When announcing a company (or revamping your website), many suggest beginning with a “Hello world!” post. For it to be effective, it needs to communicate succinctly and clearly who is in the company and what the company does. It has to be generally welcoming but also specific as it needs to speak to many different types of people. This outward facing messaging is challenging because of the heavy lifting it has to do to deliver to an audience. This is where many companies get stuck.
Sure. We (the co-founders — more on us later) get it. But instead of a one-way (probably AI generated) post telling an arms-length audience something, we are choosing for ours to be in conversation with you. We are thinking of this first post like a reunion. We will be reuniting with and meeting you — creators, investors, creative partners, technologists, and potential fans of our projects.
And as with any reunion, when you get to the door you get handed your name tag:
There’s a story behind every name.
We have been known for many things. Being intentional is one of them, so we knew we couldn’t whiff on the name of our company.
We wanted the name to encompass, embrace, feel, imply, poke at our experiences and philosophies:
- Ambition.
- Excitement.
- Out of the box thinking which extends to creative, business, projects and products, technology.
- Recognizing that success and sometimes failure comes with taking a leap.
- Fearless and strategic, bold and pragmatic.
- Go hard but risk manage where you can.
- Accepting of advice and help
- Spirited and yet also grounded.
- Knowing that WE have to perform.
We needed the name to be foundational to our mission and drive:
- Creative is a business and we want creators and their support networks to succeed.
- We’re hardcore across everything we do for and with creative, business, technology, audience and community.
- When we partner with creators, nothing we do is just advice. Everything is very tangible and moves them, their stories & storyworlds forward.
- We know that having the right business structure around the creative can be transformational. And in the right configurations it can protect the longevity and viability of creative, and ensure that the products birthed from stories and storyworlds reach their audiences and fan communities.
- When we consult, even our consultancy moves clients forward.
Oh and not to mention that the name had to be legally cleared, have available the URL and social media handles, short enough for iconography but long enough to stand out, and avoid vagueness so that SEO is possible.
After many white board sessions we plotted the interconnection of where we sit between philosophy & mission and creative & business (and the eventual needs of marketing LOL).
But we didn’t want to sit — we had already done that at our respective Studio gigs. We wanted to move. So down the thesaurus.com blackhole of synonyms for “move”. Then beautiful-minding ourselves through science which ultimately landed us in the nexus of physics and kinetic energy:
- Generally accepted principle definition of kinetic energy: the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity.
- Deloitte defined a kinetic enterprise as: an enterprise built to evolve, no matter what the future brings; an evolving organization that quickly adapts, overcoming the operational inertia that can occur when technology disruptively advances.
Boom
There’s a story behind every venture.
Like many start-ups, Kinetic Energy Entertainment began as a solution to a problem we were personally facing in late 2020: being stuck. More to the point — stuck within a legacy media system that seemed to be okay with being stuck.
But the signs were there that shifts were happening in every part of the entertainment ecosystem: creative, business, operations, legal, technology, audience behavior, etc ad infinitum. Old methodologies and models were showing wear & tear, creativity was being ping ponged around while business searched for new revenue streams and the audience was stuck in the middle.
The system was (and is) under distress though it had (and still has) a choice:
(just change)
But we can not and are not here to fix an entire industry and the system it has set up. Both have been around longer than us. So system — you do you.
And so what we are going to do is build creative and business operations that can take advantage of those ingrained inefficiencies and irrelevancies to produce exciting/engaging/thought-provoking/etc entertainment that is distributed to audiences and communities as frictionless as possible, ensuring long term value for creators, creative partners and investors.
There’s a story behind every Founder.
We first met creating and executing the transmedia (please don’t @ us over this word because it’s where the industry is headed… again… and to be discussed in another post) strategy for <redacted IP> that unfortunately was canceled just before launch by <redacted Studio> when box office forecasts and pre-awareness foretold that the mothership film was going to be dead-on-arrival. And the forecasters weren’t wrong. But this served as a valuable lesson regarding how Studios view exploitation of rights (a phrase we try to avoid because when is the word “exploit” ever used in a positive connotation???), the broken relationship between the rights’ holder/licensee/licensor and creator, the conflict between silos and how important it is to reconfigure these structures. This experience became the seed of our mission: Creative is a business and we want creators and the supporting ecosystems to succeed.
We have 30 years of experience in each category and division of the entertainment industry including development, production, supply-chain, distribution, etc). We built our respective careers from opposite ends of the industry — one via the indie film world and the other climbing the Studio ladder. We’ve created IP and storyworlds, launched businesses, partnered with vendors and delighted audiences across all media platforms. We’ve worked with some of the biggest IPs in the world (and declined working with others).
We know that to survive in this entertainment industry you gotta keep moving. Whether it’s evolving an idea or story into its next form (ie: movie, tv, videogame, podcast, comic, socks, etc.), developing an MVP with an unproven tech, discovering a micro-community hungry for stories that reflect them and their journeys, or supporting an emerging talent that has an undeniable voice and perspective.
Our approach may be slightly different but we end up in the place that we are all trying to get to: telling great stories for people to enjoy. And our approach is a reflection of our philosophy and mission: get unstuck, make a path, keep it moving.
Complacency can take many forms — storytelling that relies on tired tropes and worn-out clichés, business models that stagnate or decline slowly (but still decline…), legal that thwarts innovation, technology that becomes commodity. To grow and scale we have to ask questions, challenge assumptions and test relevancy as we #doubtthedefault. By succumbing to “that’s the way it’s always been done” we will fail to realize the immense power and agency of entertainment.
Thinking outside the box encourages us to move beyond the implied boundaries of what is possible so that we can produce truly memorable, exciting and impactful entertainment that will provide careers for creators, sustainability for business, and capture the imagination of those who want to enjoy the stories we tell.
Whether partnering with ambitious creatives, crafting bold tales of fantasy/adventure/horror/etc, or exploring next generation technologies to make & distribute new products, we built Kinetic Energy Entertainment to be “unstuck”.
There’s more story to the story.
The Big Questions — Why us? What is our approach to IP development? How do we think about story? Who do we work with? What’s behind the intersection of story and technology? — will be tackled in subsequent posts. Stay tuned and #keepitmoving.
Follow us on our socials:
Twitter: Kinetic Energy Ent.; Co-Founders Diana Williams & Dario Di Zanni
LinkedIn: Kinetic Energy Ent.; Co-Founders Diana & Dario
or email us using the Contact form below!
