Starting up and running your own outsourcing studio

Welcome to Quick Dev Insights. A series of bite-sized interviews with people who work in and around the games industry, from indie to AAA. A full list of these interviews can be found here and you can follow my Twitter to find out when new ones are released!

Some of the Rekindled team at Develop Brighton in the UK (Left to right: Liam Lambert, Yogi Patel, Rob Moody)

Introduce yourself / Rekindled

Hey! My names Rob Moody, I’m a ‘hands-on’ lead animator and co-founder at Rekindled Studios! I’ve been in the games industry for almost 15 years now working on a numbers of projects from indie to AAA.

Our studio, Rekindled, was established over 2 and a half years ago (wow time flys!) by myself and a technical animator, Siobhan Maracle.

Rekindled is an animation and character art house specialising in game project development. We love working co-development contracts and integrating ourselves 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 on the entire character art or animation pipeline for the project!

What made you want to start your own animation outsourcing studio?

Myself and Siobhan have worked with each other for 7 or 8 years now in multiple studios across many projects and the last large studio we worked at kind of ran out of internal work so they started hiring us out. We really enjoyed the idea of being mercenary artists, getting to meet lots of new devs, working on different styles, learning new pipelines and tools.

Siobhan and I worked well as a little unit, Siobhan being a technical animator (the brains) and myself an animator (the creative) were able to collaborate and take on any issue or feature. And after a few years, we thought we could do this on our own and be able to choose cool projects and teams to work with, so we did! And Rekindled was born.

How did you choose who to team up with initially?

It was myself who first had the idea to set up a studio, but I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. I struggle with admin, I tend to do first, think later and I’m kind of scatter brained, so luckily for me Siobhan didn’t take too much convincing. She has a very logical brain which keeps the company on track. A good analogy is that in Rekindled I have my foot down on the accelerator while Siobhan is pulling up the handbrake, resulting in the studio moving at a nice steady pace!

In terms of splitting up the workload of running the studio, I take on a lot of the introductions and client-side meetings whereas Siobhan likes to run the back end and support the studio. We both get to spend the majority of time doing what we love though, developing and animating. As for the most important skill, I’d have to say that it is communication. We talk everything over in the highs and the lows, being 100% transparent and seeking guidance from another perspective.

What are the biggest challenges and how do things differ from what you expected?

I think the biggest challenges so far have been growing the studios team size and then managing more projects. We started off as a 2 man band and quickly felt the need for an extra pair of hands to cope with demand. Initially, I assumed that bringing on some extra animators to help out would make things easier, and at first it did! We had more skills at hand, more bandwidth and more brains to bounce ideas off. It wasn’t until a couple of months later we realised that we didn’t have a clue how to manage a bigger studio. Keeping employees engaged and tasked up, resulted in working with more studios and more slack servers to track. We were remote only, Discord was our office and we didn’t have regular meetings set up or syncs, everything was kind of adhoc. We were still working it out and as a result, we felt that people felt quite isolated and a little lost. To combat this we now have 2 syncs a day, a short 15-minute discipline sync in the morning and a larger all-studio sync at the end of the day. On top of that, we have two scheduled animation reviews with the team, allowing team members to prepare ahead of time which streamlines the meeting.

Another challenge as of late has been getting the word out that we also offer character art! Yogi Patel joined us this year to set up a character art team allowing us to offer the full end-to-end pipeline from character art through rigging to animation. It’s something we have always wanted to have in place at Rekindled. The challenge is that we are currently known as an animation studio but we are hoping that by 2025 we can show that we are more!

Is there anything you would do differently if you started again?

Being honest, I’m not sure I’d do anything differently again. Life is a journey, you learn a lot from mistakes and ventures into the unknown. The biggest unknown for us was the business side, we had animation down to a T, happily working on different exciting ideas and pushing boundaries…. However, we were complete noobs at running a business. Learning what a good contract looks like, NDAs, licences, pensions, accountants, corp tax etc. It was a steep learning curve! But very rewarding.

Any resources you think would help people build their own outsourcing studio?

There are many resources that help small businesses navigate their adventures. We’d really recommend using CreativeUKs courses, they run 4 a year, each one aimed at helping studios at different stages of their progression. From foundations for entrepreneurs just starting out, to scaling up a business, then investment-ready businesses. The courses are very affordable, £250 per studio the rest is subsidised by the government and you are in a cohort of like-minded business owners. We completed the scaling up 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’d highly recommend it to any games industry small business owner.

Where to find more about yourself / Rekindled

If anyone wanted to find out more about Rekindled or its services head over to our website: https://www.rekindled.uk/ or check us out on LinkedIn.

I’ve also come to learn that networking really is the superpower that everyone in the games industry needs so please feel free to reach out to me on Linked-in if you wish to chat! Happy to answer any questions or offer advice for aspiring business owners or animators.