Floor planning for tomorrow
That sort of goal takes time, of course. Project Orange is less than a year old and, say officials, has yet to fully take wing.
“There’s so much potential within this space,” Santana said. “We’re not utilizing all of it. We could easily double the staff and the project flow that we have right now.”
For the time being, there are also limits to what Studio Orange can realistically pull off.
“One of the skillsets that we do not have under this roof is broadcast,” Santana said. “That is still an important channel for us. We’ll leverage our agency partners to do those broadcast shoots.”
Despite the cost savings it hopes to realize by pulling more creative work in-house, Battin maintains that the brand is not looking for a complete break from the traditional model.
“We’re not thinking of Studio Orange as a replacement for our agency partners,” she said. “The studio is a great collaborative space that we invite our partners to take advantage of when we are working together.”
Some jobs will always have to go to contracted help. A full-time hair and makeup person isn’t economically viable. Nor is a pen full of animals. Studio Orange’s conceptualists in Atlanta like to feature animals because they add a touch of whimsy and help to make an otherwise commoditized item look more interesting.
Even so, the last few days of the Lifeproof shoot have been challenging. Rigby the dog’s been a dream compared to his costars. The alpaca kept eating carrots off the kitchen island, the ferrets were hard to control and the pigs—given strawberry ice cream to spread around the vinyl—really did make a serious mess.
“We got a little jaded after a day with the pigs,” Hudson said.
