spanish version

How was Keytoon born?

The truth is that it was almost pure coincidence. None of us had a businessman spirit nor did we have the ambition of creating our own studio, but the moment came when our only option to work in a nice studio was to come out of Valencia or to found one ourselves, so that's what we tried before taking the decission to emmigrate.

The beginning surely was the riskiest stage. How was your experience with the first customers? Did they take long to come? Were you tempted to throw the towel at any moment?

At first it was like jumping to the void, we biuld keytoon from scratch without a single penny, a single client, using our own computers and renting a tiny place with some friends to be able to share the rent. One thing that was clear in our minds was that our best ally to find new customers was the internet. We tried to create images and little animation tests with the highest quality we were capable of and show them where possible to promote ourselves. Our relationship with Next Limit through Jonatan Catalan, Maxwell Render beta tester, was a great aid to help us to be better known.

That's how our first customers, first works, first dissapintments and first leg pullings, hehe. It's been tough, the business world is really harsh, but bit by bit you adapt yourself to it.. We learnt not to be afraid of negotiating things, or to say no, a difficult task in the beginnings.

The truth is we never decided to quit, but anxiety and stress have always been there. To have an studio carries a lot of resonsibilty, more so when it is growing. There's always worries or things to do... that is one of the things you kiss from working as an employee, to totally disconnect from work when turning off the computer.

What tools do you usually use?

Most of us are max users, but sometimes we use Zbrush as well for modelling. We have built some tools for max in the studio to speed up the production tasks.

We use Maxwell to render and then the typical apps like Photoshop, Flash, After Effects, Combustion...

We use current PCs with good videocards and a couple of monitors for each, so it is nothing special. Luckily for us, we have a little render farm with 15 Dual Xeon that we are slowly expanding as we are able to.

Have you got any new project in mind?

We have just finished a little short called "The Grandfather of Soul".

It is a funny music videoclip in which Dr. Maxwell (who has been the main character in some of our animations) dresses up sixties' style to sing "I feel good" from James Brown. We did not intend to, because we started the short months ago, but at the end it has become a posthumous hommage to the singer.

Can you tell us a bit more about the film? How long did it take you to do it, how many people were involved?

Being this a project we have been doing between jobs, the production stage has taken much longer than the actual time we spent doing it. We started our first designs in August 2006, and the sound FX were finished by December.

The team that worked in the short has been quite small. Jaime Maestro assumed direction tasks as well as the animation in some shots, but Dani Peixe was the one who did the majority of the animation. Luis San Juan and Rudi Hammad rigged the characters and Santi Agustí -Sapone- was in charge of the postproduction. Toni Reyna, Chams Farhad and Sebastián Sanz designed the environment and props, while the modelling and texturing of the environment as well as the lighting was done by Jonatan Catalá. In charge of the production have been David Lacruz and Cecile Hokes, and Nina Rappaport has been the executive producer. To finish, we would like to thank people from SPLASH STUDIOS NYC for the great work they have done with the sound production.

When you are working for others, is there any room for personal ideas and creativity?

It always depends on the customer. Some people thave a clear idea of what they want and they and they give you clear guidelines of what they want, but there are others who trust more in our creativity, they only give us some hints and they give us total freedom from design to post production.

Anyway, there is always something to interpret our way or to create from scratch, and there is where you provide your little something.

You have worked on several different projects. What has this variety thaught you?

Maybe what you learn the most is how to have a better communication with the customer to avoid useless work or to repeat things. We apply our own quality standards so the customer has few excuses to refuse the work. We try to avoid "send it and see what happens" because what happens, more so in the USA, is that it is refused.

Has your methodology changed much since your beginnings?

Yes, but it still has to improve a lot. We always try to improve our pipeline. We have changed our folder system several times in order to optimize it as much as possible, and also the order in what we develop the tasks to be able to work more and in a better way.

What do you think is Keytoon's growth due to?

That has been without a doubt the arrival of Nina Rappaport, our associate and executive producer, not only because of the works we have done thanks to her, but for the things she has taught us. In fact, we like to show off every once in a while because she has an Oscar, hehe.

Six months from keytoon starts we received an email from Nina, when we researched a bit who she was we couldn't believe that she had been Bluesky's executive producer for seven years!
She told us that she had seen our works on the internet and that she wanted to be our agent in the USA, but the relationship was so close that she ended up being another asssociate and our executive producer. We have just opened a branch office in SF and created Keytoon Inc.!

The truth is we all are very lucky to keep the studio running and under constant growth. We changed from being three friends with their computers in a tiny office (Alex Mateo, Jonatan Catalan and Jaime Maestro) to have three more partners (David Cuevas, Jonatan Cuevas and Nina Rappaport) and a good numbere of proffesionals.

You have several international projects. What are the differents when working for abroad?

The truth is that we work much more for abroad than we do for Spain. Our own experience tells us that, apart from budget or payment issues (usually better when not working for Spain), the main difference relies on that you feel a better appreciation for quality, they know that quality means more time and money. Sadly, in Spain the objective is the budget, the lower the better, and to send the work in a hurry with the minimal quality enough to gat the ok from the customer. There are always exeptions, like with Disney Channel, with whom we have been feeling very comfortable working for some time now.

We have always put a bet of making things with a high quality standards and to look for customers who share that values with us, even thought that has made us to decline work offers more than once, apart from the budget they offer. One of our premises is not to work on things we won't be able to show.

What kind of projects do you feel most confortable with?

With the most demanding ones at a creative level, more so with the really challenging ones. Those are the ones me most enjoy, even though those are the ones taht require most time.

Sometimes it has those advantages to work for others, every project is different from the one coming.

How long can it take to finish a project, from the start to the final render?

Like everything, it depends on the kind of project, from jobs that you have to complete in a couple of days to others that take us three months, but the average is some weeks.