LOS ANGELES & NEW YORK CITY — Following 12 successful years of business in New York City, full-service production and post company Hayden5 (www.hayden5.com) has expanded to Los Angeles. The company represents a global database of vendors and talent, and with its own proprietary back-end software and technologies, offers its Drop Crews and Cloud Cuts services.
Photo: Wiseman (back/center) with the
Hayden5 team
Drop Crews provides live viewing of remote productions via local crews, while Cloud Cuts enables realtime editing, fast media delivery, and cloud storage – all executed by its seasoned staff of producers and a curated team of remote editors from around the world. With approximately half of its business coming from companies with a West Coast presence, Hayden5 is now positioned to grow and better serve its client base, which includes Salesforce, Amazon, FCB Health, A&E Networks and Edelman PR, among others. To celebrate its new bicoastal presence, Hayden5 has launched an out-of-home campaign in Venice and West Hollywood. Media buys for the campaign include billboards inspired by imagery of evolution. The company also produced 50,000 branded fortune cookies with messages about “the future of production”, which will be distributed by local Chinese restaurants.
“I can’t think of anything more quirky and quintessentially ‘Hayden5’ than the announcement campaign we put together for our coming-out party in LA,” says Hayden5 founder/creative director Todd Wiseman, Jr., who has taken up residence in the Abbot Kinney area of Venice. “Hayden5 is the anti-production company in a lot of ways. Without a traditional roster of directors, we've taken a service-first approach to our business model, building it around Drop Crews, Cloud Cuts, and a growing, dedicated staff of 30-plus folks to handle volume production and post needs around the world.”
Wiseman says the Drop Kits the company developed in response to the pandemic, which are optimized for contactless production, won’t have the same demand once things get back to normal.
“But having deployed more than 3,000 Drop Kits over the last year, it's clear that remote production and remote monitoring are here to stay,” he notes. “With reduced costs, a smaller carbon footprint, and the ease of realtime monitoring and communication through our remote offerings, including Crew Cam, it’s an attractive alternative to the status quo of production.”
With the LA expansion, Hayden5 plans to increase its staff by more than 30 percent, while growing its Originals division, which has produced a number of unscripted content, including Long Shot, an Emmy-nominated documentary on Netflix. It is currently in development on Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, a behind-the-scenes look at how video games are made, and American Exile, a 2021 documentary following the experiences of US-born individuals who were deported back to their countries of origin. For the latter, Hayden5 interviewed subjects in places, including Mexico, Indonesia, and Ethiopia, relying on its network of local crews while Wiseman directed from his New York office.
“This is an exciting time for us at Hayden5,” Wiseman concludes. “We’re thrilled to be building a bicoastal operation that embraces a distributed workforce and underscores the power of local and diverse talent, from directors, to DPs, to editors.”