We – two filmmakers from Austria and Japan – met during college in Los Angeles in 2009. We happened to live in the same apartment building, and our fascination for film quickly forged a friendship. Upon graduation, as passionate international students, we decided to start own business in 2011. We knew nothing about business, but we were ready to give it our all. Over the years, we learned that great storytelling has the power to move people  – and the world, in extension.

In 2013, we teamed up with Robert Rippberger to start the online platform Cinema of Change, a place where people can discuss how film and TV made an impact in society, both good and bad. Through screenings of SIE (Social Impact Entertainment) films and interviewing world-renowned psychologists, our friends and us debated for hours and hours to understand what inspired people to take action after watching these films. Two years later, we completely pivoted Prodigium towards SIE. The deeper we dove, the more we saw ourselves as bridge-builders in a disconnected world of do-gooders.

In 2016, we saw that the Japanese film community was extremely fragmented and had a hard time accessing cutting-edge education. We teamed up with Adoir and together, we launched what is now Japan’s biggest online education platform for filmmakers: VOOK. We published more than 100 educational articles and made dozens of video tutorials for young filmmakers, all in Japanese. 

We celebrated successes along the way as we built our method – like launching our mission-driven client Ava to 30,000 downloads in 3 days without spending a dime on ad buys, or producing the feature film “Strive” (starring Danny Glover) in Harlem and doing our part to provide positive role models to audiences around the world.

Whenever we could, we chose to deepen our first-hand immersive experiences in different cultures and gain an in-depth understanding of humanity around the globe. This journey took us to live in Canada, Peru, New Zealand, Austria, Japan and the United States, eventually returning to our home base in Los Angeles. 

One of the discoveries we made along the way was SBCC, a large community of international development professionals dedicated to leveraging storytelling for wide-sweeping social development around the globe. Armed with more than 8 years of research in 5 continents led us to firmly believe that what we can transform human cooperation and culture in a positive way. This power of ethical storytelling comes with great responsibility. 

We are now in the process of becoming a certified B-corp production company, which is very rare in the film and advertising industries. Our core values are completely aligned with the vision of B-corp, which is a very diverse community of businesses with the intention of using business as a force of good. As of 2020, we became founding members of the SIE Society, the first trade association for the field of Social Impact Entertainment.

We use that expertise to empower our clients with high-end impact videos to disrupt their industries, succeed in business and make the world a better place – together.