Published in the winter 2010 issue of MyLIFE magazine
Jason Yim and Trigger design Web sites and games to market big Hollywood movies.
If you have recently visited a Web site for a major Hollywood movie, chances are it was produced by Jason Yim and Trigger, LLC. Yim is the founder and executive director of Trigger. His company has been producing rich-media digital marketing campaigns for Hollywood releases for more than 10 years. The firm’s past and current clients are among the biggest brands in the entertainment industry and, as a result, their talent has unquestionably earned the company prestige.
“Digital marketing is no longer just Web design,” Yim said. Trigger not only creates award-winning Web sites, but it also develops online games, mobile phone marketing and gaming, and social media marketing. Last summer, the company worked on campaigns for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek and Transformers 2.
Trigger has a wide range of talent in-house, with offices in L.A. and Shanghai. “The great thing is that we have such a mix,” Yim said. “We have project managers and account managers that manage our clients’ expectations. We have highly technical people like the programmers and the creative group divided into graphic designers, flash animators … a whole 3D team that we pulled from a lot of the gaming development studios. They do all the modeling and create the animation for the games.” Trigger even has a music composer on staff.
Yim attained a degree in graphic design from UCLA in 1995, when visual Web sites were starting to appear on the Internet. While in school, Yim’s assignments focused on the Internet. “One of our professors had us look into this stuff versus working on CD- ROM … that kind of media. A couple of us from school did a big presentation at a conference in L.A., and we got a lot of interest,” Yim noted.
The group decided to start a company soon after that, working out of an apartment. “This was before any fame or fortune from Internet work,” he added with a smile. These days, Trigger generates about $5 million a year.
Yim’s first movie-related project was to create a screensaver for Independence Day. Later, he designed the Web sites for Spiderman 1, 2 and 3. “Those films made our name,” said Yim. Trigger’s portfolio expanded to include projects for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Hancock, Cars MMO and Angels & Demons. The company’s most recent projects include Web site designs and games for 2012, District 9, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Planet 51.
Yim hopes that people will realize the amount of time Trigger puts into designing Web sites and games. His strategy of using video games to market movies across all new media is brilliant and has paid off. The firm’s creations continue to enhance the excitement around new releases and certainly help take a movie’s popularity to a whole new level.
