The Austin City Limits Connection

By Ron Pippin, Co-Founder, Shiny Object
Another ACL Festival has steamrolled through Austin’s Zilker Park bringing hundreds of thousands of musicians, event staff and fans together in sunny, sweaty harmony. This three-day event touches most of us in some way – if not, it’s definitely by choice. Learn more about award-winning member (they happened to pick up a national Gold at last year’s Addys), Shiny Object and its celebrated work last for year’s ACL Festival along with numerous related projects.

Design and production collective Shiny Object began in April 2004 when co-owner and Creative Director Ron Pippin left his six-year stint as a designer, editor and creative director at Matchframe, a post-production company, to open the studio with longtime friend Kyle Hunter.

Hunter, a transplant from Dallas, was looking for an opportunity to make a career change. He had been a manager in the car business for some time but was looking for a way to get back into moving pictures. Before cars, Hunter, who had a graduate degree in film, worked in the film industry in the ‘90s. Pippin had been living in Houston doing production and post-production jobs since 1989. “For me, Shiny represented the chance to take all of these related experiences and build more projects from the ground up,” said Pippin.

In three years since the company’s founding, Shiny has grown from a two-person shop, primarily building end tags and graphics for commercials, to a full-service motion design and production studio. “Our best description of Shiny is that we make things that move for big and small screens,” said Pippin.

On most projects, Shiny Object collaborates with local independent writers, cinematographers, designers, animators, artists and musicians. “When a job comes our way, we ask ourselves what team can we assemble to best solve the problem?” said Pippin. “We opened with the goal of working as a collective. Collaboration makes our job experience a much richer one.”

Shiny Object recently moved into a 1,600 sq ft studio at Penn Field on South Congress, and also hired a designer, producer and animator. “We’re creating something unique at Shiny. Our clients trust us and give us lots of latitude on jobs. I think they see us as partners and peers who are deeply committed to delivering the best work we can.”

The 2006 ACL Fest line-up piece is a great example of this partnership. “When Ben Blocker and David Mider of C3Presents, the festival producer, (formerly PlanetCSE) brought us this project, we were thrilled,” said Pippin. “They gave us a list of 130 bands, a few key points to hit upon and a list of sponsors. Together we came up with the concept of the animals in Zilker Park having a festival of their own.”

In addition to receiving industry accolades, the ACL piece drew rave reviews from the festival’s 220,000-plus attendees. “Shiny not only executed on a concept, but added its own unique style and vision that brought this project to life. Fans on the ACL message board were buzzing over the promo almost as much as our lineup,” said Ben Blocker, senior creative at C3.

C3 also hired Shiny Object for “LollaLives”, a Web-only project featuring Perry Farrell interviewing creative classmates like graffiti artist Shephard Fairey. “C3 sent out a camera crew to capture Perry Farrell interviewing all of these interesting people,” said Pippin. “So they came to us for a show open that would illustrate the points explored in the episodes while capturing the vibe of the Lollapalooza brand.”

In just three years, Shiny Object has created eight film and music-related projects including SXSW, Austin Film Festival, Video Vinyl, River Roots Fest, ACL Fest and Lollapalooza. “There seems to be some sort of gravitational pull for us to music and film projects. It’s easy to deliver your best work when you care about the subject matter as much as we do.”

Since 2004, Shiny Object has co-hosted a SXSW party with live music from around the world. Soon they will start their own micro-film festival called “The Shiny AV Club.” “This will be a great chance for us to get together with our friends and clients and share the things that inspire and influence us,” said Pippin. “We’re in the process of brainstorming theme nights – any ideas are welcome.”

Shiny Object has collaborated with The Butler Bros, Crush, Idea City® (formerly GSD&M), McGarrah-Jessee, nFusion, Sherry Matthews Advocacy Marketing and Sicola-Martin. The agency also has done long-format corporate pieces for Gemalto, Vignette Software, NEC and Nortel. Beyond Austin, Shiny has worked with national advertising and media leaders including PBS, Richards Group, HBOFilms, IWGroup and MTV.

See the work at www.shiny.tv