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Our Business Mantra: Turn And Face The Strange

Changes Bowie

Not unlike most businesses, ours has undergone many changes over the course of the past several years. And our strategy has guided it at times and tried to keep up with those changes the rest of the time. This post was inspired by David Bowie a veritable master of change. Listen to the song while you read this post and you’ll see why I was inspired.

Take Two used to be known mostly in the Kansas City market for our post-production work. In order to keep up with a changing industry, we created Back Alley Films to do original film production and motion graphics design. We then created our Integrated Experience Lab to focus on emerging digital and multi-platform work: things like augmented reality, interactive design and experiential design. We’re now known as T2 + Back Alley Films and, while our client base still includes Kansas City based companies, it has expanded to include clients all over the world.

Change has been a great opportunity for us to reinvigorate our business, reinvigorate our staff and completely reexamine our business model. As a result, it has literally changed the way we do everything.

These days, from the very first moments of working with a new or prospective client, the people that we bring to the table is an eclectic group — and a strategically formed one. No longer do we rely on our new business development team — or our producers — to do all the work, instead, we bring the talent to the table. We combine the strategic and the creative thinkers – for a new age of strategic/creative thinking. That means our team, our creatives, our brand experts, our interactive and experiential design teams, our mobile technology team and our social media strategists are part of just about every project or idea, from its earliest inception.

The reality of our business – and any business, really – is that change IS the reality. And in this case, we’re finding that change is making us better at what what we do. It’s creative services — but it’s broader than what it used to be. I bet it’s happening everywhere. What about you? How are you changing the scope of the way you do business? Our generation will be defined by this. Let’s talk about it — and learn from each other.

Flash me; Flash me not

Flash me; Flash me not
In the blind spot of Google
I don’t want to be

– Michael Ong

Footnote: Lately, there has been much discussions about how to improve T2 and Back Alley Films’ ranking in search engine results. It seems like there’s a list of cardinal rules one should not break, if one wishes to enter the pearly gates of Google or Bing. And unlike the Ten Commandments which were engraved eternally onto a couple of stone tablets, the search engines algorithm changes constantly, making it even more difficult to be pious. Since T2 and Back Alley Films are in the production and post production business, we are a visual design and storytelling company. It only makes sense for us to go with a very visual rich and dynamic site, to showcase our commercial productions, motion graphics and experiential design works. And naturally chose to design our site in Flash.

Anyone who was geeky enough to watch the streaming keynote of Steve Jobs unveiling Apple’s much hyped iPad, probably heard the almost audible cyber-gasps when the “missing plugin icon” appeared on the NYTimes.com page — a sure sign of NO to Flash.

I dug a little deeper and found out that apparently Google and Apple engineers are both working on standardizing HTML5, which is supposedly the new and improved programming language that reduces the need for proprietary plugin-based rich internet applications. Of course, Adobe (the developer of Flash) is the biggest opponent to it. In this case, will Google’s little eight-legged freak, Googlebot, ever make an extra effort to be friendlier to Flash sites?

All the geek talk aside, T2 has a beautifully designed and dynamic site, which won us the very prestigious FWA Site-of-the -Day title (September 17, 2009), but our all-Flash site is not at all arachno-friendly. Does the importance of SEO force many sites to sacrifice the design and dynamic impact of the ones built in Flash? How do we balance between maintaining the dynamic visual impact, which is the core of our business, and achieving higher ranking?