Mill Digital
I co-founded Mill Digital with Rod 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 inside Oscar-winning VFX studio The Mill.
The ambition was simple: take The Mill’s creative and technical talent beyond TV and cinema screens and into the emerging world of interactive, experiential, mobile, and whatever came next.
We created groundbreaking digital campaigns, experiences, and innovations, won multiple Grand Prix, were nominated for Digital Agency of the Year at the 2012 BIMAs, and helped expand what The Mill could be.
Mill Colour
It really started with Mill Colour, an app I created in 2009.
It was the first app to bring professional colour grading to the iPhone - pre-Instagram - reaching 500K+ downloads and making Macworld’s Apps of the Year.
Its success kick-started a wider exploration of interactive and experiential work across The Mill Group, eventually 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, Spikes Asia 2011, GoaFest 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.
We also made fun stuff like Mill Corgi, a Queen’s Jubilee idea that let people tweet commands to virtual dogs.
All of this felt radically innovative at the time.
Now you can do waaaay more with the tech in your pocket.
The Lesson
Mill Digital was a great experiment, but it also had an identity problem.
Offering digital agency services inside The Mill put us in direct competition with The Mill’s principal client base- agencies - which made the model difficult to fully commercialise.
Valuable lesson: always make sure there’s a clear path to commercialising an idea, if that is the idea.
Despite that, we made a lot of fun, genuinely pioneering work, won a slew of tasty awards, and helped push The Mill into a wider creative world.