WORKING WITH THE STUDIO
One practice, both ends of the work.
Most of what follows is already visible in the fields: the work, the tools it left behind, the notes written while it happened. This page is the plain version — what can be handed over, what stays with you afterwards, and how a first message turns into a first week.
In production since 2009 · ЦНФ-Анимация · Parovoz · CHEil/Samsung
01 / THE CHOICE IN FRONT OF YOU
Three reasonable options, and what each one costs you.
A production problem that touches both picture and system usually gets handed to one of three places. All of them work. Each leaves something behind.
- A larger studioCapacity and process, and the result arrives. The pipeline that produced it stays inside the studio, and the next season starts by buying it again.
- An artistThe frame is right, because someone with taste made it. The scene behind it is built for one pair of hands, and the first revision after they leave is expensive.
- A technical developerThe tool gets written, and it does what the specification says. What it does not know is what the image needs, so it is correct and unusable at the same time.
This studio is the fourth answer, and the only argument for it is the order of work: every tool here began as an obstacle in the studio's own film, was solved as an artist first, and only then made reusable. That is why the picture and the system arrive together — and why the instrument is written to survive its author, because the first author it had to survive was us.
02 / WAYS IN
Four shapes the work takes.
01
Take a stage
- YOU BRING
- a sequence, an effect, an environment or a Blender or Houdini stage inside a larger production
- WHAT STAYS
- the finished work, plus scenes another artist can open, understand and change
- HOW IT STARTS
- you send the shot list or the scene; we say what we would take and what we would not
02
Repair what has started to drift
- YOU BRING
- a fragile pipeline, a hand-off that loses data, a scene only its author can open
- WHAT STAYS
- one real bottleneck diagnosed and fixed in production, documented for the next person
- HOW IT STARTS
- you name one place where time is leaking; we look at it before promising anything
03
Build the instrument that is missing
- YOU BRING
- a step repeated by hand, non-standard data with no route into the scene, a task with no tool
- WHAT STAYS
- an add-on or automation with parameters that mean something, safe defaults, loud failure and documentation written for whoever inherits it
- HOW IT STARTS
- you describe the repeated step; we say whether it is worth a tool or worth an hour
04
Build a world that survives its revisions
- YOU BRING
- an environment, a system or a class of objects that cannot be rebuilt by hand for every change
- WHAT STAYS
- a reproducible system: the same place returns from the same seed, and the brief can change without starting over
- HOW IT STARTS
- you bring the world and the changes you expect; we design for the changes first
03 / THE FIRST STEP
A first message is not a commitment.
What we answer in the first round is deliberately narrow, because it is the part that costs you nothing and tells you the most:
- 01
whether this is work we should take at all, said plainly if it is not
- 02
which single part of it we would start with, and why that one
- 03
what would be in your hands at the end of that part
- 04
what we would need from you for it — files, access, or a decision nobody has made yet
And when the situation needs a real look, not an opinion:
600 € · fixed · result within three days
One bottleneck taken apart properly and written up: what is actually wrong, what we would do about it, and what that would leave you with.
If we start the work after it, those 600 € come off its price: the report is not a separate bill, it is the first part of the job.
04 / ASKED IN EVERY FIRST LETTER
The questions that come anyway.
- What do I actually receive?
- The work itself, and the thing that made it: scenes with production naming and exposed parameters, and — where a tool was built — the tool with its documentation. A scene should not depend on the memory of the person who built it.
- Can you work inside our pipeline?
- Yes. Work can join as production support, take responsibility for a defined stage, or sit inside an existing studio pipeline, with hand-off into Nuke or After Effects where a shot needs it. Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Nuke and Houdini came before Blender in the production history, so the hand-off is designed, not improvised.
- What happens when the brief changes?
- That is the assumption the work is built on. Procedural setups are re-run rather than rebuilt, environments come back from a seed and coordinates, and the controls that are expected to move are the ones exposed. Late changes are a condition, not an accident.
- Who does the work?
- The studio is independent and small by design: the person who builds the shot is the person who sees where the process is fragile, which is why the tools exist at all. Production background is CG since 2009 — animation, broadcast graphics, advertising, rendering, compositing, then technical art and R&D.
- What does it cost to start?
- Answering a first letter costs nothing: we say whether this is work we should take at all and which part we would start with. The first paid step is 600 €, fixed and named in advance, with the result in your hands within three days: one bottleneck taken apart properly and written up — what is actually wrong, what we would do about it, and what it would leave you with. If the work goes ahead, those 600 € come off its price. The cost of the work itself is agreed after the report, when both sides know what the work is.
- Who owns what afterwards?
- The work is yours: scenes, renders, project files and the documented setup. The studio's own instruments — the add-ons, digital assets and engines they grew into — stay with the studio, and you get the right to use them in the work they were built for. This is said before anything starts, because those instruments are the reason the work looks the way it does.
- Do you sign an NDA?
- Yes, as a matter of course. Unreleased games, films and production pipelines are the normal case here rather than the exception.
- Will our project appear on this site?
- Only if you are content for it to. The studio log runs on the studio's own work by default; a client project enters the dailies or the cases when you agree to it, and stays out of sight until then.
- Languages and time zone?
- Working remotely in English and Russian, Serbian conversationally, from Belgrade on Central European time. The site itself is kept in five languages for the same reason.
05 / START
Bring one place where the work is stuck.
A repeated task, a fragile scene, a difficult hand-off, or a picture that exists only as an idea so far — any of them is enough for a first letter.
Bird@InTheLES.studio↗