‘We’re Being Ballsy Enough to Take a Swing and Hope It Pays Off’: Supergiant’s Founders Speak to LBB
Supergiant, a new and immersive experience, content and entertainment studio based in Sydney, London, and Singapore launched with a bang this morning.
Announcing themselves into the market with no holding back, the team has already produced work for the iconic music festival, Glastonbury.
The founders, Heath Campanaro, Will Alexander, Jamie Watson, and Simon Connel have combined their skills in design, VFX, entertainment, lighting, technology and music to deliver unique and extremely cool immersive experiences to audiences all around the globe.
LBB’s Toby Hemming caught up with Heath and Will before their launch to discuss what it means to create work worthy of the biggest and brightest stars, better known as Supergiants.
LBB> Congratulations on the launch! Tell me a little about the thinking behind SuperGiant, what you are trying to achieve and what makes you unique.
Heath> Thanks, Toby—we're pretty pumped. Supergiant is really about us conceiving and delivering the kind of work and projects that people really love. These are experiences they choose to do in their free time with the people they love, things they save for, travel to go to, and remember forever.
Immersive, live entertainment experiences that bring design, music, lighting, tech and content together in new, huge, beautiful and unexpected ways.
LBB> And why Supergiant?
Heath> Supergiants are the biggest and brightest stars in existence - so our name is our aspiration for the work we want to create - electric, bright, beautiful, massive and exciting.
LBB> Heath and Simon's backgrounds are very much skewed towards large experiences and events from their time at Imagination, where you and Jamie and your team at Heckler have an incredible legacy in VX, Post Production and Sound. What does combining the two bring to the market that is different?
Will> It's a dynamite combination of experience and capability – we both bring such different but complementary skills and networks to the table. We've partnered on projects with Heath for over 15 years, and one day, just a couple of months back, the partnership became so obvious that we wondered what took us so long to see it!
Heath and Simon know how to come up with these epic, iconic live experience concepts and s and moments – stuff that involves build and infrastructure, and OHS and people planning and construction permits and all those realities of mega-events that aren't in our wheelhouse at all. But then, the Heckler Group brings this high-end artistry,elegance, and finesse to how we approach vision and sound, which is rarely seen in large-format execution – particularly in APAC. We looked around and didn't see anyone else doing it locally, yet it comes so naturally to us, and we felt that the market would respond... so we jumped at it.
Heckler brings artists and directors from studios like Lucas Film and Industrial Light and Magic to this extended team, and Heath and Si bring this extraordinary live event capability and a network of partners - and combined that gives Supergiant the ability to conceive anything, at any scale and know we have the depth of artistry along with the tech and event production prowess to deliver end-to-end.
LBB> Event, experiential, or however we want to describe it, has undergone some massive changes, particularly post-COVID. What does this new landscape look like, and what are you offering that we should be particularly excited about?
Heath> What I love about the world of events post-covid-19 is the explosion of unadulterated, selfish hedonism. People are choosing to invest their time and money in things that excite them and make them feel something. You see that in the rising popularity of immersive experiences, the rebound and domination of high-production EDM gigs and festivals, and the increasing integration of tech and content into activations and performances everywhere, from theatre to rock and roll.
This is the stuff that people are craving and raving about. It's everything I've always loved and been passionate about, and everything our team and partners know exactly how to, or in many cases, are already delivering. At Supergiant we're just creating a beautiful incubator to bring all that talent and capability together.
LBB> Is this going to be primarily a brand-focused play? Who else might benefit from the Supergiant approach?
Heath> We hope that courageous brands will be inspired enough by our work to ask us to create things for them, but we're not setting out to be a traditional agency relying on briefs.
Most of the work we're looking at right now is completely concocted by us. We've come up with an idea, and found incredible artists and tech and lighting partners who are prepared to take a risk and do something new, then we'll commission a project, promote it and bring it to the world. We trust enough in our creative instinct that we know what the public will love and in our ability to deliver a quality experience at a massive scale - and we're being ballsy enough to take a swing and hope it pays off. I say that with my fingers crossed, of course.
So the people we hope will most benefit from Supergiant are the public. People who love art and design and music and experiences that surprise, maybe shock – but definitely
create a memory burn.
We want to create those kinds of installations, exhibitions, moments and experiences for festivals, major events, cities, bands and DJs – and, of course, one day for brands, too, when they see what we're capable of.
LBB> You’ve already hit the ground running with the incredible work at Glastonbury. What's next for Supergiant? Anything exciting you can tell us about?
Will> We were already pretty excited about collaborating with Stanley Donwood on all of the design and content packages for the main stages at Glastonbury. Still, then we took a call from our very talented friends Astral Projekt to create content for the new Dragonfly stage for Arcadia Spectacular. It was at that point we knew this was the moment to launch Supergiant, and we worked around the clock to give them some incredible art to accompany the Opening Ceremony with Fatboy Slim and Barry McGuire, an Aboriginal Songman from the Balladong, Wadjuk Noongar nation in Perth.
All that happened while we were still getting the business incorporated – but there's more in the pipeline already. Hopefully, there will be something in the snow in Japan this winter, and we'll be exploring immersive rave concepts with massive electronic bands. We're enjoying seeing how this new collaboration and fusion of VFX, audio design, physical event and experiential tech and design plays out as we experiment with teams, talent and tools... I can't believe how instantaneous the chemistry has been, and I can't wait to see the next Supergiant project land.
