Everything that has to happen for something to feel simple

Some time ago, we received a form submission through the 
/nk. website. It was Captain Fresh.

Based on the name, my first association was pretty obvious: fish, the ocean… and if I stretched it a little further, given my obsession with Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack Sparrow somehow made his way into the story too. 😅
Jokes aside, we replied.
We had a first conversation, then another. We started getting to know the team and understanding what they were looking for.
Captain Fresh had been born around technology and supply chain within the seafood industry, but very quickly we realized that describing the company only that way would fall pretty short.

They were growing, acquiring companies, integrating brands, entering new markets. Building an increasingly global organization.

And I think it was during a conversation with their CEO that a pretty simple thought first appeared:
Okay. This is big.


It wasn’t some Hollywood-style revelation or anything like that. And it’s not like we hadn’t understood what we were working on until then.
It was more about gradually grasping the scale of it.


Every conversation added another piece. And our challenge was exactly the opposite: figuring out which pieces we could remove until all that complexity could be understood in a simple way.

Because the project had started with a fairly concrete objective.
Create an audiovisual piece, just over a minute long, that would play a central role in Captain Fresh’s new digital experience while also being able to stand on its own and tell the company’s story.
A little over a minute to explain all of that.

Quite a beautiful mess of a challenge.

First, we had to understand. A lot.
From what Captain Fresh actually did, to how the different companies were connected. What role technology, distribution, brands, and markets played. What was important for the business. What was important for the story. And, perhaps even harder, what didn't need to be told.
Then the project work began: A conversation that led to an idea, an idea to a script, the script to a storyboard, the storyboard to keyframes, and the keyframes that started to move.
Something that seemed to work well on paper stopped working when it had five seconds of animation. A transition that forced us to change the previous scene to make sense with the story.
Or a single comment would make something we'd worked on for days disappear. Another small decision would make everything that followed easier to understand. And so it went, several times over.

An enormous number of people making an enormous number of decisions, big and small, so that in the end the result would seem simple.

It almost never works that way.
Ideas are built.
They’re discussed.
Tested.
Broken.
Put back together.
Simplified.

And above all, they become better when a lot of people are pushing in the same direction.
That’s exactly what happened with Captain Fresh.
The audiovisual piece started shaping the storytelling of their new digital presence. As we moved forward, we began supporting other decisions too, helping translate that narrative into the website and collaborating more and more closely with their team.


One deliverable led to another.
One conversation opened another.
And what had initially been a fairly specific collaboration eventually turned into something much broader.


Yesterday, while scrolling through LinkedIn, I came across a post by Sohini, one of the people who had been on the other side of this entire process.
It said something along the lines of:

I thought it was brilliant because, in one sentence, it summed up the entire process.

Not doing something different just to attract attention.
Not designing something weird just for the sake of being weird.


But understanding an organization deeply enough to help it show the world what it actually is.

And then, when it finally goes out into the world, someone can look at it and think:
“This looks nothing like what I expected.”
In the best possible sense of the phrase.


Then I started thinking about everything that had to happen before that comment could ever exist. Someone on the other side of the world looking for people who could help them. Finding thousands of agencies and studios. Choosing a few. Sending a form. Us replying. Meeting each other. Sharing references from previous clients that could help build trust from thousands of kilometers away.
People at Captain Fresh opening up their business and their vision to us.



Until, quite some time later, all of that turns into a little over a minute of film and a digital experience that seems to tell the story naturally.


It’s a bit of a butterfly effect . And maybe that’s why I like this project so much.
Because we often talk about moving the needle for the organizations we work with.

But when a conversation begins, you don’t always know how much you’ll be able to move it.
You don’t always know how far a collaboration might grow.
And you definitely don’t know how many small decisions will have to align before something finally works.


Sometimes it all begins with a form.
And some time later, you find yourself looking at something finished and thinking:
It’s crazy how much had to happen for us to get here.
Maybe that’s a pretty good definition of what we do.