Germany: Parasol Island

Despite a laidback beach-life name and its genesis as a collaboration between four lads sharing a flat in a party zone, Parasol Island is an efficient, highly adaptable production company, its work for big clients like Audi revealing not a little vorsprung durch technik.

They say that you don’t really know someone until you’ve lived with them and, by that philosophy, you could never have accused Parasol Island’s founding members of going into business together with their eyes closed.

Just 10 years ago, Philip Hansen, Charles Bals, Moritz von Schrötter and Sebastian Druschel, who had previously attended high school together in Düsseldorf, were all living in a flat in the city’s party-friendly old town that doubled as the first office for their fledgling company, Parasol Island.

The friends and the company have come a long way since then. Now employing a total of 55 full-time staff at two locations, Parasol Island is firmly established as a creative production studio working across multiple formats including film, animation, VFX, music and interactive, and prides itself on being able to offer creative and brand building solutions, as well as website, app and digital development.

“We can do everything and that’s what has kept us busy,” says von Schrötter. “People are looking for other ways to tell stories now. Clients are asking for hybrid projects and we present ourselves as the place for hybrid stuff.”

The kinds of projects he’s talking about include the direct-to-client work that PI has done for exclusive Berlin department store KaDeWe, including rebuilding the front and back ends of its website and redesigning its online shopping experience. A similar project was completed for Natsu Foods, although PI is also a dab hand at more traditional work too.

Adapt and survive

With several in-house directors, the output of the company’s film department is akin to that of a German car factory (a sector that PI has a particularly strong reel for) in efficiency and quality. Bals, one of the founders and chief creative director, has a particular flair for fashion films and heads PI’s brand-new Another Slang division, which is dedicated to the creation of content for the fashion and contemporary culture industries. Another of the founders, Philip Hansen, is an animation and VFX specialist, while Denis Guth is an up-and-coming live-action director/DP and Stephan Wever is a director/editor with a special interest for macro and highly technical, challenging shoots. PI also reps Passion Raw’s directors exclusively in Germany.

Recent TV and web films for brands including Nivea, Red Bull F1, Ford, Audi, L’Oreal and LG all stand out on the company’s reel, as well as a collection of 80s cartoon-style idents for MTV, executed with razor-sharp accuracy. PI has also produced films for two big award-laden campaigns this year, the 11-Lion winning WWF Ant Rally through Proximity BBDO Düsseldorf and Days of Hope through Saatchi & Saatchi Düsseldorf.

Web film Sharper Drive for Audi A5 is a good example of PI’s capabilities. The company worked with agency Philipp & Keuntje Hamburg from an early stage to ensure the car would appear to ‘cut’ through the salt flats it would drive across to show off its new, sharper lines – which had to be added in via CGI as the new model was not available for the shoot. PI also developed a brand-new software tool for creating the ad’s stunning sky effects.

This capacity for adaptability flows through the company like blood through veins. “We shifted from offering motion graphics to VFX because people didn’t want motion graphics anymore,” says von Schrötter, to illustrate the point.

Take a tour of the company’s Düsseldorf HQ and you’ll get a feel for its fluid state. Housed in an old mustard factory, the vast space, which would likely be crammed with hundreds of people in a city like London or New York, houses around 48 staff in the film, animation and interactive departments, as well as a small film studio and full recording studio where pensive in-house composer Jonathan Wulfes spends his days concocting tracks in styles ranging from dubstep to pop. The building is a producer’s adventure playground. “Timescales are shorter these days, so having everything in-house means we can communicate quicker,” explains von Schrötter. 

Taking over the world, slowly

Despite its comfortable home, Parasol Island is growing. Two years ago its Berlin office opened in order to tap into the country’s “creative hub”, as von Schrötter puts it. “It’s another pool of talent [to draw from].” Although there are only seven employees currently in Berlin, another of the founders, Sebastian Druschel, isn’t in a hurry to attempt world domination. “We’re committed to a healthy growth, but this means there’s no rush!” he says. “We are well positioned and in the medium term we can imagine expanding internationally.”

Whether or not they decide to take their unique, hybrid brand of creative brainpower and slick production to foreign shores, Parasol Island’s founders have already achieved a great deal in the past decade. Not bad for four school friends who started out of a single, party-zone apartment.