Shooting Gallery: Using booster "cantennas," Obscura created a wireless network over numerous NYC blocks to sync 14 $200,000 projectors in full HD splendor. | Photograph by James Deavin
Power Trio: (from left) Creative director, Travis Threlkel, production head Chris Lejeune, and CEO Patrick Connolly | Photograph by James Deavin
Searchlight Pictures: For the May relaunch of iGoogle, Obscura turned buildings (including Google's NYC HQ in the distance) into multi-story canvases. | Photograph by James Deavin
"The thing about working with these guys is you never know quite how a project's going to come out; you just know they have great taste and are going to wow everybody," says Andy Berndt, managing director of Google's creative lab. He booked Connolly and his crew to simultaneously project multistory artworks by Jeff Koons, Shepard Fairey, and others onto multiple buildings in Manhattan's Meatpacking District for the May relaunch of iGoogle. "It's not like you do one thing with them, and that's it. They call you up afterward and say, 'Hey, you guys have to come over and check this out,' " says Berndt. After GM hired the Obscura team to design a booth at the North American International Auto Show, GM digital marketing director Scott McLaren says he plans to keep calling Obscura ad infinitum. "They ask you, 'What do you need to get done?' and they take it as a personal challenge to get that done, regardless of your budget."
No one is more bemused by Obscura's success than its founder and creative director, Travis Threlkel. A long-haired former guitarist for the neo-psychedelic band the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Threlkel -- who never graduated from high school -- spent the mid-1990s holed up in his warehouse space creating off-the-wall visual effects. "I collected 100 film projectors, and I'd just set them up and let them all go," he says. "I wanted to take things that didn't exist and make them real." A tech autodidact, he started experimenting with projection techniques that allowed him to achieve a look where image and canvas were one. Obscura didn't make money at first (it is now profitable), but it did get props for wild originality. Threlkel's first big commission in 2002, a surround video display for Vue -- a now defunct New York club -- won an award from an industry trade magazine.
Enter Connolly, a dotcom veteran looking for his next big play (he headed Stockpoint, an early Internet stock-trading company that sold for $22.6 million in 2001). When an old fraternity brother introduced him to Threlkel in 2002, Connolly knew he'd found the perfect rehab project: great technology, hazy business plan. "I said, 'This is a very creative kid, but he needs some funding and management.' " Threlkel agrees: "I'm not such a good businessperson."
Like any fertile collaboration, their one-plus-one added up to something closer to pi. While Threlkel has always been a font of out-there ideas, it is Connolly's guidance that has transformed them into salable concepts. Take, for example, a slightly flawed virtual-reality video-gaming "pod" Threlkel designed: "Travis wasn't thinking about how the rapid motion might make people sick," Connolly says. "So I said, 'Let's calm this thing down and repurpose it to help people visualize real estate.' " Months later, Nakheel placed an order for the remixed pods to use as sales tools in each of its Dubai property showrooms.
As Obscura grew, Threlkel played the Pied Piper, convincing a motley crew of builders from Oregon to move to the Bay Area and construct über-domes, jumbo touch displays, and other fantastical video-projection treatments. "In 2000, I was running my family business in Oregon, Pacific Domes," says Chris Lejeune, Obscura's head of production. "Travis's first project with Obscura involved surround projection, so he called me up and we hit it off. I was intending to move to San Francisco anyway, so the timing was perfect." Lejeune and his building crew, who call themselves G-Bohs (for gypsy bohemians), feature dreadlocks, multiple piercings, and a postapocalyptic style. But their guiding ethos is straightforward: Failure is impossible.
Case in point: Forty-eight hours before the kickoff show of last year's multimedia Pioneer Electronics tour, the crew faced an odd snafu. "We hired a driver to transport our equipment to Phoenix," says Matty Dowlen, the head G-Boh, "but the guy decided it would be more fun to stop and have a little crack-and-poker break." Faced with blowing a gig with a high-profile client and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment, the crew launched a tech dragnet. Armed with only a cell number, they convinced the phone carrier to reveal the driver's recent call log, which included a call to a helpful prostitute. "When the crew caught up with the driver, thanks to the woman's tip, there were crack pipes and hookers all over the truck," Dowlen says. As he tells the story, the police were no help, claiming, "He was just late for work." Applying a little vigilante justice, the G-Bohs repossessed the truck and drove to the Phoenix show at breakneck speed, stranding the driver and his new friends in the desert dust. "We just worked around the clock and pulled it off," says Dowlen.
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