Today we’d like to introduce you to Andre Elijah.
Hi Andre, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My career has been all over the place, but the consistent theme has been that I’ve always worked at the cutting edge of technology.
In a previous life, I worked in the corporate world at Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as a Systems Analyst working on servers and Bloomberg terminals, then moved into a career in film. In that industry, I specialized in the RED cameras when they first launched and became known as the “Red Whisperer” supporting international productions and documentaries with on-set and post-production workflow services. I capped off my career in film working on Beyonce’s Elements of 4: Live At Roseland concert film, which consisted of a four-night stint at The Roseland Ballroom in NYC as well as shooting a segment for the Michael Jackson tribute concert. That project was the first of its kind to use 10 RED cameras in a multi-cam setup and was definitely pretty cutting edge at the time.
After that, I decided I wanted to get into games since I played so many of them. All of my heroes were game directors or designers, but the games industry seemed to be a pretty competitive space and I wanted to find my niche. Just as I was exploring getting into games, the second wave of VR was starting to take off with the Oculus Kickstarter finding success, Microsoft dipping their toes into AR with the HoloLens, and Valve’s collaboration with HTC on the Vive. I fundamentally clicked with the idea of making games and content for this new medium and wanted to take it on!
For years, my studio worked as an agency building projects for Meta, Qualcomm, Snap, AT&T, DirecTV, Uber Eats, The NFL, Shake Shack, and more, in addition to original immersive games and ports of existing popular titles to VR.
After a year of flying between Toronto and Los Angeles, I now live in West Hollywood with my wife and twin boys and run my studio Andre Elijah Immersive out of LA!
We have a number of titles in development for Meta’s Quest device and are constantly collaborating with the folks at Snap Inc. on a number of projects and activations!
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
I don’t think anything in this world goes smoothly!
Obviously, the pandemic was a crazy curveball that caught everyone off guard. How do you grow a business as a bootstrapped indie when the world is ending? How do you grow your audience and attract work from major brands?
Also, it doesn’t help that my area of focus is slightly niche and just now starting to catch on with mainstream audiences. So I suppose I didn’t make things very easy for myself from the outset.
Beyond that, geography is always a struggle. When Big Tech is booming in California and you live in the snow-covered city of Toronto and have to fly back and forth to LA every other week for a year, it definitely makes things more difficult.
Outside of those things though, I suppose the typical stuff that everyone goes up against!
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m an Immersive Director. In practical terms that means I direct and create Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality projects. Sometimes those projects are games, and sometimes they’re marketing activations for a brand in support of a campaign or physical event.
There have been a lot of great projects over the years!
I’m especially proud of my new game Amid Evil VR which is launching on Meta Quest and Steam on 4.20! That game was a pure labor of love and a three and a half year journey that I was on. Initially, I played the original flat-screen version of the game and loved it so much that I spammed the game’s publisher New Blood Interactive for 18 months begging them to let me bring the game to VR. Finally they agreed, and I turned around to pitch it to Meta for their headset. Three days later, they cleared us for a Quest release, and two years later, we just released the trailer to an amazing response from the fans!
Another group of projects were in support of last year’s New York Fashion Week. My team banged out three fantastic digital fashion projects within a month for Alo Yoga, Gigi Hadid’s Guest In Residence, and Lionne. Each project turned out amazingly well, allowing people to try out pieces from the various collections virtually. The reaction to the Augmented Reality Mirror we worked on with Snap and Alo was fantastic at the activation, and being part of the launch for Gigi Hadid’s brand was an amazing opportunity!
There are even some unreleased projects that you end up being proud of. One project that I worked on during the pandemic with Deadmau5 comes to mind. For that, we ended up building his stage inside of Unreal Engine, the same tool used to build Fortnite and managed to have it sync up with his physical stage show as a virtual simulcast. You could even record the show and play it back in real-time with next to no latency and scrub through it like a video but it would trigger all of the samples, effects, lights and video content with perfect timing!
We’re currently working on a number of really special projects to be released this year, so I’m sure I’ll be adding to this list soon enough!
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
If you’re a brand, IP holder or company that wants to enter the immersive space, just get in touch! I just moved to LA in January so I’d love to meet locals and get the lay of the land. Despite the fact that I was here every other week for a year, I was either in meetings or working out of my hotel, so I really need to get acclimated to Los Angeles and see how I can get more involved in the scenes here!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.AndreElijah.com
- Instagram: www.Instagram.com/AndreElijahImmersive
- Linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/andreelijah
- Twitter: www.Twitter.com/AndreElijah
