Aim at perfection, no. But embrace your style 100%. Lessons learned from watching the NYC Ballet.
The other night, I went to see a wonderful performance from the NYC Ballet. It was a series of short pieces by the young and talented choreographer Christopher Wheeldon. Each piece, perfectly executed, had a very strong personality. The dance, the music, the costume, the decor all fit together to create a unique experience. Same choreographer, same dancers, same venue, and yet very different emotions.
But what stroke me first was the perfection of it all, which makes you, in the audience, forget about everything else. Your mind is simply blown away and all your attention is on the show.
It got me thinking about the app we’re building at We Are TV. How could we ever reach that level of perfection? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to compare the experience of watching a performance from NYC Ballet and playing an AR game on your mobile! But at our own humble level, and as a small company, how could we reach that kind of perfection in the experience?
Perfection is always a matter of perspective. I’m sure the dancers or the musicians must have found flows in their execution that I would never notice. The most important is that it didn’t draw my attention away. This is extremely hard to reach. I can’t imagine the long rehearsing hours of the dancers, of the musicians. But in the end, this is what makes an experience amazing. Don’t break the magic, don’t show the difficulty behind the execution.
I know this, but I’m also realistic with what we can accomplish as a small start-up and with the big requirement to launch fast. And so it kind of freaks me out :-)
Hence the second lesson from that ballet : embrace your personality. This is much more reachable and makes a big difference.
In the case of our AR game, we have developed 3D characters, with a rather naive style. The nature of our game will make it necessary to introduce new characters very regularly: for a new show, for a new character in an existing show or when we sign a new partnership. Because we are a small team and because scalability is essential to our business, we have made the choice to create a unique body shape shared between all characters, easy to animate, and easy to customize (hair, clothes, accessories, colors, you name it!). This choice influenced a lot the identity of the app, placing it on the cute, cartoonish side, without this being a real conscious decision.
Now, I see this as a real advantage if we embrace it completely. It’s a great way to build a strong personality to our app, something users can feel attached to, opposite to using real life characters. It’s a great way to unharness our creativity and create a unique experience for our app.
