Prodigium's Story

We - two filmmakers from Austria and Japan - started experimenting with filming in Santa Monica community college. One of us remembered we met at a bus stop and the other remembered we met at our school film festival. After we saw each other’s film, we quickly became friends. Upon graduation, as passionate international students, it came naturally to start our own business in 2011. We knew nothing about business, but we were definitely ready to give everything to take all experiences ahead to make the best of us. Today, with nearly 10 years of experiences as an award winning production company, we learned a lot more about what we can do through our business and what we want to achieve. And that is to make the world a better place for all. In early stage of our business, we learned, mostly from cinema, that great storytelling has a power to move people and the world as an extension. In 2015, we decided to describe what we do as “social impact through entertainment” because we felt it captured the essence of who we were. Right away we discovered the whole community of Social Impact Entertainment (a.k.a. SIE). Since then we continued to participate in bringing this community forward by actively engaging with the community members. We teamed up with Robert Rippberger to start the online platform called Cinema of Change, a place where people can discuss how cinema made a historic impact in our society, good and bad. Through screenings of SIE films, our friends and we discussed hours and hours to understand what inspired people to take actions after watching these films.After seeing Japanese film community was extremely fragmented to access education, we also teamed up with Adoir - Japanese startup - to start the today’s biggest online education platform for filmmakers in Japan called VOOK in 2016 and wrote more than 100 educational content and made dozens of video tutorials for young filmmakers. And whenever we could, we both lived in different parts of the world (literally) to have more first-hand experiences to be immersed in different cultures and have more in-depth understanding. One of the discoveries was SBCC, which is a huge crowd of people only to discuss social behavioral science. This discovery led us to firmly believe that what we can really transform how each person think and feel about something they experience through our work. That is our responsibility. For taking all of these experiences into action, we are in the process of becoming a certified B-corp production company, which is really rare in our industry. But we feel strongly that our core values are completely aligned with the vision of B-corp, which is a very diverse community of businesses with intention of using business as a force of good. Also we are the founding members of SIE Society (soon to be non-profit) where we curate fact-based research of SIE and really empower the community to improve our industry inside out. We are taking all of our expertises to help tech-driven business to have a successful strategy and video for their launch to disrupt their own industry, succeed in their business and hopefully move their industry forward to make the world a better place, together.