muiLab's Award-Winning CES Launch Video

Category

Crowdfunding Video

Client

mui Lab

Country

USA/Japan

Runtime

2:37 min

Date

2018

Prodigium was tasked by muiLab with creating a launch video for a novel IoT device from Japan that would connect the audience with a unique, intelligent, wooden device. Our launch video lead to major press, additional funding, and muiLabs' win of the respected 2019 CES Innovation Award.

mui Lab's latest innovation is a beautiful smart home hub that looks like a single piece of wood mounted on the wall; when touched, it activates and becomes an interactive device that can control smart homes and help families communicate.

Given our bicultural proficiency, mui approached Prodigium to make an English-language launch video for the Japanese startup to enter the U.S. market through a crowdfunding campaign. Practically the entire U.S. technology press world reported on this successful launch.

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Case Study

mui is an interactive wood panel that becomes activated with a swipe of your finger. When it is not utilized, the panel remains sleep-mode and will become a beautifully-sanded wood furniture.

This was a challenging function to showcase to early adopters – there aren’t really any comparable devices on the market (wood that turns into translucent high tech), so we had to not only launch a product, but an idea. The project required multilingual management from conception to completion, and Prodigium’s producer Hiroki Kamada was up for the task, being perfectly fluent in both languages. We opted to work on the client’s time zone schedule to streamline communication.

Simultaneous Productions in Los Angeles & Kyoto (JP)

One of the obvious challenges for the mui to launch on Kickstarter video was that the company and its leadership are based in Kyoto, Japan. The launch video needed to have a global appeal, both transmitting a US-centric consumer base as well as an authentic portrayal of the Kyoto-based team that manufactured the device. We needed to film the product use cases in US, and the founder interviews / company portrait in Kyoto.

Thanks to the crew and vendor network we’ve been building for the past 10 years throughout Japan, we were able to offer great costs savings to our client and achieve the best quality possible while ensuring a safe multinational production.

Ava discovered this issue and worked tirelessly for two years to build a solution to the problem: An app that would transcribe conversations by using the participants’ smartphone microphones through speech recognition. By having multiple phones present and building voice profiles, the app is able to distinguish between voices and create a chat bubble-like transcription of the conversation. The deaf person can easily read along and contribute to the conversation by typing and using text to speech – all within Ava.

Video Release and Press Reaction

The release of the video immediately sparked press reaction. The device and the video were featured in articles on CNet ("Built to calm, not to distract"), The Verge, as well as numerous other outlets. Mui had an experienced PR team that utilized our video as a major pitch element to intrigue the press: what in the world is mui, after all?
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mui Lab then used the video and won three awards at reputable pitch contests, one after another. The crown to the accolades was a prestigious CES Innovation Award.