In StudioFael, we have been working on building enough manpower to create short animated films and independent videogames and applications. Our jobs and our team's dayjobs are what we support ourselves with. We use our own appartment and our own services as resources. We ENDURE and remain STEADFAST towards our objective. We've had failed attempts at producing some projects... but nothing compared to the knowledge we gained from the experience.
Roberto Claudio Barron and myself, "Palifael" Espinosa, founded this company by teaching illustrators how to animate traditionally, 100% FREE OF CHARGE, if they wanted to learn it, all they had to do was ask. Many didn't know the basics of digital illustration, most didn't know the concept of
Sequential Art, or Language of Cinema. There was too much we wanted to do in a short time, and the correct training of all these new people as overwhelming. However, there was an interesting situation in the students... NO ONE WAS EVER LATE, NO ONE FLUNKED CLASS, THEY WERE WILLING TO DO ANYTHING YOU ASKED THEM. How could we not notice the
MANPOWER? What could we do to
HARNESS this
intense possibility of an actual productive FORCE?
We decided to intensify our rythm of study by assigning more hours of class during the week. Our purpose? to test our student's endurance while trying to identify at least 1 student ready to learn the 12 principles of animation and becoming an inbetweener and my right hand as creative director (with time as an issue one must delegate some work). Surprisingly, there were at least 5 students of 11 that proved to be very VERY talented. 1 of these still remains with us, and we have 2 girls that with some practice could reach this level in around 3 months of supervised classes.
Another of our students,
Sergio Carrasco, was actually a game designer and asked for our support in programming a videogame calle "MIMO" about a Mime's journey to a Lysergic and Odd universe. We all paused this project because we lacked the experience or knowledge to actually create the thing. Sergio founded
Pixcomp (http://www.pixcomp.com/) with the help of a local university before meeting with us, and eventually associated with the TECNOLÓGICO DE CULIACÁN University. He intends to empower his team by hard discipline, much by influence when working with us. We will train his artist, so they can give a much better quality of art in their game. We also became their associates.
Most of our students worked at a place called Culiacan Learning and Solution Center (CLSC). This company was soon to file for bankrupcy, leaving at least 30 possible programmers and Illustrators with animation aspirations to be unemployed. Among them we were tremendously lucky to find our newest, but not less powerful element,
Francisco Chavez. He has given us new possibilities as a productive force and allowed us to venture in creating our own first independent videogame.
We paused all classes and non profit projects, invited our selected students and started boucing up ideas using Google Wave. This improved our communication and allowed us to come up with a fun concept, an independent game called
CHOLOCOMMANDER, that celebrated our cultures stereotypical personalities, trying to present it to the world as a new proposal of a
Low Brow Fantasy Universe related to mexican culture the was anime portrays japanese culture.
This is where we will learn how things are done. Each one of us works 1 hour a day, 5 days a week, trying to maintain a steady productive rythm. Results are beggining to become noticed. Expect some updates via this blog.
