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The Little Black Book for the Advertising Community
0 Feb. 27, 2013, 5:57 p.m. by Bigballs Films
Laura Swinton catches up with a production company with digital cojones
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> More News Email Back in 2006, sensing that the days of hundred-grand music video shoots with fleets of helicopters on standby were going the way of the gold-plated pension, a group of directors got together to do something a bit different. MySpace was cresting, launching the first wave of online popstars, like Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys. There was this thing called ‘Youtube’ which had been around for a year, and seemed kind of interesting. Meanwhile MTV was drifting further from its anarchic, promo-loving roots – devoting increasing stretches of airtime to these really, really bad not-quite-documentaries which claimed to be a slice of reality. In this crucible of possibility and uncertainty, Bigballs was formed. A couple of years later I met the boys: Luke Taylor, Gavin Rowe, Neil Gordon and Chris Kelly were operating out of a tiny two-desk office in London’s Soho. Crowded and messy, we decided to ditch the office and decamp to their ‘meeting room’ – the pub over the road. I had come to talk to them about the success of their pioneering online drama Kate Modern, which had won them awards, unprecedented column inches in the mainstream press and upwards of 1.5 million viewers a week. They were just starting to work with brands like Nokia on cross platform storytelling – already light years ahead of the humble viral. Anyway, that was then. They were interesting. A little niche perhaps, but I wished them well. Fast forward to Autumn 2012 and the next time I traipse over to visit them and the transformation renders the company almost unrecognisable. They’re bigger, yes. And ballsier, certainly. They’re also bursting at the seams with 108 employees spread across two offices in Farringdon (which has grown to three by my next visit in early 2013). There’s a spin-off sister company called We R Interactive. They’re working with YouTube to curate custom channels. In the place of experimental webisodic drama, they’re creating AppStore-topping games and Gold Lion-winning platforms. Impressive though the growth spurt has been, it hasn’t been without its challenges. A bunch of mates who like making stuff is one thing, but managing two sister companies of over 100 employees at three different locations is quite another. However, the inevitable teething issues have been ameliorated by having a very clear idea of the make-up of an ideal Bigballer. The original foursome were bonded together by a love of surfing and a ‘why not?’ outlook – and that alchemical combination of being disarmingly laidback and intensely inquisitive permeates the company. “Growing so astronomically in the space of three years comes with its difficulties. However, it's made all the easier by having and taking on people that share the same pioneering and innovating philosophy that we do," explains Executive Producer Ross Whittow-Williams, who started working with Bigballs just after I converted by Web2PDFConvert.com