a rack for surfboards just inside the door. Frank Gehry designed the building and is still the landlord.
As executive producer of B-Reel Films, Pelle Nilsson had final say on the location, and two things sold him on this place: the beach, and the fact that employees who live near the beach can walk or bike to work. This was the European in him thinking.
Variér Brain Design
This project, for the Norwegian furniture company Variér, was the first commercial use of what B-Reel calls its "mind control" technology. Software written by B-Reel translated their brainwaves into patterns that became prints on Variér's iconic balans study chair.
Nilsson was pleased on the morning of my visit because he was in the final stages of putting together an especially huge film production for a commercial that involved a starlet and a villa rented for the occasion. A monster truck would play a part.
It was a commercial of the kind you might imagine from Michael Bay, and the coolest thing about it, Nilsson said, was that this was an ad not for TV but for the Internet. An agency hired B-Reel to assign a top director to a project that would involve a famous star, stunts, and a budget in the seven figures. This made Nilsson very happy; he and B-Reel Films had been building for years to get here. "This is a breakthrough moment, I think," he said.
Wahlquist agrees. Until very recently, Web-only productions were all about "virality," which has typically meant cheap and (ideally) clever. "We'd be working with budgets that are less than the director's fee on this shoot," he says. "And now the budgets are equal, finally."
The coolest project to come out of B-Reel's new L.A. outpost so far is something called Inside, produced in conjunction with the agency Pereira & O'Dell in San Francisco for Intel and Toshiba. Basically, Nilsson explained, those clients sought to create "the first 'social film,' in which the audience becomes part of the story." (That is, viewers can become characters and not just participants, à la Hotel 626.) Treating the project like a movie, Pereira & O'Dell hired Hollywood director D.J. Caruso and actress Emmy Rossum and then worked with B-Reel to sketch together what was billed as a "social film experiment."
An audience of three million was teased, by leaks to blogs, into going to a website on a specific day last July to view a short and very realistic trailer in which Rossum plays the part of a young woman who is abducted and wakes up in a creepy basement, her only link to the outside world a Toshiba laptop left by her captor. "Her fate, and comfort, was left to users," Nilsson says. The connection to those users was through the thing being marketed: the laptop.
That's the extent of the promotion. Every day, clues were sent out in various ways—for instance, a photo shattered into hundreds of pieces that had to be reassembled—and fans experienced the story primarily through a Facebook page set up to look as if it was maintained by the kidnapped girl.
Different people played the parts of the girl's friends and family, most of them B-Reel employees who worked in shifts to keep up with users around the world who were working (often in groups formed on Facebook) to solve the clues. It took them 11 days to locate the girl.
Inside was a step beyond Hotel 626. Here, the users weren't just playing a game; they were actually playing a part in it. "The more interesting companies today are the ones that aren't trying to give you a linear path or narrative," says Carey Head, director of digital production for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (the co-creators of 626), "not allowing the user to just enter a passive experience, but breaking out the story and making you part of it, in interesting and personal ways."
The Inside project sure filled that bill. A few people took it seriously enough to call the police.
Another fan made a YouTube video, a well-made trailer that pieces together thoughts and messages from players across America. It was meant as a thank-you to the creators of Inside. Some of the speakers are so moved by the experience that they are crying.
PJ Pereira, founder and principal of the agency that enlisted B-Reel to make Inside come alive, says that 50 million people participated at least in some small part (even if they only watched the trailer), and that when he saw the thank-you video, he knew they had all made history. "Getting consumers to thank an advertiser for an ad?" he says. "That's unheard of."
Josh Dean is a regular contributor to Inc. He wrote for the December 2011/January 2012 issue about the dog-care company Chris Christensen Systems and is the author of Show Dog.
