Tobi and Sebastian met at uni­ver­sity, when they were study­ing film and anima­tion, and went on to work for a German music television channel. Nik joined the staff of that tele­vi­sion station some time later, and we were colleagues there for a number of years before leaving to start our own business.

Well, first of all, we usually start with coffee, like prob­ably most studios around the world. As the studio has grown over the years, there are of course many more business aspects to the daily routine than when we started. But after 1.5 hours, we are ready to go and that's usually when Nik shows up.

We have a pretty wide range of services that we offer. Over the years, we've fo­cused a lot on 3D-motion graphics. But we also do TV chan­nel branding, explainer films, music videos, live event media, character ani­ma­tion, inter­active design, projection mapping, and even some print design.

It depends on the size of a project how we ap­proach our process. Usually one of us is "in charge" of a project. This person must know what is what at all times and com­mu­ni­cate with the client. For larger pro­jects, we split up the man­age­ment more and dele­gate certain parts like Design & Con­cept, Tech­ni­cal Ap­proach & Ren­der­ing, Pro­ject & Free­lancer Man­age­ment inter­nally. In our case, this enhanced man­age­ment actually improves overall quality and helps the people involved stay sane.

One of our first inspirations was xplsv.tv (online from 2004 to 2010). That was actually the first time we realized there is a real com­mu­nity and even a job profile, which was exactly what we wanted to do. Further­more, Motionog­ra­pher and Vimeo were our main sources of inspi­ration.

As time went by, it changed a lot, today there is no longer the one place where you can watch the newest, freshest stuff because it is all over the place. Insta­gram, TikTok, Face­book, Vimeo, You­tube, Pinterest... and the list goes on. Sometimes we wish for the simpler times back.

We put a lot of time into the concept phase, much more than we nor­mal­ly do, because in the daily business you just don't have the time and budget to spend weeks devel­oping ideas or even follow­ing dead-end ideas and starting over two weeks later.

We've been going to the TOCA ME Design Con­fer­ence for several years now and every time we sit there and watch these incred­ible talks and pre­sen­ta­tions. After each pre­sen­ta­tion you start to think, this is what I want to explore next. And some minutes later you're already on to the next topic and inspired by a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent art form. At the end of the con­fer­ence, you go home with so many inspir­ing talks and ideas and they start to mix together.

So our main idea was to show each speaker as a sort of creature in its own environ­ment, influ­enced by the previous creature and passing on the spark of in­spi­ra­tion, just like our experience when we attend the conference.