How did Hayden5 get its start? What was the vision for the company when you first opened 12 years ago?
We met in our freshman year of college in 2005. We were neighbors on the fifth floor of Hayden Hall, an NYU dorm on Washington Square Park. While at the Tisch Film School, we began calling ourselves ‘Hayden 5 Films,’ and upon graduation, it became official. The business began in 2009. The original vision was to have both a commercial arm and an originals business, and generally, that has remained the same throughout the company's history, plus some new components (like a proprietary technology) along the way.
What inspired Hayden5’s unique approach to production?
Clients would ask us to fly around the country to execute small, but high-end, productions we had built a reputation for in New York City. Even in 2009, we knew that was impractical. We then vetted and leveraged our early network of collaborators across the country, and eventually across the globe, to deploy on these shoots. That led to the business we have today, deploying for over 3,000 shoots annually. We think our early adoption of this process helped contribute to the realization that both quality and consistency can be achieved by tapping into local talent. Today, it seems like the norm.
Drop kits have become an industry standard since the pandemic hit. How were you able to roll them out and have them ready for use so quickly?
We had been connecting crews and interview subjects, face-to-face, with home internet connections and cellular signals for about five years before the pandemic. We evolved Errol Morris’ famous ‘Interrotron’ from a room-to-room eyeline tool into a city-to-city, high-end interview tool.
When we created the ‘Drop Kit,’ we simply leveraged our local crews to build a system we had designed, to spec. It combined a hardware / software solution, all atop a simple cart, to make contactless production possible. We quickly evolved the Drop Kit deployments to have remote-controlled motion and lighting enhancements.
As the world reopens, is there concern that interest in Drop Kits™ and other remote production tools will fall?
As far as we’re concerned, Drop Kits are already a thing of the past. They’re dead and gone. Drop Kits were a contactless, productized version of the local, curated crews we had and have been deploying for most of our company’s history. The learnings from Drop Kits led to our evolved production service, Crew+™, which brings every local team we have online. Basically, anywhere we deploy a crew, all keys, clients, and stakeholders have the ability to tap into the shoot live, in real time. They’re looking both through the camera lens, and at various angles of the set, including a face-to-face with their DP / Director via Crew Cam™.
Has there been a project that you think put Drop Crews and Hayden5’s global network and tools to the test?
We work with some of the world’s largest brands, agencies, and publishers, conducting both one-off and multi-city activations. We do not have a director roster, we don’t host completed works on our website, and we do keep our client’s privacy among our top priorities, so it’s hard to call out specific activities. It’s an amazing use of our services when we have a fully global production happening in real time. I can point to one we did ourselves called ‘The Future of Production.’
In your mind, what does the next significant shift in production look like, and is Hayden5 preparing for it?
Our proprietary software, ProducerAI, will begin client testing in late 2021. We believe the future will even further ground prep, physical production, and post production into technology, and so, our next steps as a company revolve around that notion.