Melanie Capacia Johnson heads the scripted, unscripted, animation and interactive studio business for Whistle Studios (the studio arm for Team Whistle), a next generation publisher, agency and studio which specializes in telling 360 degree stories around the most inspiring stories in sports and entertainment. The studio at Team Whistle has developed a broad range of capabilities based on the need to create whole storytelling environments for Millennial and Gen Z audiences that have no real preference for formats, but expect a full story ecosystem to exist between feature films, digital originals, vertically-formated interactive programming and native social programming. While at Whistle, Melanie and the studio teams have produced projects with Dwayne Wade (Legacy), Carmelo Anthony (Fight Ball) and Steph Curry (NAACP-nominated Benedict Men) which spanned premium streamers, SnapChat, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Whistle’s owned channels with interconnected programming that gives audiences dozens of engagement routes based on their consumption preferences.

Creating stories that stitch together this multi-format approach from inception has been a core approach to Melanie’s career over the past decade. Melanie began her career as an independent film producer before migrating to live and unscripted programming at Viacom where she worked across MTV Movie Awards, Video Music Awards, Hip Hop Honors, Rock Honors, VH-1 Divas, Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards. Following Viacom, she co-founded Tiny Horse to work alongside major format owners like Simon Cowell’s Syco Entertainment, Talpa, ITV, BBC America, A Smith Productions and many more to help them secure rights and produce programming that would ensure audiences outside of the television ecosystem (where the majority of Millennials and Gen Z spend their entertainment time) could engage with these predominantly TV-based IPs. In 2020, Tiny Horse was acquired by Whistle Sports (who had previously acquired NewForm and Vertical Networks), creating Team Whistle.