Interview: MK
Photography: Giacomo Lucchini
Who are you and where are you from?
I am a creative director from Trieste, where I’ve lived almost my whole life.
Have you ever lived anywhere else?
Yes, I spent some time in Silicon Valley, California. It was the final chapter of a huge adventure. One day, after watching a documentary on gaming indie studios, I had a meltdown. I decided I would convey my creativity to one of the biggest passions I always had: gaming. Eventually, I turned to virtual reality.
Fantastic.
As you can imagine you don’t really come up with a virtual reality gaming developing team in Trieste, so the first two years were most of all painful. A lot of trial and error, both in game development and human relations. But I found allies too, after some time we got hosted in a very cool video production office called Fantastificio. Later a Slovenian incubator stepped in to help with some funding. The plan was to play the startup game in Silicon Valley: go there, show your skills and get funded.
And then what?
We realized there was no interest in the investment world for gaming. We learned a lot about the business but life in the US was not at all what I had imagined. So we decided to save some of the funding and come back to Italy to finish the game. When we launched the game, it was very well perceived but without any skill in marketing and still being a niche of gaming, the money we got back from selling was not enough. The morale was very low and the team started to fall apart. So sadly we decided to look around for new career opportunities. From that day I started to study digital marketing since I felt it was the missing piece of the puzzle, and I have never stopped since.
Has your family always been supportive of what you do or maybe they wanted you to have a more “traditional” career path?
My family has always been very supportive. During the scariest period when I quit my former job as a technician and went full-time into something absolutely crazy, they also helped me financially. I think they realized I would have not pursued a traditional career path when I dropped out of school.
How was the idea of setting up your “Creative Storm” business born?
Movies and stories have always been my two biggest passions along with gaming. I mixed my video-making and editing skills which I learned during the Fantastificio experience, where I had to direct early virtual reality video productions for big brands, with the experience from my last employee job as a creative director, where I directed a CGI commercial project for a big cruise ship line. I soon realized I was missing creativity and entrepreneurship. During lockdown, I purchased a good camera and started studying everyday filmmaking. I instantly realized I was good at it, and paired with previous business and marketing experiences, right after the pandemic, my agency took flight.
Tell us about your “Creative Storm”.
I wanted to start making videos that would be captivating, in a nice location with some cool action. I asked the guys of Home Sapore di Casa if they wanted to shoot a cool video in a creative way, and we did. The exposure I got from those videos was amazing and many people started to contact me for new projects. I felt I was finally on the right path. I just needed a little bit of branding and putting it all together. I wanted “Creative Storm” to become a digital marketing agency and a video production. These two elements are what companies most need and struggle to understand these days: marketing strategy and content. Both have to be valuable, informative, fun and enjoyable and have to be digital! Because you can measure the results. And just like that, the Creative Storm studio was born.
Superb!
A lot of times, even after promoting posts on social media, the efforts don’t produce great results. Imagine your product or service as a chef’s raw material. It’s not enough to take the ingredients, put them in the oven and hope that a starred restaurant dish comes out. You need a recipe (a marketing strategy), proper cooking (telling a story), and beautiful plating (appealing visual content). This is the winning combination of a marketing agency with a video production: your fresh ingredients are enough, we take care of the rest.
Where can we follow you?
On Instagram: creative_storm_studio
