Established in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles in 2010. co-founded by: Austin Saya and rickey y. Kim
in memory of Michael j. Saya and his entrepreneurial spirit.
Director, Austin Saya met Creative Director Rickey Y. Kim (RYK) on a chance encounter in an artist loft space in downtown Los Angeles. They bonded over literature like J.D Salinger's Nine Stories, H.G Wells' The Time Machine and films like The Holy Mountain, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Baraka. They began having regular meetings diving into art of all mediums while expressing their mutual admiration for film. It was from these meetings where the idea for the film/art studio CHARLOTTEBOBCATS.COM would be born. An idea based in pre-social media internet sabotage.
In 2004, Austin's father Michael J. Saya got the idea for purchasing the charlottebobcats.com url before the expansion team could do it themselves. The new team ownership ran an ad in the local Charlotte Observer newspaper suggesting that the fans should name the team giving four multiple choice options. When Michael read this he quickly figured out two things: 1, every NBA team owned a website that had the city and the mascot as a dot com and 2, the new owner of the expansion team was the co-founder of the tv network BET, Bob Johnson. Michael thought, "this man is from the tv world, I bet he names the team after himself". Michael was an entrepreneur through and through and had no connection to the sports world, but he relished in finding the next great opportunity. When he acquired the site, the team tried to buy it off him for many years but never hit the right price. I like to think he enjoyed having something that was sought after and delighted in keeping it. He held onto to the site until his passing in 2010.
In those first creative meetings between Rickey and Austin, they shared the common goal that something needed to be done with this url, the traffic it gained alone without anything being up on the website except a Charlotte Bobcats score ticker was, to put it lightly immense for those times. The co-founders knew that their hearts lied in video experiments so they crafted a plan to shoot a video all in one take, for 30 minutes of a man simply sitting on a chair in room by himself trying to open a suitcase with orange fur sticking out of it and not getting it open until the final seconds. They thought: "Will anyone watch this?" The video quickly got 250k views in a short span of time.
Rickey posed the idea that they should start creating fake commercials for companies that do not exist to poke at the internet and see what it would give back. So they did. After meeting a kindred spirit, writer/producer Brendan Countee who had a comedic script idea about "race walking", they created a fake shoe company called Gordies based on the idea that walking was cooler than running. They produced the video with a small run and gun team all over Los Angeles where Brendan played the main character Gordie, who walks from the city straight into the ocean. The commercial culminates with a title superimposed over the sand: Keep Walking. That video went on to get the attention of the ESPN acquired Bill Simmons' blog: The Grantland. An interview and article came out and from that press real commercial clients followed, garnering over a decade of commercial production success.
In 2023, after a 13 year run of wild experimental videos, short films, high profile music videos and commercials, Austin closed the film/art studio to begin a new venture. This site will remain up as a testament to the spirit of internet sabotage.
For all inquiries please contact: infobobcats@gmail.com