Creative investment with Wilson Brown
Before Covid19 relegated us all to our homes, I chatted with Wilson Brown, composer, entrepreneur and founding partner of Antfood Music & Sound Design to talk shop and the importance of investing in creativity.
Q&A with Wilson Brown
Read time: 15min
Mack Garrison:
Hey! What's up, Wilson?
Wilson Brown:
Hi! Great. How are you guys doing in Raleigh?
Mack Garrison:
Dude, crazy times. We're going fully remote next week, so today is going to be our last day in the office for a while. I don't know if you guys feel the same way, but we're starting to feel the ripple effects; projects that were supposed to go live are now getting delayed and a lot of event stuff is being pushed back. Crazy times. Are y’all running into the same thing?
Wilson Brown:
Yeah, definitely, it's a weird time.
We've made a contingency plan on how to work, but the weirdest thing about it all is that it feels like we're planning for the apocalypse, but also there are all of these jobs and bids coming in. There are a handful of things that get postponed or canceled, but then there are other things that people want to just power through.
Mack Garrison:
How long has Antfood been around now?
Wilson Brown:
12 years. 13 years, I think.
Mack Garrison:
Wow, okay. Have you guys ever run into any situation where, I mean, I know this is so unprecedented, but has there ever been any sort of turmoil that you guys have run into during that time? Anything that’s made you restructure the company or approach?
Wilson Brown:
No, no. But I've been thinking a lot about that, and maybe the way that our economy and business is structured is going to shift after this. We used to be a country that was based on midsize businesses, and now we really live in this world where you’re either a giant or small scrappy startup that’s trying to get their way up to that big company.
Mack Garrison:
Right.
Wilson Brown:
Maybe that's a little theoretical, but to bring it back to what we do, we are a larger music and sound company in our niche field, but we're still a small company. I don't know if it's necessarily gotten harder to survive in that climate, but it's become rarer. As such, I think we need to be a bit more creative. I don't know your financials or the details of your guys' business, but I imagine it's somewhat similar that we have this sales cycle that's really short. You mentioned six weeks. I'd say that's about ours.
We've built some financial tools so we can start to have a really, really big estimate of what the next three months would look like. That's what I've just opened up now, and it looks like even without this COVID-19, it looks incredibly rocky and bumpy. But it sort of always looks like that. We don't know exactly what the next thing that will come up will be or the next 20 or 30 things that will come up that are going to help us hit our overhead three months out, but we generally have faith that they will come. We take proactive measures to try to ensure that they happen. And we built these tools to measure it. I'm getting into boring financial calculations of a creative studio.
Mack Garrison:
Haha not at all, I’m interested.
Wilson (top left) with some of Antfood's team.
Wilson Brown:
We built these tools to give us some red flags that okay, this is looking a little scary. Let's figure out if we can build up some business in this area or maybe in this area.
We opened our doors in the depths of the global financial crisis of 2007, '08, '09. We started from there. A lot of other contemporaries who started at that same time I've spoken to recently, and it is a different thing because we have a lot more staff. We have a lot more debt. We just have a cash flow and a payroll that is just very different and is a bit more delicate than when we were 25, didn't know what we were doing. We didn't make any money. We didn't have any needs or any bank loans or whatever. I guess it's on a different scale, but I'd like to believe that we can navigate with the same approach that we always have.
Mack Garrison:
Yeah, it's interesting to think about what you talked about at the beginning of Antfood and where it is now. It's like things haven't changed, but they have in a way. I think about when Cory and I started dash, and it was like, "Well, I hope this works out, but if not, it's just us. If it goes under, we'll be all right. We'll find another job somewhere."
But when you start taking on responsibility and a bigger staff with families and they're investing their careers into your career and what you shape and pull together, it's a requirement that you have a plan and are being more thoughtful, as you alluded to, on trying to identify those red flags so you are planning ahead.
Mack Garrison:
A lot of people at the Dash Bash are going to be freelancers who are thinking about starting their own studio or even new studio owners themselves, and since we’ve been talking business, what advice would you give on how to plan ahead for those finances?
Wilson Brown:
I get what you're asking, but I think the more important focus is the opposite. It's to not be driven by money and finances and understand or at least make an effort to figure out what your goals and ethics and the value that you can create as creative individuals or a team or a studio. In my experience and with Antfood, I think the types of projects that we do, the amount of projects, the scale of the projects, the types of clients, has always morphed and changed with the time or the industry's need or our own personal interests as creative people and as a team.
“the most important thing about Antfood is just staying true to what we're good at, what we care about.”
I would look back and say the most important thing about Antfood and how we get through the next months and years is just staying true to what we're good at, what we care about. There's enough work and there's enough need out in the world that if you believe in yourself and can convince other people to believe in you that we'll be able to find a way. We've invested a lot and are just really passionate about what audio can be in the experiential space.
Wilson Brown:
We just redid the whole Empire State Building's tourist experience. It's 30,000 square feet of installation. We just finished the case study on it and we're definitely planning and hoping to use that as a sales tool to get more work like that. But that, as you mentioned, there's going to be a moratorium on that kind of big public work for a while. It doesn't mean that it won't ever come back and it doesn't mean that the skills and the techniques or process that we used in that is not valuable for other applications.
But what's important for me as someone who's running the studio and anyone starting out or wherever they are in their career is that vertical or that type of big spatial, experiential job isn't the crux of what we do. It's the content and the creative and the concepts behind that that hopefully we can apply to a bunch of other things. If people recognize what they can be great at and can stick to it as financial pressures and stresses and HR and payroll and bank debt and all of that stuff starts to pile up as you grow up, I think it's easier to navigate, at least for me, through that lens.
Shot of the seventy screen gallery space at the Empire State Building’s tourist experience.
Mack Garrison:
That's really good to know. We started dash because we believe in the power of creativity, so everything we do is reinvesting in the work and trying to make it the best it can be. It’s great to see your success carrying that similar mindset on the creative and trying to push the limits of what's possible. In that same light when you started the studio.... When you started Antfood... Actually, let me ask you this. How do you like to refer to Antfood? Is it a music house? Is it a studio? Is it a music shop? What would be the terminology you'd use to refer to Antfood?
Wilson Brown:
Yeah. It's a good question. I mean we've struggled with really how to exactly brand and position ourselves because I think we want to convey a very simple idea, but we do work in a bunch of different areas for different types of clients. We most often refer to ourselves as a creative audio studio, which we, to be totally transparent, we're not really in love with. I'd say every six months we undertake this exercise to figure out a better way, like a better anthem or tagline, to describe what we do because it feels somewhat broad and somewhat elusive. I think the word “audio” is less powerful or sexy than music and sound. “Studio” is a bit limited and has some type of connotation, but we certainly like studio more than music house or production facility or production company or something because it implies that we have a discipline and a guiding principle and we work as a team under one roof. We're a collective of talented people, but unlike a lot of other music companies in our space who are really producers brokering a lot of freelance talent, we have everybody under the same roof, or three roofs in New York, Amsterdam and São Paulo.
Mack Garrison:
Did you always know you wanted to start your own thing?
Wilson Brown:
Yeah. I think I had a pretty clear vision from the beginning in that at least I wanted to control my own destiny as a creative person. I definitely didn't have this idea that I would start this business from day one. In some ways it's sort of evolved into that somewhat organically and somewhat by necessity. But yeah, I always wanted to have at least my own leeway to pick and choose projects and find things that were interesting. I studied music and moved to Brazil right after I graduated and I was looking for a job either in video production, motion graphics, or music composition. I got a job helping as assistant to the assistant to the assistant on this Seu Jorge and Ana Carolina live recording record. The guy who was producing it ran a music house that made music for ads [It was called Ludwig Van at the time. Run by Apollo9 who is fantastic as composer who built a beautiful studio in São Paulo]. I met up with him and showed him my work, and he hired me. I worked there for a while. I worked in another place for a while and then a third place while I was living in Brazil. Then when I moved back to New York, I guess it was the end of 2006.
“I wanted to control my own destiny as a creative person. I always wanted to have my own leeway to pick and choose projects and find things that were interesting.”
It was just the time where laptops and audio interfaces had become ubiquitous and affordable. The story I always tell is that you could take $10,000 and set up a little home studio that you could produce somewhat professional sounding stuff. Whereas 10, 20 years before that, you needed to have two million dollars to get that same kind of fidelity and quality. That combined with the RIAA versus Napster ruling, which was in 1999, and sort of pulled the bottom out of the music industry, the recording industry, had created a confluence of events where all of the traditional old school music houses that had 20 staff composers had just recently let everybody go and began moving to more of this freelance model.
Because if you think about what we do with music and sound production, everybody needs their own room. Everybody needs their own relatively expensive equipment. It's not like motion graphics, for example, where you can line up a bunch of people on a long desk with a bunch of iMacs. To go back to the old school model and build a real studio with real gear and real people in it was a novel idea for that time. I moved to New York and my friend, Polly Hall, who I started Antfood with, she was in New York doing kind of the same thing. Then we teamed up and we realized that as two people together we could do more or better work than two people apart. We started doing that. We won this really big Nike campaign when we were just starting out, and that sort of opened our eyes that oh, we can actually do this. I wanted to build a place on our own terms, and I wouldn't say that everything is perfect. I mean we obviously do all kinds of work and we have the pressures of clients. It's not like everything is the beautiful creative projects that you guys probably see when we talk at conferences and our websites or our socials and stuff. To a large degree, I'm really grateful that we were able to be this successful and really set up the place to work on what we want to work on.
“a team of talented people is always going to be able to do more amazing things more quickly, more scalable, than an individual equally talented or even more talented person.”
Mack Garrison:
Well, it's interesting listening to what you were talking about with how the music houses were big, but then the price of the equipment and what you could pull together on your own significantly dropped and shifted the industry. Some of those houses closed. More people were doing it on their own. They had the freelance model. I think it's relatable to what motion designers and editors were dealing with. You used to have these big systems that you had to work on, but then Adobe comes around. You get a subscription service, and all of a sudden anyone can start learning this stuff. It kind of leveled out the playing field a little bit or kind of reset it, maybe. When you went back to developing this model of actually having folks in house, why do you think that was so successful after it got depleted initially? Why do you think everything pivoted to this freelance model and then all of a sudden you guys had so much success rebuilding sort of a studio atmosphere?
Wilson Brown:
Yeah. As best as I can understand it, we say a team of talented people is always going to be able to do more amazing things more quickly, more scalable than an individual equally talented or even more talented person. I think we've been interested in finding the jobs where we can really add value to a client, and that could be in terms of quality or creativity, putting in a bunch of different minds together and trying to really sculpt an idea or a concept that is larger than the proverbial singular strike of genius, though certainly that still happens. Hopefully, the way we're set up we're capable of having more of those.
But I think we're always at sort of this balance of cost versus quality or cost versus team or cost versus scale. We deal with that in a lot of ways. I mean there are a lot of little jobs. There are a lot of creative studio projects that we do that we come in and we have bigger, grander, large-scale client work. We've set up a business model where we want both of those and we use the bigger budgets to help fund some of the creative R&D work. We use the outcome of that creative and R&D work to offer better services or quality or ideas to our clients.
Style frame from David Blaine’s — Spectacle of the Real project.
Wilson Brown:
I can tell a story that's a more concrete example of what I'm talking about. We did this kind of fun, creative, popup project that was on Broadway and, I think, Prince or Broome in SoHo, Manhattan. It was a slime popup store experience.
Mack Garrison:
Sounds awesome!
Wilson Brown:
It was these two women who rented out two adjacent full street-level stores on Broadway, SoHo, and set up this thing called the Sloomoo Institute. There was a 150 foot make your own slime bar. There was a big sort of a Nickelodeon style run across the oobleck kind of galley and a bunch of other sort of installations that were all slime focused. We did some audio work with this big 10 minute, fully immersive, spatial experience. There were 12 speakers and two 40-foot-long walls with projection on either side. It was 10 minutes that had really 10 different movements. The Mill did all the visuals, but really imagine 10 different vignettes over 10 minutes mixed in 12 channel spatial sound that's our own custom system. There are no plugins or pre-built tools to do that.
Mack Garrison:
Wild!
Wilson Brown:
We were at the opening party of it and someone who I guess was a friend of one of our composers, Bennett, and he came up to Bennett and was like, "Oh my god, how long have you guys been working on this? How long did this take to do?" It was implied that he thought we had been working on it for six or eight months or something of production. Bennett was like, "I don't know, like three days."
I mean there was obviously some buildup to that, but that was one of my proudest moments of the last year is that when it came down to it, we had built this custom system to work in fully spatial sound. And we literally threw six composers and two producers on it for two and a half, three days. We made this incredible amount of quantity and depth and richness of music and sound design. Yeah, I mean, I don't know who's going to see that. I doubt it's going to travel around to other cities at this point. We'll eventually make a little case study, but those are the type of examples that I'm proud of that we built this thing that can achieve great creative and technical results in a timeframe.
“I really believe the way that we get better or at least feel better about ourselves is by embracing the unknown.”
Mack Garrison:
Well, especially so quickly too. I look back and, I don't even want to put this out in the world for people to know this, but some of my favorite projects are ones that almost move so fast where it's like you just have to make decisions on stuff and just jump in and just put a team together and lean on your process. One of our favorite pieces we’ve made was for Riot Games. We basically had three weeks to turn the whole thing around. It was a little bit out of our wheelhouse, but we jumped in and it ended up being one of the best things we’ve ever made . I don't know. Maybe there's something to be said about those projects that are last minute that seem out of your wheelhouse or seem kind of scary, just to trust your process and trust your creative and just jump in it.
Wilson Brown:
Absolutely. I love those projects. I really believe the way that we get better or at least feel better about ourselves is by embracing the unknown. We have decks and presentations that say that. I think that that's very much part of our DNA and, I think, what is important. I love hearing that story for you guys, and we're always looking for those things that we don't know exactly how to do; how do we not just learn it, but how do we master it and then apply that to the next thing. I love that and I like to believe that the people that end up here and work here for a really, really long time look for that as well. I think some of those initial decisions, they can pay off over time, but that you know that first one and maybe that second one and maybe that 10th one you're going to lose some money on until you really figure it out.
Mack Garrison:
It's just refreshing to hear that y'all have done that and that's paid off. Do you have another project like that you could share? Maybe something where you really pushed the creative?
Wilson Brown:
This piece with Foam for Maxon is a good example.
Mack Garrison:
Oh, yeah?
Wilson Brown:
Pedro, the creative director and partner in Amsterdam, and me here in New York and Yuta, who is one of my amazing composers here in New York who I hope will come down to North Carolina with us too, had this pretty clear idea from the beginning. We were given carte blanche. They wanted to show off what they can do with 3-D in that zeitgeist. We wanted to really push our idea of sound design forward, and there were a number of different techniques and aesthetics that we had been experimenting with or maybe had heard and aggregated from other sources. Our goal was look, we want to push sound design forward and think about a new way of using our tools and techniques to create this new aesthetic. I mean obviously it is specific. It's very much like a studio piece.
I remember Yuta, he's the most organized and regimented person. He's in at 10:00 on the dot every single day and he's out the door at 6:00. This is an anomaly, but there was a night we were both here at 9:30, 10:00, and we were wrapping up the mix. We'd been tweaking and just really thinking about how we're going to do it. Amsterdam is delivering. Anyway, we were going to send it to them. They were going to get it over to the client first thing in the morning. Around 9:30 to 10:00, we looked at each other and we were just like, "Well, I guess people are going to like it or they're not going to like it." It was like, "What else can we do?"
Style frame from the Maxon piece.
Wilson Brown:
Then that piece, it did really well in the sound design award show circuit and got the greatest accolades in that, but more importantly than awards, what's been really great is we have these cool jobs that are coming to us now from some of the biggest companies in the world that are referencing that piece!
We're not getting a billion Maxon related briefs in, but ultimately that's one of the best things about what we do is when we go out on a limb. We have some conviction that this is going to be interesting, and then there's some sense of recognition or appreciation that we were onto something. Because I think that minute that we sent it out the door, we were like, "Man, did we just really kill ourselves over this weird, esoteric take on sound design that no one's going to care about or see?"
Mack Garrison:
Well, it's just so great and it's rewarding and it's validating, right, when you take those risks. You're trying something new. You're trying something unexpected, and you don't know how it's going to be received. And then it's received so well, it's that extra encouragement and it's a reminder why you take those chances. How closely did you all work with Foam as far as creating that stuff jointly, how much of it are you guys coming in at the beginning versus how much are you guys coming in towards the tail end of things?
Wilson Brown:
Oh, yeah. I mean for any project like that to work out, we've got to be together from the day one. I think there's that piece. There are a couple pieces that we've done with Buck over the years like the David Blaine thing and the Good Books a long time ago that in my mind at least sort of occupy this really unique marriage of animation and motion and sound.
Style Frame from Good Books - Metamorphosis/.
I think that in all of those projects that turn out well and it feels like there is just this inherent tightness and language and communication between visuals and sound, we're always talking about concepts before there are even boards or style frames. And then we're working on a textural and aesthetic approach while the visual company's working on mocking up whatever the process is, if it's boards or vignettes or motion tests. Then there's always some back and forth and rough renders or animatic that we're filling in. I think 2-D and 3-D work a little bit differently in that phase of the process, and I'd say Foam, they shifted more to us with editorial than necessarily rendering. But we were laying out the whole basics of the structure. And we very much have an analogous process too that we're laying down the most rudimentary stuff and then we're adding objects and texture and whatever the equivalent of lighting is as we work toward a final product.
Wilson Brown:
There always has to be this push and pull that every new edit or render or stringout of visual influences the next round of audio. And then that next round of audio is sent back and that influences the next round of editorial or motion or whatever. We're just sort of iteratively doing that up until we're getting something that feels polished.
Mack Garrison:
Oh, that's fantastic and it shows on the pieces that are so connected.
Wilson Brown:
I think with Maxon, we often do a quick track for 2-D and for stop motion. I think for Maxon we actually had something that it wasn't a straight quick track, but it was actually a set of chords that I think Dalton and Bennett had done. It's like this vocoded piano thing. I think we show a little bit about it in that case study that we made, but we really had sort of like a harmonic outline pretty much from the beginning. Then that sort of provided this temporal framework that everything else, both visual and the richer, deeper audio stuff. But yeah, definitely we often will put a quick track in and even just settle on a tempo before there's any animation. It makes everything, especially little motion gestures, feel much tighter.
Mack Garrison:
Well, dude, I appreciate you taking the time. I know I only booked us for 30 minutes and we ended up talking for an hour, but it was a good conversation and I know the community is going to get a lot from this convo.
Wilson Brown:
For sure. All right, man. Stay safe!