“I think it’s magic,” says Sila Sveta’s Alexander Us from his office in Moscow. “It’s something that you could only dream about yesterday, and now it’s like creating heaven. You can transform anything into art — make a building dance. It’s really a new kind of art.” “It” is their 3D projection, and those who have experienced their visual work — or saw the eye-popping video they created to open the 2015 Parnelli Awards in Las Vegas — knows what he’s talking about. And now the company has an office in Los Angeles headed by Amy Blackman, the company’s CIO.
The company specializes in leading-edge 3D projection mapping, creating large-scale interactive projections of 3D content on buildings or moving objects. Sila Sveta also creates 3D Projection Mapping stage designs, multimedia shows synched with special effects, lighting, video content, and music, and interactive installations.
“It is a digital immersive experience,” Blackman says. “People flip out over its ‘otherness’, which I feel comes from an aesthetic that can only really come from Russia.
“When creating something spectacular and exciting, you need different points of view, different perspectives,” agrees Us. “We were born in a different society, and our unique style springs from that. In fact, we don’t have ‘one’ style — everything we do is completely different from the last thing we do.”
Already well-established in Russia and Europe, Us viewed the U.S. — “the motherland of technology” — as “a good market that we can participate in. We want to create amazing shows on a large scale.”
Sila Sveta is not your conventional AV provider, a fact that can be seen in their mission statement: “We create beauty, light and movement where there is none, where it has never been possible before. These values include ‘Never say no,’ ‘F*#$ formality, but respect professionalism,’ and ‘Be human.’”
The creative team uses proprietary software technologies combined with vanguard artistry that are different than any of the U.S. market’s current offerings, Blackman says. “Yet we’re able to make the pioneering product at a more affordable cost because content and engineering is done in Russia.”
As for Blackman, she got into the music business managing bands and artists, but by 2014, she burned out from that part of the music biz. She made a 180-degree turn and started pursuing a Global Executive MBA from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She was determined to do something far away from the entertainment business, but fate had other plans.
Post-Perestroika Possibilities
Early in the 2000s, lifelong friends Alexey Rosov and Us were hobnobbing on the spectrum between ne’er-do-wells and visionaries, dressing up the town with their graffiti-style art. They had gotten their hands on some old slide projectors and started bringing those Soviet-era melancholy buildings to life with their primitive yet intriguingly beautiful projections. “That caught the attention of the local nightclubs, and then they were suddenly lighting designers,” Blackman tells. When it’s pointed out one doesn’t go from using the equivalent of an old Kodak Slide Carousel projector to designing lights in high-end clubs without training or a certificate or something, Blackman shrugs and says, “It could only happen in Moscow, post-Perestroika.”
Rosov and Us inevitably got their hands on better technology, and started experimenting with projection mapping. Us would cofound Sila Sveta with business developer Rosov in 2008. Denis Astakhov is now CEO. The company experienced rapid success and growth. Today, they have 60 people working in a 150-year-old former chocolate factory. Then investment banker/venture capitalist Andrey Kostyuk, who saw the possibilities of their work, became an investor in the U.S. division of Sila Sveta (which translates to “Power of Light” or “Luminous Intensity”). But who to run it? Finding the answer to that question would be a two-year process.
The Russian Advantage
Us remembers the day Kostyuk called about Blackman and said, “I found her! She’s the one! She’s crazy like us.”
“When I met her, we had a late, long dinner and we spoke of everything — art, philosophy, business, and I knew she was a good match for us,” Us says.
Blackman was not so sure. “[Kostyuk] was telling everyone in Moscow that he had the perfect person to run North America, the only problem was she doesn’t know she wants it yet,” laughs Blackman. Kostyuk happened to be in the same MBA program at Georgetown, when she gave a presentation to the class. Impressed, he started pursuing her. But Blackman ignored him, or tried to. “I had a lifetime of people wanting me to look at something only for it to be their nephew’s crappy Ska band or whatever,” she says. “And here was this 6-foot, 3-inch Russian banker dude wanting me to look at some link!” Finally, Kostyuk ambushed her at school and urged her to view samples of Sila Sveta’s work on his laptop.
“I was immediately blown away,” she says. What sealed the deal for her was going to a Pollstar event with the team to show what they can do. “The reaction was explosive there, similar to what happened later at LDI,” she says. “People were flipping out over Sila Sveta’s work.”
Blackman went to Moscow and spent two weeks there. “That’s when I decided to commit. The designers and their work really resonated with me, so in August [of 2015] I came onboard as CEO of Silva Sveta, USA.”
While she’s building a team that will include project managers and tech directors, she emphasizes that creative will always be in Moscow. One challenge is simply cutting through the noise that is this market.
Previously, business had always come to them, but here in the States, they need to be proactive in their branding and marketing. “So we’re getting up to speed on that and once we get in front of somebody, there’s always the same ‘wow’ reaction.”
The immediate goal is to partner with others and create a sustainable pipeline for their work. She has already worked out a deal with Panasonic, which has a high-end projector but no content. In what also has to be a first, she got the company signed as a client to Hollywood Agency CAA. They will, of course, do that big Super Bowl-sized one off and that concert tour looking for something truly original, but the focus is primarily on the permanent installations. This includes large-scale architectural projects, museums, municipal projects, corporate events and car shows.
“There’s honestly no real competition doing what we do, especially as a ‘one stop shop,’” she says. “We create content, procure hardware and equipment, and provide staffing and management necessary for the installation or event.” Future plans including having offices in New York, Miami, Washington D.C., and Las Vegas. They also plan to have two warehouses, one on each coast.
Along with the advantage of its Russian roots in ensuring that Sila Sveta projects will have an interesting twist, there’s the company’s emphasis on what’s new. “There’s always an element of theater, but we’re always looking for a new, fresh hook that will attract people to whatever the client is creating,” Us says, adding, “Also, we’re hungry. We really want to show people in your market what we’re capable of!”
More information about Sila Sveta can be found at http://en.silasveta.com.
