Mothership's leadership team: Ed Ulbrich, Tanya Cohen and Alejandro Lopez

Visual effects house Digital Domain has launched Mothership, a new creative studio that will represent a roster of directors and develop content across a variety of platforms - from print and film to web and mobile - for ad agencies and brands.

The new venture will be led by Ed Ulbrich, Digital Domain's commercials division president and EP; executive creative director Alejandro Lopez, co-founder of Tokyo agencies Beacon Communications and (Suit)man Entertainment; and executive producer Tanya Cohen, a former literary agent with William Morris and EP at Michael Bay's production company, The Institute.

The talent roster includes directors with backgrounds in VFX, design and live action: Robert Hales, Dael Oates, David Rosenbaum, Sil Van Der Woerd, Brent Bonacorso, Pierre Michel, Matthew Santoro, Happycamper, and Nathan Love for the west coast.

Though Digital Domain is best known as a VFX company for the feature film and commercial worlds, Mothership will operate as a separate company to concept, strategize and produce campaigns. Ulbrich likens the roles of Mothership's creative and directing talent to that of a feature filmmaker.

"It's not uncommon in feature filmmaking to have hundreds and hundreds of people working on one film and rallying around the film with one common vision," he says. "The same thing can be done with advertising."

To find out more about the Mothership model, Boards spoke with Ulbrich and Lopez.

Where did the idea to start Mothership come from?

Ed Ulbrich: It's going to sound odd, but it was [in 2006] when business was booming and it was raining money and it seemed like there was no end in sight. Things were great. We were looking at very prosperous times and I was looking around and saying, ‘This biz is crowded.'

Budgets were big and schedules long and things were good. Then we started looking at something I had always found perplexing. Why is there a separate department for print in agencies? And then you have online, integrated and digital in teams as offshoots of print. There was separateness.

We were seeing the way that commercial production and ad production was being bought. Then 2008 happened. It was a worldwide economic catastrophe beyond anyone's wildest imagination. Utter devastation and what was interesting was that during that period of time we were thinking of building Mothership. It seemed that in that collapse of an old economy there would be great opportunity.

What's Mothership's offering?

EU: I straddle both ad and movie worlds. I saw how movies were being made. That's so fascinating because, in that business, directors aren't hired to shoot movies, they are hired to direct them. The notion of a director coming in for shoot days and being compensated doesn't make any sense.

TV spots aren't dying. The fact is more money is in digital and yet, the tradition of making ads is still steeped in compensation. You get niche businesses. It would seem that a shop that can in fact deliver full creative services end-to-end would have great opportunity, make money and go further. This company can bring in a vision and creative and strategic point of view across all distribution platforms - across all media.

I never thought we'd say we're in the print biz, but we are. When you're working digitally and you're resolution independent, print is an organic natural byproduct of the bigger proposition, and vice-versa... If you were to design a production services model today, it's quite likely it wouldn't look like the legacy industry we're in now. If you start to offer an end-to-end spectrum of possibilities, agencies are much more willing and aligned and interested in collaborating on the creative development.

Will Mothership have people in creative technologist roles?

We will. My friends said I should talk to Alejandro Lopez. It's like we had the same exact vision. Coming from an agency perspective and the fact that there's this disruptive technology - iPad had just come out - you have interconnected devices and you have the world of advertising focused on verticals.

He's spent time in Tokyo. If you go there, we're in the Stone Ages in North America, comparatively. A lot of things we think is ‘wow', like QR codes - been there, done that in Tokyo.

[Alejandro] what kind of projects do you see coming in and how would you see Mothership tackling them? Would an agency approach you with a set brief?

Alejandro Lopez: Let me spread it in broader in terms. I don't want to get caught up in agency and marketing companies. There is an audience for what we deliver, and I mean that all the way down to consumers.

As we look at the project, we start to look at it within the world of a transmedia property - properties that are living across a vast territory of films, e-books, games, iPhone apps, etc.

Additionally, we then look at what we call convergent marketing. What are the end navigation devices? Mobile phones? E-books? IPad? Your TV set? Your computer? So as we approach these things, we stitch it all together. What makes the birth of this company from the womb of Digital Domain amazing is they have the firepower unparalleled to anyone in the world. It's an extraordinary place to start.

How will you execute what's becoming standard? For example,  let's create an online game and an app that goes with it, then link it to geo-cached data. Will you do all that in-house?

AL: We do all the planning and we do creative on it. What's interesting is that the best and brightest people don't want to work in an agency. They're getting amazing gigs all around the world and looking for diversity. Those are the people that we need. Because technology is changing so lightning fast, the minute you get someone on, you have an 18-or 19-year-old in Rio that might be perfect. The convergence of devices is such that it's a very wide and cross-functional dynamic of the type of people that we need.

The Mothership concept is: we beam in the host of things. We beam out all these different platforms, touch points, technology, etc. Everything from a comic book to iPad experience.

What's been the response from agencies?

AL: We'll see. We have been speaking to quite a few people and people are excited. A lot of the world thinks it's refreshing. I think the interest will be from the agency side but if you look at it from the business model, they've gone through restructuring and laid off boatloads of traditional creative staff. We're hoping that we can compliment services that can be retained - not in a competitive manner, but complimentary.

www.mothership.net