Frequent guests to the Frame.io Insider would possibly know Oxcart Assembly’s identify from the spectacular work they’ve completed for NASA for the Artemis 1 and Launch America broadcast graphics and apparel. But what you won’t understand is that Oxcart Assembly is definitely a very small firm whose capacity to tackle a number of the world’s greatest shoppers is born from their “just say yes” ethos. Of course, they must again it up by delivering—however in each case they go above and past in strategic perception and artistic execution for his or her shoppers.
This Made in Frame highlights their onerous work for different shoppers—most lately the AC/DC dive bar takeover throughout the Power Trip Festival—and the way they run their remote-first enterprise utilizing Frame.io as their digital workplace (their phrases, not ours).
Reaching for the celebrities
Even if Oxcart Assembly isn’t a family identify, co-founder Tony Gardner’s work as a Hollywood special effects and makeup artist is iconic. From his first job on Michael Jackson’s Thriller to Child’s Play’s Chucky to the Geico cavemen, the Jackass universe, and the Daft Punk robots, his imprint on motion pictures, TV, and music is indelible.
The genesis for Oxcart Assembly got here when promoting artistic Jeff Jetton cold-contacted Tony through LinkedIn. He’d been speaking to the principal builders of the James Webb Space Telescope at Northrop Grumman and wished to see if Tony and Daft Punk could be desirous about taking part in a mission marking its launch. That preliminary outreach led to Jeff visiting Tony at his SoCal studio and persuading him to trip alongside to the pitch assembly at Northrop Grumman. On Tony’s birthday. For which Tony promptly rescheduled his birthday plans.
While that exact mission didn’t come to fruition, the like-minded duo found their mutual affinity for reaching for the celebrities and Oxcart Assembly was born.
Building a digital workplace
As Jeff himself states, Oxcart Assembly is “not your typical brick and mortar agency.” To say the least.
With Tony primarily based in California and Jeff in Miami, there was already a full continent’s distance between them. And each steadily discover themselves on the highway—Tony for the commercials, music movies, TV reveals, and films he’s concerned with, and Jeff for his Toki Underground eating places in Baltimore and Washington D.C.
“That was the coolest part of it—it set a foundation for how we could be a business.”
“We all have careers and identities in different places, and we were trying to find a way to have a common meeting place. We had formed a company and we needed to put together a reel. The meeting place turned out to be Frame.io,” Tony says. “It was the place where we could share all our information. We could put all our assets on Frame.io. We could edit using Frame.io [with Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects]. We could leave notes for each other, and the time differences didn’t matter. We could jump in and out of it whenever we wanted from wherever we were. And that was the coolest part of it—it set a foundation for how we could be a business.”
The newly fashioned firm, energized by the Webb telescope assembly, determined to pursue working with NASA, and shortly received two contracts inside three months of their first assembly. That was March 1, 2020. Days later, the world shut down.
Jeff precisely factors out that those that had already been working remotely had a bonus over those that needed to scramble to pivot to the brand new paradigm. And as they labored on the Launch America broadcast bundle—completely from their houses—they relied on Frame.io. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and we used it as our virtual office,” he states. The Oxcart group ended up taking 60 years of NASA’s complete video library, placing it onto Frame.io, and condensing it right into a 60-second broadcast open—in six weeks’ time.
From the heavens to hell
Nothing about the way in which Oxcart operates may very well be thought of typical or enterprise as regular. If you look, for instance, at what Tony’s completed with particular results make-up and prosthetics, it’s all about discovering new methods to create unattainable characters or results from inanimate supplies.
Jeff, whose personal initiatives embody creating viral moments on social media (possibly Google “Wall Street Bull Jeff Jetton”) to working two profitable eating places—whereas creating movies and attire for NASA broadcasts—is aware of no artistic boundary that may’t be bent or damaged. Nor is there any job he considers too menial in an effort to get a mission over the road. If packages containing custom-fabricated variations of Bitcoin destined for the moon want to begin their journey at FedEx, Jeff’s the man to take them. If NASA decides they want 2,000 custom-made jackets for his or her on-air broadcast expertise and retail Exchanges, Jeff figures out find out how to get them manufactured. In America.
So when Oxcart obtained the decision from Sony Music’s Ceremony of Roses about “figuring out something cool” for AC/DC’s look on the Power Trip Festival in Indio, California (which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s formation), they mentioned “Hell, yes!” And the mission was launched…
Early in his Frame.io journey Jeff found that it isn’t solely a spot to work on video property. For the Artemis 1 mission, for instance, the Oxcart group saved every part from recordings of the introductory telephone calls with the numerous creatives and stakeholders to temper and inspiration boards that had been created in Photoshop.
With the attire designers and producers unfold throughout the US, a course of that will as soon as have been supervised in particular person occurred within the cloud by way of Frame.io. The group created vogue “tech packs” in Illustrator that contained the mockups and design specs from Tyler, the Creator’s streetwear firm GOLF WANG, that had been then shared with fabricators together with Converse, Velcro, and Ebbet’s to create the sneakers, hats, and jackets worn by the on-air expertise.
From working with shoppers who goal for the heavens to ideating a bodily manifestation of a freeway to hell for AC/DC, Jeff and Tony started sharing reference supplies and sketches in Frame.io. And then lightning struck. They would take over a dive bar and the encircling property and switch it into an immersive set up. After a Google seek for “shittiest dive bar in Indio, CA,” Jeff texted the mayor of Indio, and he responded enthusiastically. The group ready for liftoff on a brand new journey.
An iconic expertise
In true Oxcart vogue, it was additionally extremely bold, rising in scope because the concepts flowed. “Outside the bar we worked with our partners at Black Sky Creative and Ceremony of Roses to build out a 10,000 square foot venue with merchandise areas, a tattoo parlor offering free AC/DC tattoos, an eating area with food trucks, and one more large open bar. “We built a giant utility pole—installed by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers—that we hooked fake power lines to,” Tony says. The big AC/DC neon signal they mounted to the facade of the bar may very well be seen from a distance of about two miles (if not from house).
Once once more, Oxcart organized all of the sketches, photographs, props, and merch they needed to assemble for the mission in Frame.io. There had been information in all totally different codecs: jpeg, psd, png, mp4, HEIC, and extra. As they designed what Jeff refers to as a “traveling museum” they shared concepts with Sony Music and AC/DC’s administration on Frame.io, which helped them by way of the exploratory course of.
“We’d put all our ideas into Frame.io files,” Tony says. “We had all kinds of crazy things we considered, and even if we thought that some of our ideas might be stupid or silly at first, you’d read three comments into people’s responses to that silly idea and that silly idea would spark a really great idea. It was a meeting place where we could throw ideas around and revisit them later because, you know, we all have kids and lives and whatnot.”
One such concept: one among AC/DC’s group tossed out the opportunity of having a deer head trophy on the wall. “That seems like something you’d have in a dive bar,” Tony says. A couple of weeks later, Tony confirmed up with not only a deer head, however one through which he’d changed the deer’s eyes with glowing purple eyeballs. Because Tony is a man who is aware of find out how to make actual issues unreal.
They’re additionally a group that is aware of find out how to be aware of new or last-minute concepts as a result of they’ll work so shortly and effectively. One of the group members had talked about that it could be humorous to have the mummified Peruvian alien at the moment within the information really contained in the bar. “I own a special effects company,” Tony says. “So we designed the alien in ZBrush, 3D printed him, and a few days later brought him out to Indio. We thrift-shopped a curio cabinet to put it in, put little AC/DC demon horns on it that flashed, and installed it in the bar. It was a last-minute idea that we just threw in because we thought it would be fun, and a unique photo opportunity for fans.”
Another alternative they seized was to take the fly from AC/DC’s Fly on the Wall album and create it as a three-dimensional character, which they sculpted into totally different poses and positioned across the bar.
Before the bar opened on the primary day, there was already a line across the block. Over the course of the weekend-long set up, roughly 20,000 folks visited it. “So, we thought maybe we’d gotten it right,” Jeff says.
The spotlight of the weekend? When AC/DC guitarist Angus Young determined to make an look on the bar. “Hundreds of people immediately mobbed him,” Jeff says. The video of him exploring the set up reveals his apparent delight, and lots of (many) selfies had been taken. But the massive second is when Angus discovers the AC/DC mural painted on the facet of the constructing. The photograph they captured of him pointing as much as his picture is one more iconic second within the band’s 50-year historical past.
Chaos ignites progress
The factor about Oxcart—and the outcomes they obtain—is that after they say sure to a mission with out being given greater than the briefest of briefs, they regard it as a problem. And that form of alternative is, creatively talking, essentially the most fertile floor.
“We’re always really collaborative with the client,” Tony says. “ We have no agenda other than to take on challenges and run with them. Even when we designed the Daft Punk robot helmets 20 years ago, we didn’t have any idea how to realize all of the LED lights and the electronics required. But we hunted down the right people to help, and we figured it out. We react to challenges and find ways to solve problems. There’s a fear factor, for sure, but it always turns out.”
It’s additionally how they maintain themselves excited and creatively engaged. But there’s much more to it than that. It’s a testomony to the group’s ingenuity and resourcefulness that they did the AC/DC set up on a price range. Jeff so totally scoured ebay for memorabilia that he even drove up the costs as a result of he had mainly cornered the market.
But essentially the most satisfying half for Jeff and Tony was the expertise they gave the followers, who had paid upwards of $1,500 for tickets to the Powertrip competition. At the AC/DC bar, with no price for admission and $5 beers, the family-friendly occasion was, by most accounts, one of the vital memorable issues the followers had ever seen. When Angus appeared, the followers obtained much more than their cash’s price. Hanging out in a dive bar within the desert along with your idol? Priceless.
Finally, the group left their mark on one very particular particular person—the lady who owns the bar. Her husband, who’d been working the place for many years, had handed away the 12 months earlier than. Jeff discovered a framed photograph of him whereas they had been doing the set up and determined to make an ofrenda (a Day of the Dead shrine) to honor him. They stuffed it with candles, and when she noticed it for the primary time, she burst into blissful tears.
Shared visions and values
To hear Jeff and Tony inform it, each day since they related in particular person has been nothing in need of wonderful. The work, the shoppers, and the tales they’ve amassed may very well be made into its personal film, stuffed with moments that appear unattainable—besides that they’ve all actually occurred. From engaged on moon missions to creating indelible reminiscences for thousands and thousands—or for only one particular person—they share visions and values. Because, as Tony says, “The thing we do is share ideas versus selling them.”
But it’s not solely about creating pictures that have interaction those that expertise them—it’s additionally about doing work that captures their very own imaginations and pushes them to uncharted territory, together with bringing in collaborators whom Jeff and Tony have beforehand labored with—or have by no means even met. “Jeff is the king of the cold call to seek out the right people to partner with to achieve the vision,” Tony says, primarily based on first-hand expertise. “He always does his homework, so when he calls someone he has a very high success rate.”
Doing his homework means not solely realizing all about who he’s calling but additionally having pitches fairly fleshed out. In Frame.io they’ll combination all of their concepts into one mission that’s simply accessible to shoppers. Once the mission begins, the shoppers proceed to work with Oxcart within the Frame.io house—and sometimes grow to be Frame.io shoppers themselves.
As for his or her shared values, absolute honesty with one another is excessive on the checklist, as is their clear mutual respect and their dedication to leaving their egos out of it.
Which brings us again to our values at Frame.io. Starting with sure, making it actual, and main with concepts and never ego are core to our firm. So as we see our shoppers utilizing our merchandise with the identical form of intentions, it feels a bit bit as if we’re spreading our values—whether or not to a desert dive bar, or to the moon and past.
