Angus Wall–a multiple Oscar and Emmy winner who also has a long and successful track record in the ad industry as a trusted partner of agencies and brands–is this fall officially launching MakeMake, a studio he’s quietly and methodically built over the past three decades. Long established in branded content and advertising, MakeMake takes on a new structure which further strengthens its ability to deliver bold, integrated storytelling across both commercial and entertainment work. The cross-disciplinary creative studio thus reflects in some respects Wall himself–a filmmaker whose career has broken down barriers and brought together entertainment and advertising.
Wall’s vision for MakeMake is one where commercial storytelling isn’t secondary to entertainment, and is crafted with the same emotional intelligence, cultural strategy, and cinematic fluency that defines the studio’s entertainment work.
“Entertainment projects are brands, and brands are entertainment projects,” said Wall who’s won two Best Film Editing Oscars (in tandem with Kirk Baxter) for director David Fincher’s The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo–in addition to being a five-time primetime Emmy Award winner, including for Outstanding Main Title Design for Game of Thrones, and Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special for Ava DuVernay’s 13th.
From network of companies to unified creative force
“The distance between having an idea and making that idea a reality is shorter than ever, so it no longer makes sense to work in the assembly line model,” said Wall. “That’s twentieth-century thinking. Truly great work always comes from deep and unconventional collaborations using the most advanced technologies. That is the spirit of MakeMake.”
MakeMake now officially brings together its award-winning companies—Rock Paper Scissors (editing), Elastic (design and animation), A52 (VFX), Primary (color), and MakeMake Entertainment (development and production)—under one banner. Clients have long worked with the collection of companies together, and this structural change makes that process more streamlined. The result is a cross-disciplinary creative studio with 200+ artists working from offices in New York and L.A., spanning advertising, entertainment, narrative technology, and experiential media with a shared philosophy of integrated storytelling.
Wall added, “We have the greatest artists in the world and a secret weapon–our story department, which incorporates strategy, world-building, and development. We make it up and make it happen.”
“Re-enchantment” as a creative philosophy
At the heart of MakeMake is a singular creative touchstone: re-enchantment. It’s the organizing principle behind how the studio thinks and works.
“With new filmmaking tools and our long experience in storytelling across both advertising and entertainment, we know we can make anything at the highest level, from an ad campaign to a title sequence to a movie or series. So we’ve asked ourselves as a company, ‘What kind of stories do we want to tell?’” Wall continued, “There seems to be a crisis of imagination right now. Many stories are about dystopia, or they’re a reaffirmation of cynicism. And they’re old. We’ve seen them many times before. We need stories that reconnect us to each other and to the living world. We need stories that inspire futures other than the apocalypse. Another way of saying that is we need stories that ‘re-enchant’ us.”
Innovation as a creative imperative
MakeMake is no stranger to innovation. The company holds the patent for the digital film workflow developed during the production of David Fincher’s Zodiac, a leap that helped usher in the era of digital cinema. That same spirit of invention continues to guide their evolution today, with projects like their recent Cosm collaboration on The Matrix and Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory.
Leadership & creative outlook
Alongside Wall, the company is led by managing director Eve Kornblum, partner Sasha Markova (former global creative director of Mother London and executive creative director of Impossible Foods), and partner Adam Pertofsky. Together, along with a team of talented EPs and managers, they’re steering MakeMake into a new era, one that prizes craft, imagination, and cultural relevance in equal measure.
While much of the industry contracts or consolidates, MakeMake is taking a different approach–sharpening its focus, deepening its capabilities, and reaffirming its belief that stories matter more than ever. Wall believes we are entering a new golden age of storytelling, with the dissolving of old paradigms signaling a more intuitive and direct way to make things.
“We’re living in a time of unprecedented technological innovation and an equally urgent need for stories that connect us,” said Wall. “MakeMake is uniquely positioned to harness both–pioneering the future while never losing sight of what makes us human.”
