Mill Digital
My Role
Co-founder with Rodrigo Sobral in the UK, and Bridget Sheils, Colin Pearsall, and Andrew Bell in New York. Mill Digital was a digital agency and creative innovation practice within Oscar-winning VFX studio The Mill. We spearheaded groundbreaking digital campaigns, experiences, and innovations. Multiple Grand Prix winners, nominated for Digital Agency of the Year at the 2012 BIMAs, and our ambition to expand The Mill's focus beyond TV and cinema screens became a cornerstone of The Mill and Mill+ brands.
Mill Colour
I created this app in 2009. It was the first to bring professional colour grading to the iPhone (pre-Instagram). 500K+ downloads, MacWorld's apps of the year. It kick-started the exploration of interactive and experiential projects across the Mill Group leading to Mill Digital.
Brand Projects
DBA in Space for Redgate Software (Grand Prix winner BIMAs 2012), Advanced State of Mind for Audi x Creativeland Asia (Grand Prix winner Spike Asia 2011, Goa Fest 2012, Campaign Media 2012), Meerkovo for Compare the Market, Absolut Blank Live, generative art with Saam Farahmand x Absolut.
Innovations
Mill Touch, a unique touchscreen database of The Mill's archive using the Cinder coding language written by Andrew Bell (Cinder won innovation Grand Prix at Cannes). We also created fun stuff like Mill Corgi, a Queen's Jubilee idea letting people tweet commands to virtual dogs.
All of these projects were radically innovative at the time. Now you can do way more with the tech in your pocket.
The Lesson
Mill Digital was a great experiment but struggled with an identity crisis. Offering digital agency services within The Mill created a conflict of interest as it put us in direct competition with The Mill's principal client base - agencies.
Valuable lesson: always make sure there's a clear path to fully commercialise an idea!
Despite this, we left a legacy of interesting projects and won a slew of awards.