Owl Studio together with krem.productions creates a video game studio

Vera Velichko and Maxim Malygin

The questions were answered by Vera Velichko, the head and art director of Owl Studio, and Maxim Malygin, co-founder of krem.productions.

We are talking in the middle of January. As the guys will later note outside of the interview, they almost did not have New Year’s holidays. Despite this, the voices are cheerful. Unless Maxim is forced to mount something in parallel. It can be seen that there are many tasks.

Let’s start the conversation with a reason. What happened?

Maxim Malygin: We – Owl Studio and krem.productions — decided to create a joint division.

What will it be called?

Vera Velichko: This story is in progress. So far we have decided that Owl Studio will be the contact person for current and new clients.

If you come up with a new name and a new brand, the question will arise, how to present it so as not to confuse people? There is no answer to this question now.

Among ourselves, we call the new studio “essence”.

Maxim Malygin: We will always have time to come up with a cool name.

How did you come to cooperate?

Maxim Malygin: I came to visit Owl Studio, we talked with Pavel (the second co—founder of Owl Studio is Pavel Usachev. — Ed.), talked with Vera and decided to stir up this story.

Vera Velichko: In fact, it all started even a little earlier. At one of the conferences, we agreed with krem.productions that they would hold several lectures with us. In the process, we began to communicate, get acquainted, look at each other. Within the framework of one of the meetings, such a topic was born.

Do I understand correctly that both companies had a desire to move towards something new? That is, Owl Studio wanted to move towards commercials, and krem.productions — towards art?

Vera Velichko: In theory, we understood that it was worth moving towards the rollers, because there was a request from the market. However, in fact, there was no opportunity to develop independently within this direction. There were no specialists, there were no resources. They put off all the time for the future. But thanks to the conversation with Max, we realized that we would have such an opportunity within the framework of cooperation with krem.productions.

Maxim Malygin: We, in turn, had no serious problems with art. But we often get a technical assignment from a client that lacks art to implement a cool scenario idea. As a rule, you have to significantly refine the content. Therefore, for us, partnering with Owl Studio is just an opportunity to delegate such tasks to them.

When talking about a new studio, you use the term “joint division”. What exactly is there under it?

Maxim Malygin: This is a new studio that will be located within the same office and create trailers, story clips and cut scenes. At the same time, Owl Studio and krem.productions themselves will remain independent studios from each other.

Vera Velichko: Important: we are not talking about unification. We are jointly forming a team from scratch, which we will help in creating videos, based on our own experience.

That is, we are creating a team that, on the one hand, is responsible for the full cycle of relevant content. On the other hand, this studio will always have support from Owl Studio and krem.productions.

Maxim Malygin: But here I will correct a little. The video production itself is being assembled from scratch. All works related to art are provided by Owl Studio. We are not going to take new artists.

Vera Velichko: Plus, the management and leads of the divisions remain on the part of krem.productions and Owl Studio.

What does it look like from a legal point of view?

Vera Velichko: Shared history. 50% of the new studio remains with us, another 50% — for krem.productions.

In addition to investing, consulting and working together on art, how else will the studios be involved in the work of the new division?

Vera Velichko: The theoretical potential of the interaction is very large. Our competencies are quite different and interesting for both of us. Maybe then we will jointly undertake training activities. At the moment, we are not making it into something specific yet. However, we are looking at each other’s pipeline.

As for the video production, we have already understood what is being done and how. We will be developing specific products in the near future.

Maxim Malygin: We want to show the market by the example of internal products what we can do before taking on commercial orders.

What do you mean by internal projects?

Vera Velichko: We are talking about the internal projects of Owl Studio.

Look, we never take unfamiliar tasks. If a client comes with a task that we have never encountered, we cannot take it, because we cannot guarantee deadlines and a good result.

But we have the practice of taking such unfamiliar tasks and testing them inside. After all, if there is a request, it is worth studying the requested competence and adding it to the scope of our proposals.

The study takes place within the framework of creating your own projects. They are a good training material for us. Firstly, this is how we learn to work with unfamiliar tasks. Secondly, we can train artists and programmers to explore some other features.

And now we are developing two internal projects for mobile platforms. When working with them, we are just testing the processes of our new studio.

At the moment, we have several areas of internal development: these are full-cycle game projects, which, according to our plans, will one day be released in the format of independent products, and art projects that our artists develop to show our skills and replenish the studio’s art portfolio. All this allows us to introduce the client to the activities of the studio, to show what we can do as a team. Well, you know, there is always an NDA on current orders, there are certain difficulties with this. So, we plan to make the first videos just in the format of such projects — so we can demonstrate them when ready.

How will the work with clients be built in general?

Vera Velichko: Here the first step is to discuss what the client wants in principle. But already at this step, as soon as we realized that there is a task, I connect the guys.

Maxim Malygin: At the stage of the formation of the terms of reference, we begin the development of art and video development as a whole.

It’s always been a big problem before. If you cook them separately, then not all the art will be suitable for production. Plus, when a trailer is being developed for ready-made art, not all art is suitable to be in the trailer. Now, even at the stage of forming the terms of reference, the work will be done in such a way that from all the available art you can create a wonderful trailer story.

Vera Velichko: This will be a single task for us, which will be both on the artistic part and on the part of the video production.

Maxim Malygin: For clients it is always saving time, saving budget and saving time.

Vera Velichko: Summing up: when a client comes, we will ask him what he needs and what he already has (in terms of video content).

Then the guys from krem.productions evaluate:

• to what extent is the client’s content suitable for production;
• how familiar is the customer with our products;
• do I need to explain to him what kind of videos there are, as well as for what purposes and how they work;
• they tell us what tools we have.

After that, we all evaluate together:

• what needs to be done;
• do I need to refine the art;
• do I need to create a script if it is not ready;

Based on all this, we form an action plan and prepare a product.

On the one hand, you talk about videos all the time, but at the same time you emphasize the importance of art in them. Do I understand correctly that you are not going to specialize in classic cinematic commercials?

Maxim Malygin: A cool reference of what we plan to do can be Darksiders or Hearthstone videos. There, art is used as the basis of trailers.

But you’re not going to do three-dimensional cinematics?

Maxim Malygin: Not within the framework of the new studio. We chose quite specific products for it: trailers on the App Store, Google Play, Steam, cut scenes. These are the things that together we can do faster and better.

Vera Velichko: These are exactly the things in which both competencies are required: art and video production.

And cut scenes for you are not staged scenes on the game engine, but the preparation of character art for dialog boxes?

Vera Velichko: That’s right. Some kind of story on the characters, on the illustrations. For example, World of Warcraft has many similar cut scenes that reveal part of the ent with the help of illustrated videos with awesome parallax, effects and the like.

What is the event horizon of cooperation?

Vera Velichko: It all depends on how everything goes. The first task is to put the cooperation on a stable production basis, to see that a high–quality, predictable result is obtained in the terms guaranteed by us.

Are you going to make commercials for mobile?

Maxim Malygin: In the direction of advertising and creativity for mobile platforms, it is worth looking at, this is an interesting topic.

Yes, it is interesting, but at the same time it is more flowable and cheaper.

Vera Velichko: We’re looking this way. Moreover, we want to concentrate the efforts of our new studio on the rapid production of high-quality content. Our goal is that the customer can come, order and quickly get the desired product.

At Owl Studio, we are already doing this within the framework of event content for active projects of our clients – these are updates in games, advertising creatives, etc. We have a lot of departments that are formed specifically for some projects and work with two-dimensional content. And they consistently give out content for Easter, Halloween, New Year and so on in a given style.

We plan to use this approach when building our processes in the new studio. And it is also suitable for working on teasers.

When people talk about advertising creatives today, they often mention that they also need to be analyzed and tested. Are you planning to do this?

Maxim Malygin: That’s a good question, but I think we’re artists first and foremost.

Vera Velichko: However, there is Pavel in our team. He is also engaged in analytics. I think we will come back to this issue later.

The final question is about demand. What kind of offers are coming more and more often now?

Vera Velichko: Our customers want more and more in-game video production. Not very complicated, but in large quantities. They want to tell stories with it.

And we are just going to focus on this type of content that is in the game, is an integral part of it.

Are you now talking about the content that is in the spirit of Playrix games? Is something wrong with Austin and the conversation starts for five minutes?

Vera Velichko: Sort of. Something happened and you’re reading the lines. However, now such things as bonus scenes, videos for 15-20 seconds begin.

How expensive is this pleasure for the customer today?

Vera Velichko: This is the question we will be ready to cover as soon as we have successfully completed our internal tests.

Good. Thanks and good luck