Welcome to Quick Dev Insights. A series of bite-sized interviews with people who work in and around the gaming industry, from indie to AAA. A full list of these interviews can be found Here and you can follow my Chirping to find out when new ones will be released!
Some members of the Rekindled team at Develop Brighton in the UK (left to right: Liam Lambert, Yogi Patel, Rob Moody)
Introduce Yourself / Rekindled
Hey! My name is Rob MoodyI'm a 'hands-on' lead animator and co-founder of Rekindled Studios! I've been in the video game industry for almost 15 years, working on a variety of projects from indie to AAA.
Our studio, Rekindled, was founded over 2 and a half years ago (wow, time flies!) by myself and a technical animator, Siobhan Maracle.
Rekindled is an animation and character art house specializing in game development. We love working on co-development deals and integrating with different studios, ranging from large AAA studios where we become an extension of their team, to working with small indie studios where we take care of the entire character art or animation pipeline for the project!
What inspired you to open your own animation outsourcing studio?
Siobhan and I worked together for 7 or 8 years at different studios on many projects and the last big studio we worked at ran out of in-house work so they started hiring us. We really enjoyed the idea of being mercenary artists, meeting lots of new developers, working on different styles, learning new pipelines and tools.
Siobhan and I worked well as a small unit, Siobhan being a technical animator (the brains) and me being an animator (the creative) we were able to collaborate and tackle any problem or feature. And after a few years, we thought we could do it ourselves and be able to pick and choose interesting projects and teams to work with, so we did! And Rekindled was born.
How did you initially choose who to collaborate with?
I was the first one to have the idea to open a practice, but I knew I couldn't do it alone. I struggle with administration, I tend to do things first and think later and I'm a bit scatterbrained, so luckily for me Siobhan didn't take much convincing. She has a very logical mind that keeps the business on track. A good analogy is that at Rekindled I have my foot on the accelerator while Siobhan puts the handbrake on, resulting in the practice moving at a nice, steady pace!
In terms of splitting the workload for running the studio, I do a lot of client-side pitching and meetings, while Siobhan likes to run the back end and support the studio. However, we both spend most of our time doing what we love, which is developing and animating. As for the most important skill, I would say it is communication. We talk about everything through thick and thin, being 100% transparent and seeking guidance from another perspective.
What are the biggest challenges and how are things different from what you expected?
I think the biggest challenges so far have been scaling up the studio team and then managing more projects. We started as a 2 man band and quickly felt the need for an extra pair of hands to cope with the demand. Initially, I thought bringing in a few more animators to help us out would make things easier, and in the beginning it did! We had more skills on hand, more bandwidth and more brains to bounce ideas off of. It wasn't until a couple months later that we realised we had no idea how to run a larger studio. Keeping employees engaged and engaged meant working with multiple studios and multiple Slack servers to monitor. We were working remotely only, Discord was our office and we didn't have regular meetings or syncs, everything was a bit impromptu. We were still working on it and as a result, we felt people felt quite isolated and a bit lost. To combat this, we now have 2 syncs a day, a short 15 minute discipline sync in the morning and a larger studio-wide sync at the end of the day. Additionally, we scheduled two animation reviews with the team, allowing team members to prepare in advance, which streamlines the meeting.
Another recent challenge was to let everyone know that we also offer character illustrations! My friend Yogi Patel joined us this year to create a character art team that allows us to offer the entire end-to-end pipeline, from character art to rigging to animation. It's something we've always wanted to have in place at Rekindled. The challenge is that we're currently known as an animation studio, but hopefully by 2025 we can prove ourselves to be more!
Is there anything you would do differently if you were starting over?
Honestly, I'm not sure I would do anything differently again. Life is a journey, you learn a lot from mistakes and adventures into the unknown. The biggest unknown for us was the business side, we had the animation down pat, happily working on several exciting ideas and pushing the boundaries… However, we were complete newbies to running a business. Learning what a good contract looks like, NDA, licensing, pensions, accounting, corporate tax etc. It was a steep learning curve! But very rewarding.
Are there any resources you think could help someone start their own outsourcing firm?
There are many resources that help small businesses navigate their adventures. We highly recommend using CreativeUKs Coursesthey run 4 a year, each aiming to help studios at different stages of their progression. From foundations for first time entrepreneurs, to scaling a business, then investment ready businesses. The courses are very affordable, £250 per studio, the rest is government subsidised and you are placed in a cohort of like minded entrepreneurs. We completed the expansion module and as part of the course we met Rebecca from YellowJumper who was assigned as a business mentor for us. This was a fantastic bonus and worth its weight in gold. I would highly recommend this to any small business owner in the gaming industry.
Where to find more about yourself / Rekindled
If anyone would like to know more about Rekindled or its services, they can visit our website: https://www.rekindled.uk/ or check us out on LinkedIn.
I've also learned that networking is truly the superpower that everyone in the gaming industry needs, so feel free to contact me on Linked-in if you want to chat! We'd be happy to answer any questions or offer advice for aspiring entrepreneurs or entertainers.