Company Retreat Production.

Flywheel's employee awards, bolted onto the winter retreat, which I wrote and produced four years running and hosted the first two. It was built like an awards show rather than a ceremony, with a script, nominee packages, live voting by text from the room, and a Best Picture montage cut from the year's department skits. Recognition lands differently when it arrives inside something people already want to watch.

Flyfest was a long-running in-person tradition, and 2020 was the year it had to happen with everyone suddenly working from home, so we went retro-futurist: an old-timey, deeply optimistic vision of the future, because a rosy picture of the future was the thing worth having that year. The wrapper was a host in a transatlantic accent asking the year's great questions. If a website goes headless, will cryogenics keep the head alive past a natural lifespan? If a sentient being across the cosmos wanted to sign up for our promotion, could their device even register the send button? Which is how you get a room to sit through a segment on accessibility. Vintage found footage, an original orchestral score, art direction from Bryan North and animation from Mike Ehrhart. Probably my favorite thing we ever made.

Two days in April on the theme of wellness, about putting time and energy into getting better and imagining a world where we were not all stuck inside. We built socially distanced, masked, carefully controlled studio setups in the Omaha office and in a hotel we rented in Austin, and had employees talk about what they were most excited about. A halftone aesthetic across the whole thing, with artwork built around employees, part of a bigger employee storytelling and photography push I was making at the time.

The WP Engine version of Flyfest, and the one where I went all the way with the keynote edit. The year's strategy shipped as named segments, Reimagine Marketing, Reimagine Product, Reimagine Go-To-Market, Elevate Operations and Thrive Together, each one its own film with its own owner, which is the formula sitting right there in the file names. The workforce was still almost entirely remote, roughly nine out of ten people working from home every day, so I was directing people to film themselves on their phones and flying to Austin to shoot the CEO on a rooftop with a camera and a drone. No teleprompters, just call and repeat. There were commercials. This was the year we introduced Walter P Engine, the wealthy mythological benefactor of the company, who was funding everybody's access to the employee store, and anyone who did not want swag could send their share to reforestation and environmental causes instead. An engagement program with a whole character and mythology behind it, dropped inside a strategy meeting.

Two days in person outside Austin with the virtual audience patched in, and a Texas cowboy theme I did not pick but committed to completely. The agenda was the keynote formula in a room, with the CEO opening, the CFO laying out the health of the business, and then each growth bet getting its own leader and its own film. Everything else carried the bit. Table numbers decoded into activities, the leadership Face Book ran on the TVs introducing every exec in full cowboy, and survey participation became a standings board with a Golden Nugget Club at the top and a Calamity Club at the bottom. Phones and laptops down, except during table activities.