Located in Union Square in lower Manhattan, the Courageous enterprise currently boasts twenty full time employees from all media sectors and disciplines and a 12,000 square foot studio. “We have 4K cameras, drones and cranes to create beautiful branded content,” explains Bell (pictured at top). “Employees with editorial backgrounds, Emmy- and Morrow-winning journalists from companies like Mashable and VICE, video producers, documentarians, storytellers, web designers and developers, etc, all in-house. We are fully self-sufficient and never outsource.” Courageous has hit an inflection point, Bell reports, to air fourteen programs currently in production from around the world. “And,” he adds, “We are currently shooting aerial VR in Pennsylvania.” Their productions are designed to be format agnostic with the ability to reside comfortably across any platform and media type. The question, Bell says, becomes, “What is the right channel for the content we create? We find the unexplored angle for an advertiser’s traditional media buy.”
As part of its branded content effort, Courageous is producing a one-day event called Human By Design on August 3, 2016 at the Paley Center for Media in conjunction with client Square Enix to support the release of their video game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. “This video game is set thirteen years into the future but these are present tense problems,” says Bell. “There is human augmentation and mankind becomes divided between those who are augmented and improved with technology and others who are in an unadulterated state. Conflict ensues. These issues are bubbling up today.”