30 Years of The Mill | Associate Creative Strategist, Min-Wei Lee

What piece of Mill work do you believe pushed the boundaries of production creativity & why?

A recent project, HBO’s Lovecraft Country: Sanctum, is by far the most challenging and creative project I’ve ever worked on at The Mill. What started on the drawing board as an interactive Zoom party ended up becoming an enormous immersive VR event series spread over three days, with eleven discrete worlds built on a public social VR platform. Not only did we need to come up with a recommendation that balanced a rich audio-visual experience with the desire for the most frictionless VR setup possible, we then needed to build these worlds full of thoughtful interactivity three separate times, and create a seamless onboarding process for our VIP influencers whom HBO gifted Oculus Quest headsets.

To top it off, the entire project was conceived, designed, and built during lockdown – our London, New York and Bangalore studios worked across three time zones remotely, only coming together ‘in-person’ virtually to review and test our VR worlds. In spite of this, we managed to build a fun and fulfilling working relationship across the group, which extended to our incredibly thoughtful and collaborative clients who placed great trust in us to bring this vision to life.

What will be the most defining change in the creative industry over the next decade? 

With remote work becoming the norm, I believe that new ways of coming together will define the way that the creative industry will run in the next decade. As VR headsets become cheaper and more widely adopted and as our world moves from 4G to 5G connectivity, the industry will see the virtual world as a viable alternative to meeting in real life (as we did on Sanctum). Untethered by boring real-world factors like gravity and space, artists will find new and innovative ways to create together, sparking inspiration that will push the boundaries of the technology as we know it.

Discover more about 30 Years of The Mill here. We would like to thank everyone who has been part of our history – our clients, our partners, our collaborators and our staff past and present. All of you have been central to making our first 30 years so extraordinary.

You can also follow Min-Wei on Instagram @mwlmw and find her on LinkedIn.