A New Chapter
At the beginning of 2020, a new chapter of my life began. After almost five years of intensive work in post-production and VFX, I stepped into the world of animation.
For that, I am endlessly grateful to Petra Ryglová, my former colleague with whom I had already been through thick and thin, and who one day called me and invited me for an interview. And to Milan Kolář, founder of Kredenc Studio and one of the people behind the pipeline software OpenPype, who ultimately gave me the opportunity to join the studio.
My first project was the animated series Hungry Bear Tales (Mlsné medvědí příběhy). The first season was already on air, so my involvement was mainly on the distribution side. But with the second season, I became responsible for data management and editing the next 13 episodes, as well as preparing and shooting a behind-the-scenes film about the making of the series.
It was also at Kredenc that I met producer Bára Příkaská, who became a dear friend, and directors Kateřina Karhánková and Alexandra Májová. Working closely with them was an important part of discovering what animation could mean to me - not only professionally, but personally as well. Looking back, that project shaped everything that came afterwards. I had discovered a completely different world. After years of working on blockbusters, VFX-heavy productions and dramas, I suddenly found myself sitting in a cinema at a screening made for children. The feeling was almost impossible to describe.
The genuine laughter and smiles in the cinema – this was it.
The children were talking to the bears on screen, shouting with excitement and laughing out loud. There was nothing calculated about their reaction. They simply loved what they were watching. And somewhere in that cinema, I realized that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life: to create meaningful, high-quality films for children – stories they can fall in love with, grow up with, and want to watch again and again.
The truth is, I didn’t even want to leave work at the end of the day. For the first time in my life, I genuinely felt happy at work. I had my own editing room, spoke Spanish every day with my Venezuelan colleagues, and found endless joy in working side by side with the directors. I even ended up playing a small flute concert with one of my colleagues Jakub Sršeň after we discovered that we were both musicians. In short, it felt like paradise.
Unfortunately, good things do not always last. The pandemic was a difficult period for the entire industry, and not every company was able to survive it. Rather than risk putting its employees in an increasingly uncertain situation, the management eventually made the painful decision to close the studio. It was difficult to say goodbye to a place that had given me so much. But the people I met there became friends, and the memories of Kredenc – the work, the films, the music, the laughter and that little editing room - will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Animation became the direction I wanted to follow, but it never meant saying goodbye to VFX completely. Over the years, I have continued to return to the VFX world from time to time, working on different productions and bringing that experience with me into my animation work. In many ways, the two worlds have remained part of the same journey.
