Building Our Brand Voice

Chris Plunkett // Co-Founder, StoneStreet Cinema

StoneStreet was established in 2016 as a vessel to explore new narrative film ideas. We bought ourselves a camera and got to writing. After one long year and a slew of in-house short film projects, we decided to ramp up our offerings and dive into the commercial market.

October 2017 // Our First Real Client

In October of 2017, we booked our first real job. Douglas Elliman Real Estate approached us (through a friend) and asked us if we would produce a 2-3 minute piece of internal content based around some new technology they were developing. That was it. Check in hand, we were giddy with the idea that we could actually make non-narrative productions happen. After a successful production, we formally came to market and really began the push for more commercial and corporate work.

2017 to 2018 // Who Are We?

Starting a production company, a commercial production company, is not an undertaking that comes with a clear and concise set of instructions. There is no handbook or reference guide, which we learned quite quickly. There’s a lot of (good) competition , a lot of pressure, and no steadfast rules. There’s no surefire way to land clients and literally everything is variable.

We’ve existed in the market for a few years and have been lucky to have some wholesome contracts. We moved into an office and things were on the come up… until they weren’t.

This is hard.

After many meetings, phone calls, coffee dates and rejections, we found we had a major issue. Our brand is clean, it has a direction, but it isn’t obvious to the public. When someone looks at our site, what is the takeaway? Why would they come to StoneStreet? What’s this company’s deal? What’s their voice? These were the questions that we could personally answer, but we needed to make those answers clear to our audience.

2019 // Re-Developing

Come 2019, we began a deep dive into our brand development. We generated a brand guide, a pitch deck, completed a SWOT analysis and numerous other exploratory exercises. After several revisions, we began to discover the company that we wanted to be.

StoneStreet is here to shake things up. We’re here to produce thought-provoking content. The eye-grabbing. The evocative. The WTF. The etc.

We want to work with companies who value and trade in aesthetics. We want to work with companies who favor the bold ideas over the safe ones. Companies who want to try something new and maybe even difficult. Companies who are loud, but want to be louder.

StoneStreet is about to crank up the volume.

These Things Take time

Discovering the deeper aspects of our company didn’t happen overnight. It took many conversations. Hard conversations. Creative conversations. Lots of spitballing. Lots of revising. Some trial-and-error. Some failures. In the end, a company is an ever-evolving being. It’s a living/breathing thing that has to be able to adapt to adversity, changing markets, new trends and new technology.