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Angus Wall unveils MakeMake
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MakeMake brings together its distinctive companies, including Rock Paper Scissors, Elastic, and A52 under a single banner, fully integrating capabilities across advertising and entertainment.
Angus Wall has always worked at the intersection of structure and instinct.
The multiple Oscar and Emmy-winning filmmaker, whose fingerprints are on landmark films like The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as well as acclaimed series such as Game of Thrones, helped shape the grammar of modern cinema and has long been a trusted partner for agencies and brands. Lately, Wall has been focused on another kind of timeline: the future of storytelling itself.
This fall, Wall officially launches MakeMake, the studio he’s quietly and methodically built over the past three decades, as a unified creative force designed to dissolve the boundaries between entertainment and advertising, as well as dissolving the artificial boundaries between creative disciplines. Long established in branded content and advertising, MakeMake’s new structure further strengthens its ability to deliver bold, integrated storytelling across both commercial and entertainment work. In the process, Wall is building the blueprint for what a storytelling studio can be in the century ahead.
“Entertainment projects are brands, and brands are entertainment projects,” says Wall.
Wall’s vision for MakeMake is one where commercial storytelling isn’t secondary to entertainment, and is crafted with the same emotional intelligence, cultural strategy, and cinematic fluency that defines the studio’s entertainment work.
From Network of Companies to Unified Creative Force
“The distance between having an idea and making that idea a reality is shorter than ever, so it no longer makes sense to work in the assembly line model,” says Wall. “That’s twentieth-century thinking. Truly great work always comes from deep and unconventional collaborations using the most advanced technologies. That is the spirit of MakeMake.”
MakeMake now officially brings together its award-winning companies, Rock Paper Scissors (editing), Elastic (design and animation), A52 (VFX), Primary (color), and MakeMake Entertainment (development and production) under one banner. Clients have long worked with the collection of companies together, and this structural change makes that process more streamlined. The result is a cross-disciplinary creative studio with 200+ artists working from offices in New York and LA, spanning advertising, entertainment, narrative technology, and experiential media with a shared philosophy of integrated storytelling.
Wall adds: “We have the greatest artists in the world and a secret weapon - our story department, which incorporates strategy, world-building, and development. We make it up and make it happen.”
Re-enchantment as a Creative Philosophy
At the heart of MakeMake is a singular creative touchstone: re-enchantment. It’s the organising principle behind how the studio thinks and works.
“With new filmmaking tools and our long experience in storytelling across both advertising and entertainment, we know we can make anything at the highest level, from an ad campaign to a title sequence to a movie or series. So we’ve asked ourselves as a company, ‘What kind of stories do we want to tell?’” Wall continues, “There seems to be a crisis of imagination right now. Many stories are about dystopia, or they’re a reaffirmation of cynicism. And they’re old. We’ve seen them many times before. We need stories that reconnect us to each other and to the living world. We need stories that inspire futures other than the apocalypse. Another way of saying that is we need stories that ‘re-enchant’ us.”
Innovation as a Creative Imperative
MakeMake is no stranger to innovation. Its legacy is no less than the foundation to modern filmmaking. The company holds the patent for the digital film workflow they developed during the production of David Fincher’s Zodiac, a leap that helped usher in the era of digital cinema. That same spirit of invention continues to guide their evolution today, with projects like their recent Cosm collaboration on The Matrix and Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory.
Leadership & Creative Outlook
Alongside Wall, the company is led by Managing DirectorEve Kornblum, Partner Sasha Markova (former Global Creative Director of Mother London and Executive Creative Director of Impossible Foods), and Partner Adam Pertofsky. Together, along with a team of enormously talented EPs and managers, they’re steering MakeMake into a new era, one that prizes craft, imagination, and cultural relevance in equal measure.
While much of the industry contracts or consolidates, MakeMake is taking a different approach- sharpening its focus, deepening its capabilities, and reaffirming its belief that stories matter more than ever. Wall believes we are entering a new golden age of storytelling, with the dissolving of old paradigms signaling a more intuitive and direct way to make things.
“We’re living in a time of unprecedented technological innovation and an equally urgent need for stories that connect us,” says Wall. “MakeMake is uniquely positioned to harness both, pioneering the future while never losing sight of what makes us human.”
