When theater major Steve Day moved to New York City from Kansas, his goal was to become a Broadway director. As is so often the case, it didn’t quite work out that way. Instead he wound up founding a group of companies at the forefront of the exploding industry of online video advertising.
His companies – Motion Capture NYC and ideaMachine among them – have worked with Starbucks, DC Comics, Intel, Verizon, and many other leading corporations, creating award-winning animated ads for the Internet and other applications. His Whiteboard Animation Studio creates the familiar ads depicting a hand rapidly drawing an image and bringing it to life.
“We are part of a movement that as of five years ago didn’t exist, which is online video advertising,” said the 38-year-old Weehawken resident. “Five years ago you couldn’t stream a video very well, nor could you even stream it on your Blackberry. Now all these devices came out, so online video advertising is exploding. One out of two people on the internet right now is on YouTube. It’s on course to surpass Google. Everybody is on the internet and they’re all watching videos, and business is behind the curve in realizing that eyeballs are going in that direction. Viewership is growing 30 percent faster than advertising spending. That puts us in a great place.”
Recently his companies animated the Avengers characters for The Marvel Experience, a traveling theme park. They motion-captured Elmo for an Xbox game. They provided animation for ESPN’s Espy Awards.
None of this was what he planned.
The road to animation
With an undergraduate theater degree from Oklahoma Baptist University and an MFA from Baylor, Day and his wife moved east in the mid-2000s to help a Baylor acquaintance with some productions in New York.
“I came to New York for theater, but it was hard to make a living in the theater,” he said. “I was doing web design and graphics design to make a living.”
That lasted about three years. Then his father-in-law asked Day to help out by directing a series of interactive videos for a company called Vertical Learning Curve. That’s an online program that allows people to earn a master’s degree in business by participating in a series of courses they design themselves, much like a choose-your-own-adventure video game. The VLC project took Day about five years to complete.
Creating the videos involved extensive work with motion capture – the process of filming live action and turning it into animation. After the project ended, “I had a motion capture system, a really skilled crew, and we wanted to keep it going so we would just take jobs here and there,” he said. “One of the jobs we took was whiteboard animation.”
With all the pieces in place and the industry growing at an astonishing rate, he doubled-down on creating video ads, establishing sister companies for the various services they offered: whiteboard, motion capture, animation.
“The funny thing is that my experience creating a masters-in-business program prepared me very well to start a business,” he said.
At the same time, he had experience in directing for the theater. How did that translate to directing for video?
“The skill set of the director is still the same,” he said. “There are a lot of similarities between theater and animation: music and even dance or movement, character journeys, costumes, design, sound effects. To communicate the message and the story is the most important thing.”
That said, there were some key differences. One is that time moves much slower in creating animation. Also, “I was surprised to discover that these artists had never experienced a [live] audience before,” said Day. “In the theater when we would tell a joke we would immediately know if the joke was funny or not. If we did something dramatic, people would laugh or cry. In the theater you have a direct relationship with the audience. With animation you have the most indirect relationship with the audience you can imagine.”
The golden place
Day bought a home in Weehawken about four years ago, around the same time he founded his studios. “It’s a great town,” he said. “I like to say it’s the closest thing to suburban living that’s 15 minutes from midtown.”
His intertwined companies operate out of Brooklyn, with 22 employees currently. Day said his ambition is “To dominate the online video advertising market. Historically it didn’t exist and I have no doubts it is exploding right now so we really want to take advantage.”
“Other aspirations would be directing for an animated film or TV show,” he added.
What about live theater?
“Theater doesn’t pay.”
Fair enough. Recently his companies have dabbled in live action and special effects work, in addition to animation. Is that a direction he sees them going in?
“We’re getting a bit more into that but these are highly competitive arenas,” said Day. “The other thing is that in animation, believe it or not, there are still things that nobody’s ever seen before, and that’s a huge competitive advantage. So that’s why my focus is there. I realize I’m in this golden place, this golden opportunity.”
Art Schwartz may be reached at arts@hudsonreporter.com.