The visual history of Stimulated-Inc. #1
Stimulated-Inc. is celebrating its 16th anniversary and we want to commemorate this milestone in a big way. Since we couldn’t throw a sweet-sixteen party due to Covid, we decided to do something we love instead- tell our story through visual art and media.
Our curiosity for doing new things inspired us to turn our Instagram gallery into a creative showcase of years past. Over the next four weeks we will roll out a series of visual works inspired by our sixteen-year history. Our storyline will unfold as we reveal each art piece- beginning with this one.
This image pays tribute to our roots in transforming music-television and concerts into heart-pounding, ears-bleeding, cortical-singing fan experiences.
In 2004, our visionary, Robb Wagner, saw the potential for big LED screens to be used in completely different ways. He saw them not as just an extension of lighting or scenery, but rather as an extension of narrative and story. Robb committed himself to raising the bar for these big screens, and launched Stimulated-Inc. as the antidote to mundane cut-and-paste visual content. In 2005 Stimulated-Inc. stormed the industry, bringing big video screens to life in seemingly impossible ways. The studio instantly stepped into a role as an industry-leader, being noticed and recruited by the “77th Annual Academy Awards” and the “MTV Video Music Awards” in its first year.
Historic Factoid: The 2005, water-themed VMAs took place in Miami and the rehearsal was shut down when hurricane Katrina ripped through southern Florida. Look for the fishes in our visual story. After the storm, the show went on and Robb spearheaded P. Diddy’s virtual duet with the late Notorious B.I.G., and grew Shakira into a 30-foot high Queen of Latin Music. During this event Stimulated-Inc. also gave My Chemical Romance the visual superpowers they needed to pump the audience’s heart with an explosive performance of “Helena”.
Over the next five years, Stimulated-Inc. went on to transform music show-by-show and concert-by-concert, for the biggest tv networks, music artists and millions of fans the world-over.
A-list artists included Beyonce, The Pussycat Dolls, Foo Fighters and Michael Jackson. Major broadcast events included The “MTV Video Music Awards”, “MTV Movie Awards” and “VH1 Rock Honors”. Significant global events included “Live Earth, The Concerts For A Climate In Crisis”. Other global music events included “Disney’s High-School Musical, The Concert Tour”. For Disney, Robb and his team worked with film director Kenny Ortega to create a new, interactive kind of concert experience, where live stars on stage traded verses and choruses with pre-filmed stars on the big screens. To achieve this Robb and his team reverse-edited Disney’s TV film and turned it into something new.
From this point on, Stimulated-Inc.’s method of Experiential Transformation started to emerge and the studio became focused on the radical creativity that drove this project to success. Robb Wagner coined the term Hyper-Transformation, which meant taking a brand’s existing assets and transforming them into something that people have simply never experienced before. During this period Stimulated-Inc. became a go-to for other industries that were eager to try new things.
In film, Stimulated-Inc. helped Disney and Sony make two of the top-three grossing concert-films of all time. In 2007, Stimulated-Inc. was chosen as the live directing company by Disney for its “Disney’s Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds 3D” concert film, and in 2009 by Sony, as a creative producer of “Michael Jackson’s This Is It”. During this technologically-explosive era in entertainment history, live music was transformed into a visual artform, and Stimulated-Inc. was at the center of this Experiential Transformation.
If you were part of our story, or even if you weren’t, please share a comment. And please follow our Instagram @stimulatedinc to see our visual story series unfold over the next four weeks.