Mill Digital
Mill Digital, a pioneering digital agency and creative innovation practice, was co-founded by me and Rodrigo Sobral in the UK, and by Bridget Sheils, Colin Pearsall, and Andrew Bell in New York. Operating within the Oscar-winning VFX shop The Mill, we spearheaded groundbreaking digital campaigns, experiences, and innovations. Our work garnered many awards, including multiple Grand Prix’, and within two years, we were nominated for Digital Agency of the Year at the 2012 BIMAs. Our ambition to expand The Mill's focus beyond TV and cinema screens became a cornerstone of both The Mill and Mill+ brands.
We created a tonne of innovative projects for brands, institutions, and to promote The Mill itself. The first project, Mill Colour, was an app I originated back in 2009 that brought professional colour grading to the iPhone pre-Instagram. It garnered 500K+ downloads and earned a spot in MacWorld's apps of the year. Notable brand projects included ‘DBA in Space’ for Redgate Software (Grand Prix winner at BIMAs 2012), ‘Advanced State of Mind’ for Audi and Creativeland Asia (Grand Prix winner at both Spike Asia 2011 and Goa Fest 2012), ‘Meerkovo’ for Compare the Market, and ‘Absolut Blank Live’ a generative art project with Saam Farahmand. We also launched innovations like ‘Mill Touch’, a unique touch screen database of The Mill’s archive using the Cinder coding language written by Andrew Bell (Cinder won the innovation Grand Prix at Cannes). We also created dumb fun stuff like ‘Mill Corgi’, a Queen’s Jubilee idea allowing people to tweet commands to virtual dogs. All of the projects were radically innovative at the time, now you can do waaaaaaay more with the technology in your pocket.
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 took us into direct competition with core Mill’s principal client base - agencies. It proved a valuable lesson… always make sure there’s a clear path to fully commercialise an idea if that’s your desire. Despite this, we left a legacy of interesting projects and had a lot of laughs along the way.